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May 28 - June 3, 2021
It might be hard to see how, but even a Twinkie does this—constitutes an engagement with the natural world.
George’s crops are basically inedible—they’re commodities that must be processed or fed to livestock before they can feed people. Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink: Like most of Iowa, which now imports 80 percent of its food, George’s farm (apart from his garden, his laying hens, and his fruit trees) is basically a food desert.
Richard liked this
“Sure, you might get a yield bump, but whatever you make on the extra corn goes right back to cover the premium for the seed. I fail to see why I should be laundering money for Monsanto.”
Basically, modern hybrids can tolerate the corn equivalent of city life, growing amid the multitudes without succumbing to urban stress.
There are no alpha corn plants to hog the light or fertilizer. The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.
From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.
This re: modern fertilizers being a >1:1 input/output calorie ratio vs. classic crop roation + cover crops with 1:2
You can fire me, but you can’t fire my land, because some other farmer who needs more cash flow or thinks he’s more efficient than I am will come in and farm it. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.”
George owned he was getting something just south of two hundred, but he was too polite to say what he knew, which was that he was almost certainly clearing more money per acre growing less corn more cheaply. But in Iowa, bragging rights go to the man with the biggest yield, even if it’s bankrupting him.
In nature, the population of a species explodes until it exhausts its supply of food; then it crashes. In the market, an oversupply of a commodity depresses prices until either the surplus is consumed or it no longer makes sense to produce any more of it. In corn’s case, humans have labored mightily to free it from either constraint, even if that means going broke growing it, and consuming it just as fast as we possibly can.
A commodity is like a filter, stripping qualities and histories from the harvest of a particular farm and farmer.
Moving that mountain of cheap corn—finding the people and animals to consume it, the cars to burn it, the new products to absorb it, and the nations to import it—has become the principal task of the industrial food system, since the supply of corn vastly exceeds the demand.
All that excess biomass has to go somewhere.
One of the most striking things that animal feedlots do (to paraphrase Wendell Berry) is to take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all).
Richard liked this
In the same way ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn, humans in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn.
But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them.
So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass–powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.
(Food industry executives used to call this the problem of the “fixed stomach” economists speak of “inelastic demand.”)
This leaves companies like General Mills and McDonald’s with two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food, or entice them to actually eat more than that. The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, of course, and the food industry energetically pursues them both at the same time.
And / Or / See also : food waste
Now, thanks to the ingenuity of modern food science, we had a choice. We could eat things designed by humans for the express purpose of being eaten by people—or eat “substances” designed by natural selection for its own purposes: to, say, snooker a bee or lift a wing or (eek!) make a baby.
One reason that obesity and diabetes become more prevalent the further down the socioeconomic scale you look is that the industrial food chain has made energy-dense foods the cheapest foods in the market, when measured in terms of cost per calorie.
The researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar, or 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate.
Together we would be eating alone together, and therefore probably eating more.
No doubt the food scientists at McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, are right now hard at work on the one-handed salad.
I loved everything about fast food: the individual portions all wrapped up like presents (not having to share with my three sisters was a big part of the appeal; fast food was private property at its best); the familiar meaty perfume of the French fries filling the car; and the pleasingly sequenced bite into a burger—the soft, sweet roll, the crunchy pickle, the savory moistness of the meat.
Like other comfort foods, it supplies (besides nostalgia) a jolt of carbohydrates and fat, which, some scientists now believe, relieve stress and bathe the brain in chemicals that make it feel good.
it = fast food
In this consumer’s mind at least, the link between a nugget and the chicken in it was never more than notional, and probably irrelevant.
By now the nugget constitutes its own genre of food for American children, many of whom eat nuggets every day.
Overall the nugget seemed more like an abstraction than a full-fledged food, an idea of chicken waiting to be fleshed out.
That perhaps is what the industrial food chain does best: obscure the histories of the foods it produces by processing them to such an extent that they appear as pure products of culture rather than nature—things made from plants and animals.
But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn’s koala.
Perhaps the reason you eat this food quickly is because it doesn’t bear savoring.
The wail of farm machinery had fallen silent, and in the space it left I could hear the varied sounds of birds: songbirds in the trees, but also the low gossip of hens and the lower throat singing of turkeys.
We think of the grasses as the basis of this food chain, yet behind, or beneath, the grassland stands the soil, that inconceivably complex community of the living and the dead.
But then another, more local dairy boasted about the fact they had said no to ultrapasteurization, implying that their product was fresher, less processed, and therefore more organic.
Or maybe it's a plea to aesthetics? That the milk is somehow more flavorful?
As the literary critics would say, the writer seemed to be eliding the whole notion of cows and grass.
WORDY LABELS, point-of-purchase brochures, and certification schemes are supposed to make an obscure and complicated food chain more legible to the consumer.
“Organic” on the label conjures up a rich narrative, even if it is the consumer who fills in most of the details, supplying the hero (American Family Farmer), the villain (Agribusinessman), and the literary genre, which I’ve come to think of as Supermarket Pastoral.
One of the company’s marketing consultants explained to me that the Whole Foods shopper feels that by buying organic he is “engaging in authentic experiences” and imaginatively enacting a “return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact.” This sounds a lot like Virgilian pastoral, which also tried to have it both ways.
Acting on the ecological premise that everything’s connected to everything else, the early organic movement sought to establish not just an alternative mode of production (the chemical-free farms), but an alternative system of distribution (the anticapitalist food co-ops), and even an alternative mode of consumption (the “countercuisine”).
Enlightening! I've often wondered about why organic markets were so frequently organized as co-ops -- turns out it's a moralistic political values thing.
The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.
Charles Darwin taught us that a kind of pragmatism—he called it natural selection—is at the very heart of nature, guiding evolution: What works is what survives.
Survives AND reproduces.
Especially as organic agriculture has grown more successful, finding its way into the supermarket and the embrace of agribusiness, organic farming has increasingly come to resemble the industrial system it originally set out to replace.
Hard to argue with scale when there's money to be made.
Kahn drove me out to see the original farm, following the twists of the Skagit River east in a new forest-green Lexus with vanity plates that say ORGANIC.
:vomiting_face_emoji:
Horizon Organic’s Mark Retzloff labored mightily to preserve the ability of his company—which is the Microsoft of organic milk, controlling more than half of the market—to operate its large-scale industrial dairy in southern Idaho.
highlighted mainly for: "the Microsoft of organic milk"
Viewed from overhead, the lettuce-packing operation looks like a hugely intricate Rube Goldberg contraption,
An inevitable comparison.
“We may have to give up on the word ‘organic,’ leave it to the Gene Kahns of the world. To be honest, I’m not sure I want that association, because what I’m doing on my farm is not just substituting inputs.”
[esp. that last bit there]
The space that has been provided to her for that purpose is, I realized, not unlike the typical American front lawn it resembles—it’s a kind of ritual space, intended not so much for the use of the local residents as a symbolic offering to the larger community.
Clearly my bunch of asparagus had delivered me deep into the thicket of trade-offs that a global organic marketplace entails.
Many are potent antioxidants;
Many = polyphenols -- i.e., maybe those Belgian beers are good for me? hehehe
