I’m deep into Deep Economy — how come nobody told me about this book before? (Or maybe, how come I didn’t listen?) In it, Bill McKibben expresses and crystallizes so much of what we know to be true, and what animates us here at the Link. Not just about food but about the promise of real communities and local economies.
That said, he’s also great when he’s writing about food and the food system. I wish I had this passage on the tip of my brain:
The deepest problem that local-food efforts face, however, is that we’ve gotten used to paying so little for food. It may be expensive in terms of how much oil it requires, and how much greenhouse gas it pours into the atmosphere, and how much tax subsidy it receives, and how much damage it does to local communities, and how many migrant workers it maims, and how much sewage it piles up, and how many miles of highway it requires — but boy, when you pull your cart up to the register, it’s pretty cheap. In the 1930s a family might have spent a third of its income on food, middle-class Americans now spend more like a tenth. Even in Italy, one recent study found residents spending more on cell-phone service than on food shopping. And food is cheap not just in terms of money, but in time. Mostly we eat processed food; cooking is something that happens on the Food Network. In fact, fresh-food sales fall every year; per capita consumption of eggs, milk, fresh vegetables, and wheat flour was far higher in 1950 than a generation later. Our food is cheap, fast, and easy.
The problem is what that cheap, fast, easy food doesn’t deliver. We get all the calories we need (and more that we don’t) but our money doesn’t bring us much in the way of satisfaction….A chicken that has never stood up in its entire short life won’t taste like much, nor will a salmon reared in a cramped pen and fed food coloring to turn it pink. The supermarket crammed with its thousands of brightly packaged offerings is a mirage: if you could wave a want and break everything down into its constituent ingredients, a pool of high-fructose corn syrup would fill half the store. Real food really does taste better; that’s why, say, the Slow Food movement, which started in Italy and spread around the world, has grown so rapidly.
McKibben goes on to show how, in both price and the spending habits of people from different background, the idea that better-tasting food is reserved for yuppies “is simply wrong.”
The book’s full title is Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and you can find it at your neighborhood independent bookstore.