Americans generally believe that food comes from farmers, oil goes in cars, and that our country’s governance is animated by principles which make us unique in the firmament of contemporary societies. Sixty years ago, these things may have been largely true, but since then everything has changed except for the story we let ourselves believe.
The actual mechanisms by which our lives and culture are shaped, are not particularly hidden, but they don’t make sense to us because we still think (among other vestigial beliefs) that plants are grown from sunlight; so we ignore all that we see. To the point where we live in a dreamworld: everything that exists, we don’t understand; and everything we understand, doesn’t exist.
If you’ve read this far, you are in the tiny percentage of people who would choose not to live in a dream. Everyone else has moved on to reading about America’s next food star.
Here’s what has changed since the middle of the 20th Century. Our food system — and thus the very base our economy as a whole — is now driven by a small number of large corporations that do one or more of the following:
* develop seeds which can only be used one time (because, for instance, the seeds mature into sterile plants)
* convert fossil fuels into energy which can be accessed by plants, in lieu of good soil
* convert fossil fuels and similar inputs into pesticides, growth hormones, and other facilitators of agricultural yield
* process inedible agricultural products (mainly field corn and soybeans) into processed food and livestock feed
* convert livestock feed into meat at feedlots (and, increasingly, fish farms)
These companies, as a group, make their profits — and, incidentally, obtain control of our food supply — by working in concert with our policymakers to replace small family farms which grew many different crops, with much larger, consolidated farms which grow only one or two crops (usually corn and soybeans, sometimes other commodity crops like wheat, rice, or alfalfa).
Since this group of large corporations controls the costs of all the inputs to the farm (the modern farmer has no seed lines and must buy them each year; his soil is dead so he must buy petroleum-based fertilizers), and the same group of corporations buys all the outputs of the farm (to process into animal feed and human food), they can ensure that the new, larger farms are operated at a loss — with the farmers brought to break-even through government subsidies contained in the Farm Bill.
The farmers’ financial unsustainability guarantees that smaller farms will continue to fail in competition with bigger farms (who enjoy slightly better economies of scale), which continues to reduce the number of farms and increase the size and predictability of the remaining farms.
Over generations, millions of people in vital agricultural towns are quietly dispossessed and the towns shuttered. In the American Midwest, each generation of young adults may leave their now-dying town in search of “opportunity”, perhaps by moving to a regional small city, or by attending a land-grant university and moving to an exurb or large city. In the last 60 years, this process has been effectively laid waste to the Corn Belt, and to much of California’s Central Valley, and many other areas throughout America.
We grandchildren and great-grandchildren of iconic independent farmers, now often work in flaccid “knowledge-based” industries that produce little of value. But we nonetheless serve our function: to produce goods, and to buy the products of the food industry (and to a certain extent the consumer products industry) in order that we might continue to live. The New Food can be produced in staggering quantities. and human populations can thus be induced to grow, and labor, and pay.
Having conquered the land of the United States, the titans of food expanded beyond our borders. With the passing of NAFTA in the late 20th century, the fertile lands of Mexico were opened to these corporations, which worked with governments in both countries to repeat the successes of Iowa and Nebraska. Now, farmers in the cradle of maize itself no longer have the ability to sustain the most important crop in their country, without annually purchasing seeds from Monsanto.
With no access to a robust infrastructure for cubicle workers, displaced rural Mexicans created a different kind of pressure, that of overcrowded cities and agonizing joblessness. This was a huge positive feedback loop for the food companies, as now, a byproduct of their industry — masses of unemployed young men with agricultural backgrounds — perfectly matched a necessary input for their factories: countless disposable workers willing to abide danger, dismemberment, and backbreaking labor for meager pay. Young men, denied legal standing and thus any bargaining power, came north to work in thankless jobs in slaughterhouses and factory farms. Good taquerias appeared in Arkansas and North Carolina, costs at the food producers fell, and profits begat profits.
This system of replacing soil-based agriculture with petroleum-based agriculture has proven to be the most effective mechanism in human history at generating what economists call “wealth”. “Wealth”, in this context, is a measure of how rapidly a society of people can turn unique, essentially irreplaceable organic resources (such as ecosystems, eons-old fossils, and living soil) into short-lived products (such as automobiles, McMansions and hedge funds). In other words, the industrial concept of wealth is a measure of how effectively we break the sustainable processes of life and propel them into entropy. Our modern food production system, which has as its very essence the destruction of the cycle of life, has created wealth like nothing in the previous dreams of mankind.
Viewing the massive riches piled up in the US by this system, societies around the globe have adopted the same model. Rural Chinese flooding into cities to work in factories making cheap junk for overseas clients? That is the picture of a society figuring out how to make it big. The EU, India, every society that is able to do so, partners with multinational corporations and adopts this system, leading off with technology called, without irony, the Green Revolution.
This process — displacing people from the land, and putting them to work, by their own volition, for the corporate State, generating practically infinite wealth for its trustees — can continue indefinitely, as long as copious amounts of fossil fuel and water are available. Which means that, as supplies of easily-obtained petroleum dwindle, our stewards will take ever-more extreme steps to obtain to what remains. Whether it’s extracting oil from tar sands in Canada, deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, or overseas military adventures, no step is too extreme for a machine that will collapse, taking down the whole of our civil structure, if it is not fed enough oil.
Some societies with more oil than military strength see this kabuki playing out, and look for radical alternatives to the obvious endgame in which they become a vassal state to a technological power such as the US or China (cf. Hugo Chávez and nuclear Iran). Others (Mexico, Saudi Arabia) accept their fate, and sell themselves to the system, providing their upper classes entry into the global elite.
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So what happens now? Obviously, while global populations continue to explode, access to new oil is getting more difficult, as witnessed by the recent events in the Gulf of Mexico. If our current pace continues, at some point the system will collapse, and such a collapse is not likely to be pretty. With neither oil nor soil, food will not grow. The rich will be facing the prospect of poverty, and the poor will be facing starvation. These conditions do not typically lead to blissful relations within a society.
Our best hope, as a culture, to thrive after the breakdown, is that we progress enough in dismantling the system beforehand, that we may have partial shelter from the storm.
This shelter will be found in older, more sustainable, ways of living, and all around us people are becoming, ever-so-slowly, more conscious of the possibilities. The people you hear of and see who are taking the time to develop urban gardens and polycultural farms, to make things by hand, to preserve and pickle and cure their food, to ride bicycles — these are people who are providing hope and humanity for the future. Their choices and suggestions are a ray of sunlight peeking through a sky of deep, gray, tar.
Jay, have you read The Windup Girl?
It’s a sci-fi book set in a 22nd century dystopia where Global Warming has raised the levels of world’s oceans, carbon fuel sources have become depleted, and manually wound springs are the ubiquitous energy storage devices. Biotechnology is dominant and mega corporations like AgriGen, PurCal and RedStar (called calorie companies) control food production through ‘genehacked’ seeds, and use bioterrorism, private armies and economic hitmen to create markets for their products. Frequent catastrophes, caused by faulty genetically modified crops and mutant pests, ravage populations of whole countries. The natural genetic stock of agricultural plants has been nearly completely supplanted. Only one secret seedbank in Thailand holds the last specimens of natural flora. Calorie companies are eager to have access to this fresh source of genetic wealth.
It’s really good.
More people must read this. Regardless of if it plays out like this or not; the reformation of our society is mandatory if we can even hope for a better world for our children. If not, God forgive us all.
Wow. Bleak outlook, beautifully incisive writing. Do you have your book deal yet?
Researching health and nutrition, and where my food comes from over the past few months have led me buy as much locally produced food as I can get my hands on. And since there is no real nutritional value to wheat and corn, I choose not to eat any food with those ingredients, and my stomach is much happier for it. I think buying locally and engaging in a Paleo/Primal diet is the way for our civilization to go. We didn’t evolve to eat all of these grains and legumes, so it is funny that it is making up most of our diet these days.
For anyone interested in following up in more detail the destruction caused by monoculture large scale agriculture, read The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. She also explains why we need meat in our diet although not the feedlot product.
Do you have lists of urban gardens in our area? I would LOVE to participate.
Thanks for the reminder Jay. Time to redouble our collective efforts.
Jessica,
Check out Seeds at City (http://www.sandiegoroots.org/seeds-at-city/)
…or come by The Farm Proper tomorrow (http://setanddrift.org/news/2010/07/11/july-12-meetup-at-the-farm-proper/)
The End of Food by Paul Roberts has an interesting chapter that plays the tape to the end, so to speak, as regards this inevitable system failure (though I think he predicts we will run out of water before we run out of oil) … It’s a bleak forecast that replaces your okra-pickling, community gardening bicyclists with nuclear winter. Let’s hope your vision prevails, Jay.
That said, I’ve found it neither difficult nor expensive to sidestep The Grid here in San Diego, buying only local produce for 2 years thanks to my CSA, and in the past few months I’ve started getting natural, locally and independently ranched meat and eggs, too. I cook more and therefore actually wind up spending less total money on food than I did before, even though that was never my goal.
I love you guys, I live and work up in portland OR, My sisters live in SD and everytime i am in town I visit the linkery. Let me know if you are ever hiring for a Sous Chef!!!!
Garret