BOOK REPORT: ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, JUNK: A HISTORY OF FOOD FROM SUSTAINABLE TO SUICIDAL by MARK BITTMAN

 

I WAS DOING SOME READING ABOUT FOOD the other day and a set of interesting facts caught my attention: Around seventy-two percent of farms in the world are less than 2.5 acres in size. But they operate on only 8% of the available agricultural land, while farms over 123 acres—which are just 1% of the world’s farms—operate on 65% of the land. Okay, I thought, modern farms are on the larger side. Some are ginormous! Canadian farms average about 800 acres while some in the prairies are thousands of acres in size! (Surprisingly American farms are smaller, on average, at about half the size of their Canadian counterparts. Though, I’m sure farm acreage in the American mid-west easily matches ours.) After all, we have a big population to feed and need big farms, right? So, move on—there’s nothing to see here. Or is there?

 

Another set of statistics caused my brows to wrinkle a tad: More than 500 million peasant farms operating on 25% of the land feed 70% of the world’s population. Modern, “industrial” farming, (also known as “factory farming”), on the other hand, operates on 75% of the arable land, but feeds only 30% of humanity.

Even if you’re like me (someone statistically challenged) these figures don’t add up. Something isn’t right. Modern, technological farming feeds only a third of the planet while using ¾ of the cultivable land to do it? I thought the whole purpose of the “Green Revolution”, GMOs and the entire armature of the food system, from farm to table, was geared to feeding the world’s population now and in the future. What’s going on? Where does all the food from our modern farms go?

 

In reading the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences of the United States of America) and an article I found there discussing the Green Revolution (GR) and the need for a second one, a “GR 2.0”, I was surprised (perhaps I really wasn’t) at the emphasis placed on technological development and increasing the yields of “public goods”, i.e., commercial crops worldwide, as well as strengthening seed patent law, lowering trade barriers, and finally how the global food system needs to incorporate the remaining smallholder farmers into itself. It states the need to “enhance competitiveness of modernizing agricultural systems and increasing “smallholder productivity growth.”

 

But wait, aren’t small farms productive? Aren’t they the backbone of global agriculture? Didn’t the statistics I quoted at the beginning of this post suggest they, in fact, produce most of the world’s food on a fraction of its arable land (25%)? “Industrial farms” are farms that use heavy machinery, GMOs, patented seed technologies, artificial pesticides, fertilizers, and other “inputs” to grow mostly “cash crops” that are often exported or sold in upscale markets. As mentioned, they produce only about one-third of the world’s food on 75% of the land. This begs the question: Why do we stress the need for another Green Revolution and for further “modernization” of our agriculture system*? Why do we consider today’s agriculture a success?

 

Fortunately, Mark Bittman’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, goes a long way to answer these and other questions about how we grow our food, and he has strong criticisms about our current way of doing things. In the chapter entitled “Where We’re At”, Bittman makes a compelling argument for radical change in the methods of food production that today have become global in scope. He says:

     “ You will hear, ‘The food system is broken.’ But the truth is that it works almost perfectly for Big Food. It also works well enough for around a third of the world’s people, who have the money to demand and have at a moment’s notice virtually any food in the world.

     But it doesn’t work well enough to nourish most of humanity, and it doesn’t work well enough to husband our resources so that it can endure. Indeed, the system had created a public health crisis [and] it’s a chief contributor to the foremost threat to our species: the climate crisis. The way we produce food threatens everyone, even the wealthiest and cleverest.” (242)

 

He begins his study with an overview of agriculture’s rise after millennia of experimentation, trial and error and just plain luck. Following the last Ice Age, around 12,000 BC, as the world’s climate gradually warmed, steppe and boreal forest climes gave way to temperate forest and grasslands, and to ecologies with plants and soils, and animals, that would prove helpful for human populations that were adapting and expanding into these increasingly habitable and fertile regions of the earth. He reviews the “Paleo” diet humans ate for millennia as hunter-gatherers and how such a lifestyle would preclude things like “surpluses” of food. Described as the “optimal foraging” (9) formation, hunter-gatherer group dynamics, like those found in today’s remnant hunter-gatherer societies, suggest pre-agrarian cultures were more egalitarian and non-hierarchically structured, and thus better suited for small groups of individual families or clans migrating across the landscape, eating what was available from the plant and animal world.

Over time, by chance or circumstance, certain plants, and later animals, served to “anchor” humans to a more sedentary lifestyle that, with further domestication of plants and animals, gave rise to settlements and eventually the societies and civilizations of the early Holocene epoch.**

 

IN GENERAL, most of us know the “big picture” concerning the growth (some might say metastasizing) of our modern food system. But the devil is in the details, and Bittman provides many details for us to understand where our current approach to feeding ourselves has gone off the rails.

Interestingly, he cites the nineteenth-century’s discovery of bird droppings, or rather the copious deposits laid down over millennia of bat and bird “guano” on offshore South American islands as a key moment in launching humankind along a dangerous and ultimately unsustainable path.

 

I hope the reader will forgive my giving short shrift to the several millennia between the time when hunter-gatherers first discovered the food value in various perennial grasses, and animals, and jumping ahead thousands of years to the New World of the Americas. But, in short: by the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant societies of Europe and its colonies were running out of productive farmland, even as the wealth and bounty of an entire hemisphere had been used to fuel and feed its various empires and enterprises. The agrarian strategies that had mostly kept pace with humankind’s growth around the globe—techniques such as “slash and burn” agriculture, fallowing, “inter-cropping”, composting, “green manures”, and so on—had fallen behind the rapid population growth during the nineteenth century, where primarily European technologies, trade, and conquests had, up until then, allowed for expanding populations. Of course, the eighteenth-century discovery of coal and its powerful combustive properties began what is called the Industrial Revolution, whose processes and manufactures and wealth generation added fuel to the population fire. 

But something else was needed to increase farm yields to feed people.

And that something was fertilizer. Or more specifically the wealth of nitrogen, potassium and phosphate found in layers of seabird excreta deposited on offshore islands along the Pacific coast of South America that the Europeans and other rich nations in short order mined to exhaustion. Bittman states:

 

     “Thousands upon millions of years of fertilizer was being carted across the globe, only to be exhausted in decades. Europeans would realize the folly of this approach over the following half century—and especially after the development of chemical fertilizer—as it became clear that flouting the natural laws that prevent infinite growth was not a system built to last.”  (74)

 

He raises concerns and criticisms around an economic system that promotes such rapacious and ultimately unsustainable activities, and just how unfair and anti-egalitarian capitalist economies can be. He cites one example from nineteenth-century India, a country with a long tradition of diverse and sustainable agriculture but was now burdened by huge swaths of arable lands given over to cotton, wheat and corn production (and opium, but that’s another story), mostly destined for export. The imposed dislocation of traditional croplands and markets by the British overlords directly resulted in two devastating famines, killing millions across the subcontinent.

Capitalism, by its nature, promotes unsustainable and inequitable growth, a theme Bittman returns to throughout his book. In particular, he cites American innovation in the food “industry” during the late nineteenth century, and particularly following WWI with advancements in farm machinery, petrochemical sciences and the manufacture of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, allowing America's version of agriculture to become the major driver of globalized, industrial farming, as well as becoming a chief emitter of greenhouse gases. One of the main “themes” of this new way of farming, one that fits nicely with the critique of capitalism in general, is the supposed need for agriculture systems to become more “efficient”. Like modern manufacturing and marketing enterprises, efficiency is the key component for how corporations (and now farms) are to be run: maximizing profits while minimizing costs. It sounds reasonable enough, until you examine the actual costs of such enterprises and how efficiency limits farming to an ever-narrowing suite of unsustainable and increasingly costly practices. When pundits call for increased efficiency in the farming sector, what do they mean? Generally, they refer to larger farms, more mechanization and technology (GPS, drones, etc.), and of course greater use of patented seeds, artificial fertilizers, and herbicides, manufactured by giant petrochemical and pharmaceutical companies and foisted off onto the world’s farmers. As well, multi-national agricultural conglomerates use their market dominance and favourable trade agreements to dictate, in many cases, the types of crops grown in different countries. 

 

FOR EXAMPLE, great swaths of North American farmland are given over to the production of corn, wheat, and soybeans, as are countries like Brazil and Argentina and large tracts of Europe. In the United States, about 40% of the corn crop is “destined to make inefficient fuel.” [Ethanol] (186) About 36% goes for animal feed. Most of the rest is exported or else processed into high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) which is used as a “feedstock” to produce just about every type of junk food you can imagine. Bittman points out that relatively little of the corn harvest in the US goes to feeding humans directly. (He does not consider salt-laden, HFCS-infused corn chips a food.) And, of course, this goes a long way in answering that question I asked earlier about where all the food goes from our modern agricultural system. It goes disproportionately toward bio-fuels, animal feed and junk foods. 

 

Thus, markets are distorted. Unsuitable crops are planted, animals are treated in the most appalling manner, lands despoiled, forests destroyed, fish stocks depleted. And that’s just on a Monday for "Big Food"! With his strong convictions and clear prose, Bittman takes the industry to task, showing how it has become a system of food production that is killing us—literally: Through our excessive consumption of highly processed foods and diets heavy in meat⁺ and animal products that are available mostly to that well-fed third of humanity mentioned earlier. Our food system is killing us with  short-sighted, extractive methods of soil management, with toxic chemicals and drugs and other additives that end up on our plates, as well as through resource depletion, dangerous genetic experiments, pollution, and environmental degradation.

 

AND SO, we are left with a system that fails to support (most of) us, and one that will not safely, sustainably, or nutritionally feed us as our population continues to rise in the coming decades. We are at the cliff’s edge, yet believe we can fly, even as we fall. Bittman says he is not hopeful that we will be able to change our food system in time to avert catastrophe, but he does say that while we “do not see many examples of better food systems in [our] daily lives, they do exist.” (265) Much of Africa and Asia still have highly decentralized farming systems that can be used as models for sustainable agricultural practices. Agricultural movements like “La Via Campesina (“the Peasant Way”), organic farming, the holistic farming methods of Rudlolf Steiner (called “bio-dynamics”), permaculture and “restorative agriculture” are some methods that give us hope. All of them fall under the rubric of “agroecology”, a holistic way of growing food. 

 So, here’s hoping! (I think I’ll go out back and pull a carrot or two from my patch, and sit and chew a while.)

 

Cheers, Jake. 

 

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*Not forgetting, of course, animal husbandry and fishing, two vital links in humanity’s food chain. Each face similar challenges as modern production methods compete with traditional ones.

 

**For example: barley and “aurochs” from Europe; wild wheat (“emmer”), goats and sheep from the Fertile Crescent. Later millet grasses, pigs and chickens from India and SE Asia, rice from China, Andean potatoes and llamas, maize from Central America, turkeys and bison from North America, etc.

 

⁺ David Pimentel, professor of ecology at Cornell University states: "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million. If only grass-fed livestock were raised in the United States, "individual Americans would still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of meat and dairy protein.”

 

[Factoid: Zyclon-B, the gas used in Nazi extermination camps to kill millions of Jews in Europe, was originally invented by German scientists in the 1920s as a pesticide.]

 

 

 

Bittman, Mark. Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of food from Sustainable to Suicidal. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Boston, New York, 2021.