As a follow-up to my last post about the environmental movement not just being crunchy anymore….
The organic movement is not just for white people anymore. So says yesterday’s article on Grist – my favorite, often satirical, environmental commentary. Please comment/email me on this stuff. We must must must engage in a dialogue in order to get people thinking not just about the environment but their own health, which is no more intimately connected to nature than through food
You may not hug trees, you may not have children’s future to care about, you may breath clean air today and not worry about tomorrow (unless you are in China, sorry Kari), you may not have a car to fuel up, but you eat food. You probably like eating food and noticed all this noise about the food crisis. You also probably think that organic food is ‘good’ or at least ‘less bad’ than traditionally marketed *cough* I mean grown food.
Many of my friends have been asking me about what the big deal is, what can be done about the ‘food crisis’ on a national scale. At times I fear that these questions are somewhat fueled by a lack of commitment to actually feeding ourselves with more effort than the cheapest brown bread and Skippy from Kroger. It sure sounds a lot nicer to endorse a better Farm Bill than to actually take the time to meet a farmer, cook real food on a stove, and *gasp spend more money on food (as a culture we spend less on food per capita than any other in history; that’s a whole separate discussion). Nonetheless, we need to have a national commitment to encourage and increase a responsible food system as opposed to this disastrous ignorance-based agribusiness oligarchy.
There are plenty of excellent books and articles out there on the food crisis and many proposed solutions so I won’t go on. Grist’s article is a pretty quick and digestible one addressing the ignorance I am trying to destroy by sharing with you. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing (and really no one has an excuse because we are talking about the food you put in your one and only body; this is very basic healthcare so think of it as the latest release on a cancer study breakthrough), then here is a section to whet your appetite 
.
One of the things the organic industry has to do is educate, inform, and provoke. In this country, fewer than 1 percent of us farm. That’s the lowest rate in the world — and surely the lowest rate in the history of agricultural society. Food really does seem to arrive on our plates by magic — it appears, or seems to appear, by the grace of corporate marketers, not through the hard work of people interacting with the soil, animals, and the climate.
And I believe this ignorance — this beautiful, blissful state of unknowing that would be the envy of nearly any society that came before us — has mostly been maintained by the organic movement. Surely it’s maintained by “organic” milk processors that buy from feedlot dairy operations, and then decorate their cartons with happy cows munching grass. Surely it’s maintained by “certified organic” supermarket chains that decorate their produce sections with images of prosperous farmers, and then stock their shelves with produce grown under God knows what conditions in Chile. It’s maintained by large organic farms that quietly rely on exploited immigrant labor to eke out profits. And it’s even maintained at the farmers market, by the farmer who’s too embarrassed to tell his customers that he’s barely scraping by, that his back is killing him, and that he can’t afford health insurance.
If we’re going to move beyond 4 percent organic cropland and really challenge industrial agriculture, we also have to move beyond this acceptance of mass ignorance. One concrete thing we can do is start talking honestly and seriously about soil fertility — Albert Howard’s Law of Return [we must return the nutrients to the soil which we take out to eat]. We all know our food system generates tremendous amounts of waste. Very little of it gets cycled back into soil. Instead, it ends up rotting in landfills.
I know from hard experience that for new organic farms, the No. 1 challenge is coming up with a fertility strategy. Creating the kind of closed-loop, mixed-farming system celebrated by Albert Howard and embodied by Joel Salatin in Virginia takes years. One of our dirty secrets is that a lot of organic farmers rely on manure from confined-animal feedlot operations to fertilize their land. By doing so, we’re depositing all manner of pharmaceuticals and toxins into our best farmland -- the very stuff people try to avoid when they buy organic. An alternative farming system that relies on CAFO waste for fertility is a kind of parasite on a sick animal.
Why not champion a national composting policy, one that compels municipalities to transform food waste into high-quality, crop-grade compost? And why not then give it away to farmers — the ones who grow food for their nearby communities? That’s an agricultural subsidy that makes all kinds of sense.
While we’re at it, let’s reinvest in the infrastructure that makes small-scale, pasture-based meat and dairy production viable. The best and most successful organic farms are the ones that mix diversified crop production with livestock production; they build their soil with their own animals’ composted manure. But as the Tysons, Smithfields, and Cargills of the world gained control of the meat and dairy industries, they shut down processing plants and concentrated production geographically. Who wants to raise chickens if you have to haul them 70 miles to a USDA-approved slaughterhouse, and 70 miles back?
Rather than continue a trend of corporate control and consolidation of organics, the decision makers in this industry should be cajoling the federal government to enforce antitrust laws and break up the monopolies that control the food system. You should conceive of yourselves as the anti-Tysons and anti-Smithfields by investing in appropriate-scale processing plants all across the land.
As our globe lurches into a period of ecological and economic crises — not least, the food crisis — what we need is less ignorance about food and more people with their hands in the dirt producing it. If we can’t achieve that, than the Tysons, Cargills, and Monsantos will retain their grip over food production, and organics really will amount to some “stuff white people like” — a soothing room within a sinking ship.
