The Dirty Secret on the Farm
Authors:
Richard Manning
When we write about food, the accounts are generally superficial, analogous to the way we cast our politics as celebrity and glitter. We ponder sauces and seasoning, but ignore the flow of real power that lies beneath. This is especially odd, given that food is so fundamentally significant to the human endeavor, the one story each and every one of the 6.865 billion of us engages directly and daily, the luckiest among us three times a day, with sauces and seasoning.
Nonetheless, when somebody does delve deeply into this story, the telling can enlighten, entertain, and unsettle. Such is the case with Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D. G. Fraser, an academic specializing in farming, climate change, and the environment, and Andrew Rimas, a journalist based in Boston.
Books about empires rising and falling are enjoying something of a renaissance. Yet this one is a departure from the usual accounts of the vanities of emperors and the perfidies of inbred monarchs. Fraser and Rimas’s overarching argument is that the meat and potatoes of history is, well…meat and potatoes. Or to be more precise, it is about that weird co-evolved relationship between humans and a few botanically freakish grasses we call grains, which is to say, it is about agriculture. This is what distinguishes their effort from the current spate of books excoriating factory farms, feedlots, agribusiness, and fast food.
The most useful among the many useful messages of Empires of Food is that our manifest problems and crises are not new. The Eric Schlossers and Michael Pollans of the world, by and large, worry about the deleterious effects of modern, industrial, hydrocarbon-based farming on our health, the environment, and the integrity of our society. This is clearly worth worrying about, and these authors have struck a chord that needed to be struck.
Still, much of this work assumes that if we’d just go back to the way grandpa did it, we’d be fine. Not so, say Fraser and Rimas. The crisis of sustainability that looms just off the end of our forks has been a long time coming. Their important contribution is to demonstrate that these troubles did not begin with hybrid seed, anhydrous ammonia fertilizers, and high fructose corn syrup. The flaw of agriculture is inherent and fatal, based in the depletion of soil. The phrase “sustainable agriculture” has every bit as much meaning as “clean coal.”
The book surveys a vast historical landscape, not in a linear plod but as an elegant buffet spread across space and time, leaping from odes to cereal by Hou Ji, the “Prince of Millet” in China 3,000 years ago, to the construction of the Three Gorges dam for the irrigation of cropland, from the reworking of Dark Ages Europe by Benedictine monks growing hops as a preservative for beer to the agricultural practices of the ancient Sumerians, who created the Fertile Crescent by turning the swamps around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into farmland. All of this is wound up in the waxing and waning of empires, a process that is driven by agriculture.
The authors shanghai one particular character to loosely pull a narrative thread, an Italian named Francesco Carletti, born in Florence in 1573. The Mediterranean people were then buoyed by maritime discoveries and, more important, were in need of food because their own cropland had been depleted, so they had both motive and means to create a food empire. Carletti went along for the ride.
The authors use him as a physician would use a dye or a radioactive marker to trace a patient’s circulatory system. His appearances, each of which illuminates a critical moment in the history of empire, are emblematic of the book’s larger strength: wherever the tale goes in time and space, the story is the same. The waxing and waning of empires is rooted in agriculture.
It may seem self-evident to argue that the course of human history is driven by food, but there is something far more interesting at play here. Human history, after all, encompasses something like 200,000 years, but for at least 95 percent of that time humans have eaten only what they hunted and gathered. Before plant domestication, there were no empires, monarchs, irrigation, saved seeds, or global travelers like Carletti.
What the authors understand better than most is that the very botanical fundaments of this odd experiment dictate the course of history, the fatal flaw, and it is simple as dirt. The cultivation of grain — wheat, corn, and rice, the sources today of the vast majority of human nutrition — inexorably depletes the soil. We have always grown grain in monocultures of annual grasses, an unsustainable strategy that nature abhors. Agriculture depletes not through oversight, negligence, or greed, but inevitably.
At the same time, cultivation generates surplus, making possible the storage of that surplus and the creation of wealth. Farmers grow grains and sell their surplus to neighbors, who make a city. The soil is exhausted, and the city goes hungry, but has the might to go hunting for more — in other words, to build an empire. This cycle is all of history.
The soil depletion that was the root cause of the waxing and waning of all the world’s empires remains in effect, although the context has changed. The empires of the past overcame depletion by imperialism. Wear out your own soil, then raise an army and take someone else’s, a strategy limited only by the technology that supported supply lines. As that technology became virtually unlimited, though, so did the size of empires.
But then, about 1960, everybody else’s land had been taken, an inconvenient truth that humanity avoided by attempting to offset land depletion with chemical fertilizers. New limit: chemical fertilizers are energy intensive. “Bargain-priced energy is the reason we’ve been free to breed and feed our population past the 6 billion tally,” the authors write. “Remove the energy, and those billions, too, will be taken away.”
They provide examples of what this might look like, pointing out that in one period of decline of the European food empire (following the collapse of Rome, which the authors say was caused by soil depletion as well as by the Visigoths), Europe’s population halved. Can’t happen today? Remember: China starved to death as many as 30 million people in the 1960s. Ostensibly, that famine resulted from Mao Zedong’s stupidity, but a dense and enormous population dependent on agriculture left the country vulnerable to that stupidity.
The history of civilization is one of expansion regularly punctuated by collapse and famine. This gets us to the inevitable conclusion of the authors’ argument that agriculture is fatally flawed. The principles that drove the rise and fall of civilizations throughout the world’s short experiment with agriculture remain in play. So does the relative scale of catastrophe.
The vast sweep of this idea is the greatest value of the book and the necessary corrective for the narrow focus of foodies. The authors, in fact, aim particularly vituperative blows at the Slow Food movement: “Slow Food is ostensibly about sustenance, fellowship, and democracy,” they write, “but its face is the truffle-sniffing snout of the eco-foodie.”
Of course, people reserve their harshest critiques for their best friends. The foodies aren’t wrong, just too narrowly focused. The authors are roughest on them because they believe, as I do, that the foodies are on to something vitally important beyond the boutique, especially in eating local. Remember the role of supply chains and transportation in building empires and in driving the cycle of collapse. Eating local subverts the force that builds empires.
The authors extrapolate from this something like a solution, something useful beyond the gloom and doom, by bringing us back to the fundamental principles of surplus, transportation, and storage. Anything we can do to undermine any part of that triad undermines the entire cycle, which is why eating local is important. But this only begins to head us in the right direction. Until we address the fundamental flaw by redesigning agriculture to grow perennial plants in polyculture, there’s no justification for getting smug about grazing on the organic radicchio in one’s own foodshed.
Rimas and Fraser have a firm enough grasp of history and the enormity of the problems in play to forgo pat solutions. A problem that has been 10,000 years in the making and lies at the very heart of human civilization is not going to be solved without significantly disrupting life as we know it. Absent the truly revolutionary redesign of agriculture — and present the 6.865 billion — we will continue to reap what we have sown.
Read the rest of the post here:
The Dirty Secret on the Farm
A Culinary Homage to the Gulf
Editor’s note: This is an online preview of a story appearing in our Fall 2010 issue.
“Are you serious?” asked the guy behind the counter, a look of doubt crimping his suntanned face. It was mid-June, and I had just told him I was interested in buying some seafood from the Gulf of Mexico. By that time, apparently, every other New Yorker had decided not to go anywhere near the stuff. But I was on something of a mission.
A few nights earlier, I’d had dinner with my friend Nathalie, who had just moved back to the city from New Orleans. At the last minute, she had invited along another friend, Robin, who helps Louisiana fishermen and shrimpers get small-business loans. Nathalie writes about cooking, and I used to be an editor at Gourmet , so save for the requisite detours to Treme and the Saints, our talk mostly centered on food. Nat mentioned that Big Easy chefs had begun substituting chicken livers for oysters and were having Dover sole FedEx-ed down to stand in for the region’s speckled trout. Robin told of the town meeting she’d sat in on a few nights earlier: a burly shrimper had stood up to speak, only to break down in front of the crowd.
I’ll admit that before the dinner I hadn’t focused much on the situation in the Gulf. Of course I knew the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon had been an unprecedented disaster, one getting worse by the day, but between the reporting I’d been doing on post-earthquake Haiti and my usual day-to-day neuroses, I was already overwhlemed. When I saw photos of oil-dipped pelicans and tar-shellacked turtles, I mostly turned the page. I just didn’t have the emotional space to let those images in.
But I went to bed with that shrimper on my mind, and when I woke up he was still there. By the end of the week, I’d become so fixated on the spill and its impact on the people and the food of the region, I could have told you more about berms and top kills than you would ever want to know. I’d learned that, in addition to serving as the breeding ground for a seemingly infinite variety of marine wildlife, the Gulf of Mexico provides 1.3 billion pounds of fish and shellfish each year, including 73 percent of all shrimp and two-thirds of all oysters harvested in the United States. Louisiana alone is responsible for more than a quarter of the nation’s blue crabs.
By June 21 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had closed more than a third of federal Gulf waters to fishing, and seafood prices had shot up as much as 50 percent. Restaurateurs, chefs, and wholesalers across the country were struggling to persuade customers that their products were safe. Meanwhile, people who knew no life aside from fishing — including those from already marginalized communities like the Houma Indians and the Vietnamese — were watching their futures dissolve before their eyes. On Grand Isle, Louisiana, one family had erected a faux graveyard with simple white crosses to commemorate everything they were about to lose. “Sandpiper,” read one. “Seafood Gumbo.” Nearby, handmade signs pleaded “Pray for Fishermen” and “God Help Us All.”
In a gesture of solidarity, I suppose — and because planning and cooking a meal is among the few ways I know to impose order on the world — I decided to throw a dinner party celebrating the region’s cuisine. “Please join us,” I wrote in my e-mail. “We are supporting Gulf fishermen and eating food we may not always have the luxury of eating.” (“Oily gumbo, mmmm,” came back the first response. “Too bad I’ll be out of town.”)
I pulled down John Besh’s 2009 cookbook, My New Orleans , and lingered over its black-and-white portraits of oystermen and maps depicting the habitats of the brown shrimp, crab, and crawfish that form the basis of the cuisine Besh serves at his six restaurants. Eventually I settled on a menu. We would start with Sazeracs, the official cocktail of New Orleans, then move on to Besh’s Crabmeat Maison and Louisiana shrimp and andouille over grits, finishing with Southern biscuits piled with strawberries and fresh whipped cream.
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An ex-Marine and father of four young sons, Besh grew up “surrounded by cypress knees and tupelo trees,” and his entire 374-page book is a love letter to the singular culture and cuisine of his home. I phoned him the next day — we had met back in my Gourmet days — to find out how he was faring amid all the mess, and he told me about a recent late-night fishing trip he’d made with his oldest son on Lake Pontchartrain. The two had gone out in hopes of nabbing a couple of trout, he said, only to encounter 24 desperate shrimp boats shut out of their normal offshore haunts. “It just killed me,” he said, “because at that point I realized I may not have this life to pass on to my children.”
You could already sense the change up in Manhattan. I had read that NOAA was inspecting seafood from the Gulf, so I felt reasonably assured that whatever I bought would be safe — and the whole point of the dinner was to support the fishermen by buying the seafood they could still land. But it turned out to be not so easy. The salesman at my local Whole Foods told me the frozen Gulf shrimp had been procured long before the accident. The guy the gourmet food shop Citarella — once I had convinced him that I was serious — maintained he had nothing whatever from the region. Eventually I connected with the fishmonger for the seafood wholesaler Wild Edibles, who said he could get me the fresh lump crabmeat (from Alabama) and the few dozen shrimp (from Florida) that I would need.
In the end, we were seven around the table, including Ruth Reichl, my former boss at Gourmet , Paige Orloff, a food writer, and their husbands. We sat on the patio, sipped our golden-hued Sazeracs (they contain rye and absinthe and were thus to have the benefit of blunting Ruth’s expert palate), and considered the fact that entire generations of shrimp, crab, and oysters were probably being wiped out as we spoke. Ruth mentioned that the Gulf was one of only two spawning grounds for bluefin tuna, which were already under siege from overfishing, and lamented that they might soon be gone for good. (In late May, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition to protect the fish under the Endangered Species Act.)
Over an improvised take on Besh’s crab salad (my trial run had shown his “maison” style to be far too rich for our northern blood), which I’d mounded on baby greens from the local farmers’ market and accessorized with sweet snap peas and tomatoes, we talked about BP’s use of dispersants. As of June 27, the company had applied some 1.5 million gallons of the likely toxic chemicals — which neither neutralize nor destroy the oil but simply move it underwater, where it can circulate and kill fish larvae and plankton for years. Back in the kitchen, stirring my grits and trying to figure out why my shrimp sauce was taking so long to thicken, I overheard my guests debating whether it was more humane to rehabilitate all those pelicans and sea turtles or to simply let them die in peace.
I finally served and sat back down, and we raised our glasses to the shrimpers before digging in. I recounted Besh’s fishing story and told of the article I’d seen about the devastatingly high rates of divorce, suicide, and alcoholism among the residents of Prince William Sound since the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil there in 1989. “Long after Tony [Hayward] and the other CEOs have gone their way,” Besh had said, “the people of the Gulf Coast are going to be suffering from all this.”
After everyone was gone, I stood at the sink rinsing wine glasses and replayed the evening in my head. I heard Ruth admitting how, after reading an op-ed piece about a woman swimming around in the muck, she had become too depressed to continue following coverage of the spill, and I winced at the memory of my own claim of finite emotional space. “We’ve all become so fat and happy,” I recalled Besh saying, “that we no longer see ourselves as a country. We’re just worried about what affects us in our neighborhoods.”
Our dinner had at least taken us outside ourselves for a while, and the vibrant, wild-tasting shellfish had reminded us what we will have lost if we’re relegated to eating the farm-raised stuff. (A few weeks later, researchers would find oil in the Gulf’s blue crabs and discover that it had begun to seep into Lake Pontchartrain.)
Towel-drying the last of my pans, I glanced over at Besh’s lovingly written book and thought about the photos inside of family and friends gathered around home-cooked meals to mark one occasion or another. In days to come, the heat of andouille sausage or the perfume of sun-sweetened strawberries might pull my own guests back to this night, when we came together to celebrate a people and a place and to recognize how food can unite us. How it can slow us down and remind us what’s important.
Seafood Safety Assessment Needs to Protect Vulnerable Populations
Calling on Federal Agencies to Improve Seafood Safety Testing
Ask Us: What Effect Will the Gulf Spill Have on Seafood?
More here: A Culinary Homage to the Gulf
I Was a Victim of the Peanut Butter Recall
This week an Iowa company recalled 380 million eggs due to a salmonella outbreak. Last year, our online editor wrote about the personal impact of a similar outbreak and recall of his favorite food.
Yesterday, my wife forwarded me an “Important Announcement Regarding Your Recent Purchase of Peanut Butter” that she got from Fresh Direct, the online grocery service here in New York City.
This was not a good e-mail.
As my wife will tell you, peanut butter is very important to me. She even mentioned it in our wedding vows (along with my love for the Pittsburgh Steelers). If I had to choose one thing to eat for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t even be a close contest — peanut butter would top the list.
And you know what? Compared to a lot of the other things that I love to eat, it’s not even that bad for me . Unless, of course, it’s packed with Salmonella.
“Dear Valued Customer,” the Fresh Direct e-mail started, “We are writing because you recently purchased a product affected by a newly expanded recall announced by the Food and Drug Administration.”
I really didn’t like where this was going. Turns out, the tub of “Freshly Ground Peanut Butter, Honey-Roasted” that we ordered a week ago is now on the FDA’s list of recalled products . The e-mail instructed us not to eat it and to throw it out immediately (and, appropriately, offered us a refund).
Unfortunately, as I alluded to earlier, I can work my way through a container of peanut butter pretty quickly — especially when it’s honey roasted. There was almost nothing left for us to throw out.
Chances are, the peanut butter was just fine, and so am I. (Thank goodness my wife doesn’t crave peanut butter as much as I do — she didn’t have any.) But it’s scary to get a reminder of how vulnerable we are to problems in the nation’s industrial food chain. Somehow, when you buy freshly ground peanut butter from a grocery service in New York City, you aren’t expecting it to be connected to a processing plant in Blakely, Ga. But that’s the way it works.
I’ve tried in recent years, after reading books such as Fast Food Nation and Omnivore’s Dilemma , to be more aware and conscious of the food that I eat and where it comes from. My wife and I try to buy organic as much as possible, and we love getting the fresh produce at the farmer’s markets around New York City.
We even joined a veggie co-op two summers ago, and I came to really enjoy visiting the church basement where the veggies were delivered once a week and picking out our share (although I have to say, I got a little tired of the endless string of lettuce). NRDC has a great Eat Local web feature that helps you find what’s fresh in your area season by season, and even offers recipes from chefs around the country using only fresh foods.
But when it comes to peanut butter … well, for me, it’s always in season, and I don’t pay much attention to where it’s coming from — although clearly, I should.
And so should the FDA. This peanut butter recall has been yet another reminder that the FDA, like so many other government watchdog agencies, was “one of many hobbled by the Bush administration’s antiregulatory efforts,” as a New York Times editorial put it yesterday . The folks over at Food and Water Watch also criticize the FDA for its handling of the matter. (And of course, peanut butter isn’t the only place where the FDA has been found lacking, as NRDC’s effort to get the agency to ban the chemical BPA from food packaging shows.)
If you want to see how badly the nation’s system of safeguards has been decimated, look no further than Deepest Cuts , a December NRDC report that evaluated the state of environmental and health monitoring programs at the end of the Bush administration in five key areas: air, water, food safety, toxic substances and human health.
The report authors found “a disturbing and pervasive pattern of program and funding cuts that make it impossible for programs to fulfill their monitoring role. … These cutbacks will keep us in the dark about threats to our health.”
I certainly can’t say that I was completely in the dark when I bought my honey-roasted peanut butter last week, but I guess, like so many people, I had the impression that someone was looking out for me. For our industrialized, highly networked food system to work, someone needs to be.
In the meantime, I guess I’m just going to have to cut back on my peanut butter consumption. Somehow.
Deepest Cuts: Repairing Health Monitoring Programs Slashed Under the Bush Administration
Food Safety Finally First on the Menu
More here: I Was a Victim of the Peanut Butter Recall