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.

 

BOOK REPORT: "PARADISES LOST" by URSULA K. LE GUIN

 

I THOUGHT I WOULD BRIEFLY MENTION AN ENGAGING NOVELLA I’ve just read by Sci-Fi and Fantasy writer, the late Ursula K. Le Guin. Paradises Lost, with its reference to John Milton’s epic Seventeenth Century poem, Paradise Lost, is a tale about people aboard a “generational” spaceship bound for a distant planet in another star system. The voyage will take over two centuries to complete, and there will be several generations born aboard the Discovery spaceship who will never see the new world of their destination. It’s a story told in short, episodic chapters, that focuses on two main characters, Luis and Hsing, two “fourth generation” children, as they mature into adulthood, living their lives aboard the only “world” they would ever know--Discovery, the giant ark that shelters thousands from the dark and airless void beyond its thin shell.

This 2002 novella has Le Guin continue her exploration of family dynamics, kinship and communal structures, examining both the processes that keep them relevant, and the forces that act to disrupt or even destroy them. Aboard Discovery, families are necessarily structured differently than traditional ones and there is an emphasis on community and reciprocity and sharing. For the most part, it is an egalitarian and non-hierarchical society but also one following strict protocols around procreation, for example, something that must be carefully monitored and authorized, else the supplies will run out and the ship’s environmental systems will become overloaded. Birth rates are carefully controlled, as is the balance between male and female fetuses  brought to term. This communal emphasis on child-rearing as everyone's responsibility meant there was less division between men and women in terms of work and authority aboard ship. Both sexes contributed equally to the ship's maintenance and to the health and well-being of the “generations” it contained.

They must remain harmonious and self-sufficient, for they were increasingly on their own. There would be no supply ships from Earth or much in the way of advice and instruction, as communication with the home world became more and more erratic over time. It is interesting to note that the messages they do receive from Earth are increasingly incomprehensible to those aboard the spaceship. References in shipboard encyclopedias about life on Earth, its customs and norms, became strange and often meaningless with the passing of time: What does “crash-test dummy mean?”, or  “forge ahead?”, “steeling” oneself, and so on. Words and ideas from the past were less and less comprehensible for the passengers aboard Discovery. Their world was inside their ship and all it contained; outside was a dark, blank canvas, hostile and death-dealing. Not to give too much away, but it’s amusing to note that on “Shindychew”* or “New Earth”, the settlers use the word “dog” to name the small flying insects that land on their skin, tickling them. They called them that because on Earth "dogs" were some kind of creature that followed humans around, acting friendly, just like the colourful, tiny insects (who apparently just wanted to lick the salt in human sweat) of their adopted world. On New Earth there were no such things as a "Shih Tzu" or "Mastiff".

 

Life for the “middle” generations was indeed a journey. Just as there was no “Departure” for them—that was an experience of the “0-Generation” who first left Earth—only the "6-Generation" would see the new world, with the "5-Generation" preparing them for life on a “dirt ball”, on a world with sun and sky, clouds, and wind, and all manner of living things around them. There, they would see the horizon and experience days and nights as the bright sun rose and set. But not for Luis and Hsing. Life for the Fourth Generation would always consist of walls and ceilings, aisles and cubicles, storage rooms, public squares, cafeterias and workshops, and Engineering and Navigation decks. On Discovery, no one “owned” anything; the ship provided for all. They were safe, cared-for and sheltered from the dark outside. And while such things as “EVAs” (“Extra-Vehicular-Activity”, i.e., “spacewalks”) were performed for repairs and maintenance, these were seen in subsequent generations as an “odd” or even “unseemly” activity.

And this was because a quasi-religion had begun to develop aboard ship called “The Bliss”, which taught acolytes that there was nothing beyond Discovery, that they journeyed literally in “heaven”, in perfect harmony and with a balanced and sustainable shipboard ecology. There was nothing that could improve their condition, while, on the other hand, landing on “New Earth” or returning home would be akin to a fall from grace. Interestingly, members of the cult called themselves “angels”. For them, to leave “heaven” was unthinkable.

The years passed and Luis grew into a gifted intellectual and scholar who began to have doubts about “The Bliss”, whose members became an increasingly large and vocal presence aboard ship. While researching in the library archives, he uncovers worrying details about the religion’s growing influence over ship’s affairs, even to affecting the mission itself. At the same time, Hsing’s husband Canaval discovers a navigational error in the ship’s computers. An encounter with the gravitational pull from a black hole several years earlier had caused Discovery to rapidly accelerate, meaning they would arrive at their destination decades ahead of schedule. The Fourth Generation would be the ones to settle New Earth. Luis and Hsing would soon stand upon a new world!

As a result of these revelations, there existed among the ship’s population a real possibility of dissent, perhaps even violence**, as different factions began to form, and cohorts of believers contested for control with those still committed to the the ship's original mission. But social norms aboard the spaceship were such that committees and study groups were formed instead of armed camps, with dialogue and compromise ultimately resolving their differences. And with little time left, the “4s”, (the fourth generation born on Discovery), readied themselves to become colonizers. One example of their preparations was getting used to wearing shoes for the first time; aboard ship, everyone walked in bare feet.

Thus, there would be no ‘Mad Max’ scenarios or Hobbesian “war of all against all”, no revolutions or mutinies on Le Guin’s ark, though she uses the possibility of violence and factionalism to create dramatic tension leading to the story’s climax. A vote was taken to decide who wanted to stay aboard Discovery and who wished to disembark on New Earth. Supplies were evenly distributed, good cheer and best wishes for a fair journey were expressed between the two groups, with over half of the ship's population continuing their blissful journey into space, while the remainder settled New Earth. It's interesting that Luis considers that both settlers and “Remainers” have made a valid choice. He once told Hsing he would be just as comfortable staying on the ship as he would becoming a settler. And given the hardships of those early years on New Earth, life aboard Discovery was in many ways a paradise of ease and comfort. It was understandable that many would want to stay. Luis also felt that each way of living had its own value,  purpose and importance for those living it; each came with its own opportunities for discovery, growth and understanding. Luis chose to live on New Earth because, in the end, he felt life as a settler would simply be more interesting. And, he adds, life aboard ship among followers of “The Bliss” might be a bit tiresome after a while.

 

There is some foreshadowing at the beginning of the new settlement when two Fifth Generation infants die and later an adult succumbs to death by blood poisoning, leaving the reader wondering whether New Earth might ultimately prove uninhabitable, even deadly, for the settlers. Both tragedy and joy accompany them as they begin their lives in the new world.

Le Guin takes the reader though the early years of the settlement in a series of short episodes, ending with a scene between the now-middle-aged Luis and Hsing, sitting beside a drainage channel the New Earthers have dug to bring water into their rice fields. Children play in the distance and it is at the end of a hard day of work. The sun is slowly setting, and Luis tells Hsing how it is at times like these he feels “bliss”. Not, he assures her, the “Bliss” experienced by those aboard Discovery who live each and every moment in a state of religious ecstasy, but rather the way he feels now, after a hard day’s work, or during moments of communion with her, or when he sees the colours of the sky at sunset and feels the warm winds softly blowing, simply to feel joy in breathing and being alive!—those fleeting moments of true bliss that come unexpectedly, and are therefore all the more welcomed and treasured. 

Thus the people of Discovery had lost two paradises: the first, their home, Earth, now only a distant memory; still it was the original Garden, the paradise now failing, embroiled in turmoil, war, and ecological disaster. The second was the ship Discovery, their other home, the only paradise they knew in all the time they had journeyed through the blackness of space. Will this third home they have found prove to be a paradise for them, one they learn to cherish and preserve? Only time will tell.   

 

Le Guin began her novella with an epigraph—a quote from Theodore Roethke’s poem, “The Waking”. The last line reads: “I learn by going where I have to go.” Wherever those travellers in space have gone, they have learned by their journeying. Wherever we go in life, so too will we learn by our going where it is we need to go.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

 

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* ”Shindychew” is the phonetic spelling for the Chinese “Hsin Ti Chun” or “New Earth”. Most of those aboard Discovery appear to be of Asian descent.

 

** There had been instances of violence aboard Discovery during its long flight, of suicides and murders, and there were passengers afflicted with various psychological ailments, but those instances were rare, with the entire ship’s company focused on maintaining social harmony and keeping the peace.

 

 

 

Le Guin, Ursula, K. "Paradises Lost" in The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin. Saga Press. Simon & Schuster, Inc. N.Y., N.Y., 2016.

 

 

QUOTES: ALDOUS HUXLEY

“The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitude."—Aldous Huxley