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No One Eats Alone
Food As A Social Enterprise
By Michael S. Carolan ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Michael S. Carolan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-804-6
CHAPTER 1
Monocultures of the Mind and Body
"You are what you eat." We have all heard this saying, and no doubt each of us has used it on a few occasions. Yet food is not only a what, but also a when, a why, a how, and a with whom. In other words, we cannot understand food without understanding the social practices that go along with eating and producing it, as well as all those activities that lie in between. Those practices have changed dramatically over the last half century, becoming far more homogenized, as illustrated in figures 1.1 and 1.2. Figure 1.1 tracks the narrowing dietary profiles of dozens of countries from 1961 to 2009, which also implies a narrowing of culinary skills, preferences, and knowledge. Figure 1.2 shows the same trends, focusing specifically on seven commodities, three industrial and four traditional.
How have we created these monocultures? Why have farming and eating patterns changed so much in such a relatively short period of time? And once new habits have become ingrained, how might they be changed again? Nutritional literacy campaigners would have us believe it's just as a matter of telling people what they ought to do and why. Easy-peasy. Next problem? But I'm afraid the roots of these monocultures run too deep for our current course to be reversed by well-designed educational campaigns. To eat is to be connected, in one way or another. To eat differently, then, requires a change in those connections — that social change I talked about in the introduction. It will require places where people can come together, where they can develop new habits and feelings not only about food, but about each other.
* * *
It is a cold, rainy afternoon in The Hague. In other words, it is a typical January day in the Netherlands. I am seated across from a slender gentleman in his late sixties, though his athletic frame and jet-black hair, save for a light sprinkling of snow in his beard, give the appearance of someone at least ten years younger. George used to work for the Kenyan government in their ministry of agriculture, livestock, and fisheries. I wanted to learn more about Kenya's recent experiences with the global landgrab — companies and countries securing massive tracts of land in distant parts of the world for food and biofuel production. I had not expected us to get lost in a conversation about the Green Revolution. But after two hours and four coffees each, that was precisely what had happened.
The Green Revolution can be described as a series of research and technology transfer initiatives, with support from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, that began in earnest immediately after World War II and lasted into the 1970s. I am also comfortable with the following definition, though it is not nearly as neutral sounding: the Green Revolution was the exportation of American-style conventional agriculture to lower-income nations, predicated almost exclusively on productivity gains — on producing, in a word, more. From an environmental standpoint, the Green Revolution was at best highly problematic. At worse, it was an unmitigated disaster. To use Rachel Carson's metaphor, it single-handedly silenced spring around the globe, while making farmers and peasants dependent upon petrochemical inputs.
Take the case of wheat. New high-yielding dwarf varieties were bred short, hence the name. Varieties that are tall get easily flattened when subjected to high winds and significant rainfall. This, of course, is not a problem when the crop is harvested manually. When mechanically harvested, however, toppled wheat becomes fodder for field mice and rot, as the combine's head — the business end that pulls the plant into the machine — cannot get to it. Dwarf varieties not only stand up better to the elements than their taller cousins, they also make more sense when breeding for yield. To put it simply, tall plants waste energy getting tall. Shorter varieties make more efficient use of energy, when efficiency is defined by a plant's yield relative to the nutrients it absorbs. Yet paradoxically, this efficiency came at the expense of energy — a lot of it, once you factor in petrochemical use. Dwarf varieties were so short they could not compete for sunlight with native weeds that, it turned out, were quite tall; after all, they had coevolved alongside the native wheat varieties for centuries. As a result, yields of "miracle wheat" were pathetic without the use of large amounts of fertilizers and herbicides.
The Green Revolution also led to the global cultivation of just a handful of crops. When we're looking to do things bigger and better, the tendency is to specialize — to take advantage of economies of scale. Trace the average Western diet back to the soil and you will find roughly ten plants.2 Ten plants might not technically constitute a global monoculture but it is awfully close.
George and I talked about the magic-bullet mindset of the Green Revolution and both the arrogance and outright ignorance that it embodied. How could industrialization be the single answer to sustainably — and justly, healthily, etc. — feeding the world? As for those who suggest viewing the Green Revolution as a short-term solution, a bridge to ultimately more-sustainable practices: now that it has been more than sixty years, precisely how long is the bridge? When a set of practices are tied to massive profits for powerful actors whose power is derived from those profits, it is naïve to suppose that economic and political influence will ever be willingly abdicated.
Most of my time with George, however, was spent discussing the other monocultures the Green Revolution helped bring forth. As George recalled,
The 1960s were a magical time in my country. We were seeing per-acre maize yields increasing by more than 4 percent a year. I believe that surpassed what they were even seeing in the US at the time. It was also a period of great structural change. The entire farm sector was undergoing immense transformation, starting to look a lot like the US Corn Belt. But also, and this is why I used the term "magical" earlier, we were forgetting some things that, in hindsight, we shouldn't have.
Intrigued by his curious choice of words, I asked if he was implying that the Green Revolution was an act of collective forgetting.
"That's precisely what it was," he agreed. "We failed to appreciate, until after it was gone, the unique expert systems our ancestors had developed. I'm talking about knowledge that allowed them to grow food not only under remarkably adverse conditions, but to also do so sustainably, without the need of expensive nonrenewable resources, as in the case of fertilizers, or scare resources, if you're talking about irrigated water."
Later in the conversation he talked more specifically about how this social amnesia affects Kenyans today: "Looming threats from peak oil and water and from climate change make me wish we had done a better job saving that knowledge, because we're going to need it. If not now then very soon. The Green Revolution robbed us of a very important aspect of our past."
"Robbed of our past" might seem like a rhetorical flourish, but I caution against dismissing these words. For me, they immediately called to mind something that another George, George Orwell, expressed nearly seventy years ago. In his deeply unsettling and arguably prophetic dystopia, 1984, he wrote, "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Sociologist Paul Connerton essentially makes the same point in How Societies Remember, noting that: "All totalitarianisms behave in this way: the mental enslavement of the subjects of a totalitarian regime begins when their memories are taken away." He continues by explaining, "What is horrifying about a totalitarian regime is not only the violation of human dignity but the fear that there may remain nobody who could ever again bear witness to the past."
I can guess what you are thinking. Totalitarianism? Orwellian dystopias? Is that not a bit over the top? How could those things ever be linked with the Green Revolution? After all, wasn't Norman Borlaug, generally recognized as the father of the Green Revolution, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Honor, and the Padma Vibhushan, Indian's second-highest civilian honor, for his work in developing high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties? True, but remember this: those awards were for what the Green Revolution allegedly gave the world, not for what it took away. Calculate those subtractions, and a case could be made that, on the whole and over the long run, more was lost as a result of this "revolution" than gained.
But how? How can entire societies be stripped of the ability to bear witness to the past? More to the point, how is the Green Revolution implicated as a source of amnesia? The how is nothing mysterious — it's just the opposite, in fact. It's routine. And I mean that in the most basic sense of the word.
Michael Polanyi, the brilliant twentieth-century polymath, famously proclaimed, while discussing what he called the "tacit dimension": "We know more than we can tell." Anecdotally, we all know this to be true. Ever try telling someone how to ride a bike? Or take that special dish your grandmother used to make for family occasions — for me that was the kolache. Asking her to write out the directions, with the addendum, "I want it to taste just like yours," never seems to work. Why? Because the knowledge required cannot be reduced to words. A great deal of our understanding is of this "more than we can tell" variety. Such a realization may seem trivial when compared with the practical hard work being done by scientists, activists, and practitioners to build healthier foodscapes. But this insight holds immense practical consequence. Until we give tacit knowledge its proper due, our food system cannot be transformed. If reformers hope to mount a serious challenge to the status quo, they will need to appreciate those aspects of food that are felt, practiced, and performed. To know something, in many cases, we have to do it, literally.
Consider that the world's biodiversity "hotspots," regions with the planet's richest collections of plants and animals, are also cultural and linguistic hotspots. An article published in the prestigious journal of the National Academy of Sciences reports that 70 percent of all languages left on the Earth are spoken in these biodiverse areas. Coincidence? Hardly.
Virginia Nazarea, professor of anthropology and director of the Ethnoecology and Biodiversity Lab at the University of Georgia, is perhaps the world's foremost authority on the subject of biocultural diversity. Along with the late Dr. Robert Rhoades she helped pioneer research in this field. One of the many subjects she has studied in her illustrious career is sweet potato farming in the Philippines. I am particularly struck by one study involving two sites. On one, farmers were beginning the processes of commercializing production for the market, while the other remained firmly at the level of subsistence agriculture to feed local households. As was expected, she witnessed a narrowing of genetic diversity on the site moving toward commercial production. Yet that was not all. There was also a large disparity between the two sites in terms of the number of varieties known or remembered, compared with the biodiversity that actually existed. At the commercial site, farmers had knowledge about far fewer sweet potato varieties than at the other (and no doubt they also had an even further eroded working knowledge, though this wasn't investigated), having forgotten many that still existed and were being planted elsewhere in the country. This suggests a faster erosion of cultural knowledge than of genetic diversity itself. Nazarea writes: "In the context of agricultural development and market integration, knowledge may actually be the first to go."
That is the forgetting that George was alluding to. As crops and management practices stop being used, they risk being forgotten. As for conventional gene and seed banks, they are not saving nearly enough. What good is a seed once it is divorced from the people who cultivated it? Can you tell by looking at a seed how deep it ought to be planted or how it responds to certain weather? What about the taste, texture, and mouthfeel of the fruits it will bear? And how it ought to be harvested? Can you get any of this by examining a DNA sequence? I will let George answer those questions for me: "We had such incredible agro-biological diversity a half century ago [in Kenya]. The Green Revolution took that away from us. And now, because most everyone's dead who had a working knowledge of those alternative systems, it's proving difficult to reconstruct them, even though we have many of the seeds locked safely away in a seed repository."
And taste, how does that fit into this conversation? Does it matter whether we all like the same thing or have a variety of tastes? Yes!
Nazarea documents how differences in sweet potato preferences in the Philippines helps sustain the crop's diversity there. Elsewhere, researchers mapping the wide genetic variability of corn landraces — locally adapted variations — in Mexico note that most will survive only so long as the country's culinary diversity remains intact and continues to require all those different varieties.
We have already discussed how the Green Revolution helped reduce biodiversity at the production end, through farmers' collective forgetting. But we also forget as eaters. As tastes for certain dishes are lost, so too are the requisite skills to prepare them — which, by the way, further erode knowledge at the production end. If no one is eating a particular food, what's the point of growing it? Recall the earlier figures noting the global narrowing of diets. This forgetting isn't a possibility. It's well under way.
"I'm seeing an entire generation of young Africans," George explained, "those in urban areas especially, that eat very differently from past generations. I worry about how those habits will further erode an already perilously brittle food system." To illustrate his point, George went on to talk about a favorite dish of his: matoke — steamed plantains, essentially. "You can't make it with the bananas you find in Western grocery stores. I once tried using really green ones and it didn't come out right. You need plantains." He continued, "I don't see plantains disappearing anytime soon, but that's not my point. My point is that when we lose a taste for a dish we risk losing the plants, possibly forever, that make that food possible."
* * *
I interviewed Mick at his home in Kensington, a well-known and rather affluent district in central London. Mick retired from "the food biz," as he called it, in 2006, after spending forty-six years "making people want food from either a tin or a box." "The strategy has changed," he told me. "Fifty years ago half of our customers still knew how to cook. So early on I was working on [advertising] campaigns that were about trying to talk people out of cooking, telling them about how a certain product could save them time for other things, that sort of thing. We don't do that anymore because those cooking skills have been nicked."
"'Nicked'?" I asked.
"Right. Let me put that another way. Lost would have been a better term. But what that term doesn't convey is the intentionality of it. Back in the sixties and seventies we were really working to make that happen, to make it so people actually forgot how to cook, which is why my instinct was to say 'nicked,' or what you might call 'taken.'"
The Green Revolution has helped us forget how to grow and save the seeds of heritage fruits and vegetables. But that is only half of it, as we are also forgetting how to prepare and, in some cases, even eat certain foods. Who among us knows how to carve a turkey anymore? It's a slippery slope. The less we know about cooking the less cooking we do, which leads to knowing still less, doing still less, and so forth, until we have no "choice" but to eat only certain foods, like those that have already been prepared for us. Then there's the point of no return: after a generation or two, societies will not even know they have forgotten anything as entire cohorts are born into this new normal. As the old saying goes, How are you supposed to know what you're missing if you don't know you're missing it in the first place?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No One Eats Alone by Michael S. Carolan. Copyright © 2017 Michael S. Carolan. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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