You are what you eat

Food is something I've cared a lot about for awhile now. That may sound strange... and I'm not saying what you think I might be saying.

In 2001 I read articles in Sierra Magazine and Scientific American (4/01) about the genetic modification of food crops and animals, and I began to grow wary of this application of technology to agriculture. And as I read more, I became even more wary of our increasing tendency to treat agriculture as an industry.

I was born in Kansas and grew up in Burrton, a small town of 800 people, surrounded by farmland (and oil fields) stretching to the distant horizon in all directions. My father's father was a farmer--and for awhile Burrton's mayor--and I have very early memories of watching my grandmother, mother, and aunts prepare lunch and gallons of iced tea for the men in the fields during wheat harvest, a time of year when most of my dad's family returned home to help out on the farm. At noon we would drive out to the country to deliver the food, and I'd be treated to a few turns around the field on the combine. There were trips in ancient trucks carrying loads of wheat back to Burrton's elevator, and the occasional opportunity to play for a couple of hours in a day's final load of grain, with the wheat truck parked on a carport back at home because my farming family had worked past dusk and the elevator had closed for the night.

When older, I spent some of my summer days on the farm, attempting vainly to match my father's straight furrows. (Laughing to myself now: as it turns out, I was gay to the core. :-) And years later while at Stanford, Dad called one day to tell me that he was no longer going to be farming, choosing instead to lease out the land. Farming had become, at best, a breakeven endeavour for my family. There was a momentary tug at my heart, and I thought to offer to return home and help him on the farm, but I remained silent.

So I have some connection with the land and the small farm way of life, more so than most Americans certainly, though far less than a few. And the intermingling of genetic science and our food supply, not to mention what I saw happening to the small scale agrarian lifestyle that I had grown up with, gave me much to be concerned about.

I was happy to see, therefore, an initiative on the 2002 Oregon ballot to require the labeling of any genetically modified foods sold within the state, and I volunteered to help with the campaign, only to see the measure defeated after a wave of advertising by the big agricultural commodity companies.

I subscribed to the True Food Now newsletter and learned a bit about the Slow Food Movement. I began to buy organic produce and milk, becoming gradually aware of how little food there is left in a supermarket these days. (My cousin Kim says "only around the edges.")

And then a year in to the Iraq war, I picked up the February 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine, read Richard Manning's "The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain Back to Iraq" and had one of those transformative reading experiences that radically shifts one's perspective on the world. Our food supply was now dependent on fossil fuels, and not simply as fuel for the production and transportation of food, but for the very nitrogen fertilizer required to grow the same crops in the same fields year after year. The article was fascinating, and I bought Manning's book Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization which examined humanity's relationship with agriculture. Interestingly, in Manning's view, it wasn't simply modern industrial farming that was the problem: agriculture from its beginning had begun to deprive us of our basic humanity--the experience of being fully alive and alert in the act of hunting for our sustenance. There were so many fascinating ideas in the book: that agriculture was an emergent system that developed spontaneously from the interplay of early humans and grasses rather than something our ancestors "invented," that our food supply was now more a business of producing and processing commodities than simply growing food, that agriculture was responsible for more of the world's famines than any other factor, and that the Green Revolution simultaneously reduced hunger but increased the number of people living in poverty. Against the Grain is a great read, and I highly recommend it.

The notion that our food supply was dependent on the world's reserves of petroleum and natural gas became even more of a concern as I read about the coming peak in worldwide oil production. We've decoupled ourselves from our current annual allotment of sunshine, instead growing inconceivablely large amounts of corn and other grains which are largely fed to livestock which we then eat. The only hitch, of course, is that the only way to grow this much grain is to apply artificial fertilizers which are derived from a rapidly diminishing resource. We're borrowing against millions of years of sunlight stored away as fossil fuels, and a day will inevitably come when we exhaust those resources. How then will we feed ourselves? (I watched Soylent Green yesterday. It made no sense, of course: eating humans is as inefficient as growing corn to feed to cattle to feed ourselves... but the point is clear.)

I'm gratified that my concern is shared by more and more people. In early April I read a review of Michael Pollan's new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, in the SF Chronicle Book Review. Pollan follows four meals back to their sources: a fast food meal, an organically grown meal made of ingredients purchased at an organic supermarket chain, a meal with ingredients purchased directly from the farmer, and a meal made only of what he personally hunted or grew himself. I was amazed to learn how little difference there was in the mode of production of conventionally-grown and organic foods purchased from a typical supermarket. Most shocking of all: a chicken labeled as "free range" needs only to have had access to the outdoors, but in practice this access may exist only for a two week window during a short, seven week lifespan. The chicken might never have even stepped outside of the 20,000 chicken facility it was living in, so accustomed to finding its food and water indoors and not out. And this: raising cattle on corn raises the acidity of their digestive system, making it a cozy environment for E. coli and other germs that normally affect humans but not cattle, requiring that the cattle be fed more antibiotics and further raising the chances of antibiotic-resistant foodborne pathogens.

The best part of the book for me was the section about Polyface Farm, a family-run and nearly self-sufficient small scale farm which produces an amazing bounty of food by operating as a "grass farm." The grass feeds cattle and chickens, which in turn fertilize the grass with their manure and support a complete and self-contained ecosystem on the farm, needing only some chicken feed as an input. This style of farming requires thought and careful planning and is far more labor intensive than large scale monoculture farming, but it actually produces more food per acre than the latter. I found myself again with that tug at the heart: call Dad and start a farm on the model of Polyface! (I settled for sending him The Ominivore's Dilemma for his birthday.)

I've talked about this book with a number of people: Dad, friends, even the woman working at the Rolo store on Market Street in San Francisco. Everyone seems interested... a sign that perhaps there is still hope. :-)

Why did I write this tonight? My latest read was Nathanael Johnson's "Swine of the Times: The Making of the Modern Pig" in the May 2006 Harper's. It picked up the theme of industrial livestock production as it pertains to pigs. I found myself--finally--thinking that becoming a vegetarian might not be such a bad idea after all. And if not that, I will at least be more aware and start to ask the tough questions when I buy meat and produce: where did this come from? How was it raised? What is the impact of this purchase? How can I raise awareness in my communities?

And so I write.

Food... it is a strange thing. I have often wondered at the oddity of sitting down at a restaurant and being fed. Implicit in the transaction is trust that we'll be given something wholesome to eat, that we won't be poisoned. But something else has entered into this daily ritual, something present as well in a trip to the supermarket: a vast opaque screen between us as eaters and where what we eat comes from. The food industry is changing rapidly; the large scale industrial production of swine began only in the 90s. Monsanto and other companies are tinkering with the genes of plants and patenting those changes, leaving farmers dependent on them for their seed supplies. And scientists are beginning to learn that crops grown with pesticides not only have more of the "bad" but also less of the "good stuff." Likewise with salmon raised on farms rather than caught in the wild, the former not only providing less of the heart healthy fats but needing to be artificially colored to make up for what they're fed in place of their natural diet. We're planting entire regions with single crops and raising thousands of genetically identical--and disease-prone--livestock under one roof. We're setting ourselves up for a modern Irish potato famine... and eating less healthy food in the process.

"You are what you eat," the old saying goes. What are we?