What I Eat and Why It Matters
Agriculture has become agribusiness, a fully integrated subsidiary of fossil fuel-driven global capitalism. , appearing everywhere from the giant machines that plough, plant and harvest; to fertilizers and preservatives; to irrigation; to airplanes, ships and trucks that move mass-produced food around the world and refrigeration that enables long transit. That agribusiness model is now failing — just as fossil fuel-based energy is being phased out. What’s cause, what’s effect, and what’s coincidence is unclear. What is clear is that, just as fossil fuels and agribusiness are key components of global capitalism, new energy and agricultural models will jointly do much to shape what comes next. It’s all part of the Great Transition I’m exploring.
There are many ways to feed yourself that don’t involve eating fruits and vegetables shipped thousands of miles, often in airplanes, or meat grown in such crowded conditions that animals have to be shot full of antibiotics.
I’ve found one I love. Around 80%-90% by bulk of the food my husband and I cook and eat is produced in the state of Maine, where we live, mostly by small farmers and mostly marketed through farm stands, farmers’ markets, and owner-operated food shops and co-ops. This is not a sacrifice. This food is delicious, with much more flavor than the mass-produced meat and vegetables and the sugar, corn and chemically “enhanced” products that make up the bulk of many Americans’ diet.
It’s true that you can’t eat everything all year round. Eating locally means eating seasonally in most places — certainly those still as cold as Maine. But I’ve found this makes you appreciate particular foods and flavors so much more when they are around that the tradeoff with constant availability is more than worth it. The first asparagus and strawberries in spring, and (really) sweet corn and tomatoes in summer bear no resemblance to items with the same names at the supermarket.
We’re just finishing off the harvest season, with its quickly disappearing plenitude of peaches, wild blueberries, salad greens of all sorts, squash and peppers. We’re moving into a season of apples, hardy greens and the root vegetables — from beets and turnips to potatoes and carrots — that will largely see us through winter, with some help from microgreens and mushrooms.
I admit that heavy reliance on root vegetables can start to feel boring by March, but by then the days are getting longer and the small, hardy greens from unheated hoop houses that start to show up taste fantastic.
I also admit that we eat meat and seafood, again raised nearby on small farms without feedlots and antibiotics, or fished from the diminishing stocks that remain in the once-bounteous waters and shorelines of the Gulf of Maine. We don’t eat meat and fish in enormous quantities, but we do eat them regularly — as people have historically, especially in climates where plants are difficult to grow through many months of the year.
The animals are not only raised well, their waste provides great fertilizer, while milk and eggs that form part of their ongoing life cycle are also delicious food products. Plants and animals on a small farm form an integrated culture with fruits and vegetables that is, quite literally, self-sustaining.
Agribusiness Failures
Why am I telling you this story? It isn’t to sound righteous. It’s to demonstrate that there are feasible, enjoyable and healthy ways to eat that are very different from the way most people in the US and other parts of the over-developed world have been eating. We are used to paying somewhat more for local Maine produce and meat than we’d pay in the supermarket — but not a lot more. And before long, we probably won’t be paying any more. Mass-produced agribusiness food is quickly ceasing to be cheap.
The agribusiness model is failing, in the US, where it was invented and propagated, and everywhere else. In 2020–21 acute problems in the agribusiness cheap-food complex — remember those empty supermarket shelves? — were blamed largely on Covid and resulting kinks in the long chains that bring food from factory farms to markets. Now shortages and even higher prices are largely being blamed — at least in the West — on Russia and the war-related disruption of Ukraine’s and its own agricultural production and exports.
In fact, though, Covid and the trade embargoes resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine merely exacerbated existing problems. They didn’t create them. The underlying problems are myriad. They include:
* Climate change with its heat, , and .
* Soil depletion by farming methods that rely on — rather than crop rotation and use of compost, manure and other natural soil nutrients.
* Increasing weed that are grossly overused in the Monsanto (now Bayer) farming method.
* necessary for growing many foods — again, due in large part to overuse of pesticides.
* The spread of deadly viruses among factory-farmed animals, such as the so-called that killed or resulted in the killing of roughly half of China’s pigs — the largest national pig population in the world — in 2019. If it reminds you of Covid-19 in people, you have the right idea.
Agriculture and Industry
There are more reasons. They are deeply rooted in 20th Century agriculture methods, and intimately tied in with the growth of industrial capitalism over the last two centuries. Reducing the labor intensity of farming was from the beginning the means by which a pool of displaced, newly landless people was created to work in large factories. This happened in Britain, than across Europe and North America, and more recently in China.
Farming methods that create food in much greater quantities than needed to feed those who grow it, and at costs low enough that factory workers can feed themselves on wages much lower than the value of the goods they produce, are necessities of capitalism. They enable the high profits that motivate the entire system. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, the British and others achieved this by exploiting the rich soil and virtually free water available first at home and nearby places such as Ireland, then in the hugely fertile mid-section of the United States.
New frontiers of fertile soil kept appearing — until the 1930s, when much of the soil of middle America had been carelessly depleted. That’s when the agribusiness model of mechanized farming reliant on fertilizers, irrigation, refrigeration, and food processing came along. It initially worked so well that it was exported to Mexico, India and other far-away places. China adopted similar techniques, and globalized capitalism had a firm foundation of cheap labor.
Until it didn’t. Until all those side effects, from climate change to deadly viruses, developed. Until people began dying in droves of the obesity, heart disease, diabetes and other ailments linked to the sick agribusiness diet. Jason Moore tells much of the story in a chapter on the “Long Green Revolution” in Capitalism in the Web of Life. Mark Bittman tells other bits in , from Sustainable to Suicidal. Others have told different parts of the sad saga.
Agriculture Ahead
As Bittman puts it: ”We need to create a kind of road map that will lead us to a just food system, one that will nourish us all, make good food universally affordable, sustain and protect the land, and provide more dignified and well-paying jobs in food and farming.”
Eloquent as that statement is, I disagree with it on one critical point. Climate, land availability, historic dietary preferences — so many things to do with food — differ so hugely around the world that there can and should be no single “food system.” One of the many core problems of the agribusiness model is its one-size-fits-all approach. Just as renewable electricity will take different forms and configurations in different places, so will the food systems of the future.
I told you my personal story of eating local. It doesn’t cover the many wonderful ways food can be grown even in Maine — including the ideas of Four Season Farming gurus Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch — much less the rest of the world. It doesn’t cover those like and other high-tech means of feeding humanity. Such tech-laden approaches aren’t my preference, but they’re worth exploring.
Urban farming pioneers are another important piece of the puzzle. One of my personal favorites is , a tale of how two guys figured out how to feed themselves on one-tenth of an acre of polluted land in a rust-belt city in Massachusetts. But that, and so much more about farming and food, is a tale for another day.
