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News :: Agriculture |
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Of Food, Farming, And Freedom |
Current rating: 0 |
by Roger Doiron
(No verified email address) |
02 Jul 2003
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The informed shopper knows not only who owns whom, but where food products come from, how they were produced, and who earns what from their production. Unless a food company or grocery store explicitly tells you otherwise, it is safe to assume the food you're buying is the result of questionable agricultural and economic practices that did little long-term good for the farm or the farmer. |
"Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful and most noble employment of man. "
- George Washington
"No occupation is do delightful to me as the culture of the earth, no culture comparable to that of the garden."
- Thomas Jefferson
"There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third is by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry. "
- Benjamin Franklin
Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. We call them the founding fathers but they could be called the "founding farmers" just as appropriately. All three owned farms and had a passionate interest in agriculture. Much has changed in since their day. In the wake of Enron, WorldCom, Halliburton, and the never-ending war on terror, it would seem that the US has further distanced itself from honest agriculture as its defining activity and has adopted war and dodgy commerce as its new modus operandi. One thing hasn't changed: our food still comes from agriculture and, to the extent that we all eat, we all have a stake in farming and the food it produces. On the eve of our national holiday which is a celebration of our freedom, I would ask you to reflect on the state of your own food freedom. I would wager that you're not as free as you think you are.
Most people think of their food freedoms in terms of the number of food choices that are available to them. It's true that the number of food products on the shelves and new products entering the market each year are enough to boggle the mind. A casual stroll down the breakfast cereal aisle of the local grocery store would seem to suggest that our food freedom has never been greater. We are reassured to see the old favorites there like Raisin Bran, Grape Nuts, and Shredded Wheat. "At least some of the good things don't change", we say to ourselves. We also see a whole new generation of brands, some of them with appetizing names like "Cranberry Almond Crunch" and others like "Oreo Os" that sound like they've been stocked in the wrong aisle. All in all, though, we come away with the impression that, although Osama and Saddam may still be on the loose, there are no imminent threats to freedom at tomorrow's breakfast table.
But to assess our food freedom, we need to take more than just a casual stroll down the local grocery aisle; we need to take an informed one. First, the informed shopper knows that a true local grocery store is almost as hard to find as the missing WMDs in Iraq. The grocery business has gone through waves of mergers and acquisitions making it difficult for local and regional stores to survive in an increasingly international climate. The three grocery stores closest to where I live in Southern Maine are fully owned subsidiaries of large transnational corporations, one American, the other two European. The chances are good that your "local" grocery store belongs to one of them too. But let's brush that aside and head back to the cereal aisle. There we see boxes and brands galore, a stunning example of capitalism's ability to bring diverse companies and products to the marketplace, right? Well, that's true as long as you don't look too closely at the boxes themselves. At close range, you'll see that all the cereal brands mentioned above belong to a single company, Kraft, which belongs to Philip Morris (now called Altria) who also own another twenty or so cereal brands that I haven't mentioned. Oh, and by the way, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Oscar Mayer bacon, and Maxwell House Coffee, those brands belong to Kraft too in case you're wondering. Hmm
maybe our breakfast choices aren't as vast as we first thought.
The informed shopper knows not only who owns whom, but where food products come from, how they were produced, and who earns what from their production. Unless a food company or grocery store explicitly tells you otherwise, it is safe to assume the food you're buying is the result of questionable agricultural and economic practices that did little long-term good for the farm or the farmer. The agricultural practices include old, now accepted methods such as the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides as well as new ones such as hormones and antibiotics in livestock, genetic engineering, and food irradiation. The economic practices include the growing use of contract farming by which the farmer becomes the modern-day equivalent of an indentured slave to the large corporate interests to which he or she is beholden.
So, what's a well-meaning hungry person to do? The best short answer I know of is "eat responsibly". By this, I mean four things in particular:
Become an informed shopper. When you go grocery shopping, ask yourself a number of tough questions about the food you buy, its origins, the chemicals, technologies, and methods were used in its production and processing, the living and working conditions of the animals, farmers and farmworkers that made it possible.
Look for ways of shortening the distance between field and table. Look for farms, orchards, farmstands, and farmers' markets in your area that allow you to buy your food directly from the producer.
Participate in your food production to the extent you can. Plant a kitchen garden if you have the space. Make time in your schedule to prepare some of your own "real" food rather than rely on highly processed, industrial substitutes. Pry your children from the television screen or video game, and get them involved in the fun.
Get active politically. Call or write your elected officials to urge them to support sustainable agriculture at local, state, and national levels. Become a member of an organization working on behalf of small, sustainable farms in your area. Urge your local government to keep farms and farmers as part of the community.
In the end, the true measure of our food freedom lies not in the number of corporate mega-brands filling our big-box grocery stores but in the quality of our choices. In the case of breakfast cereal companies, there's only one based in my state that offers products that are delicious, healthy, local, and produced on a human scale in a way that sustains both the farm and the farmer. It is this brand that my family has recently started buying in the hopes that other such choices will become available to us in the future. It may not be what Philip Morris wants us to do, but I am certain that it is what the founding farmers would want us to do.
Roger Doiron is an activist working for sustainable and pleasurable food choices. He has recently started a new non-profit initiative called Kitchen Gardeners International (http://www.kitchengardeners.org) to promote the role of home-grown, home-cooked food in a sustainable food system. |
