“To be a centrist when it comes to food is, unfortunately, to be a radical,”
writes James McWilliams in his recent book Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (5). With the onset of many sensationalized and polarized media reports and books on food issues, McWilliams does seem to have a good point. Beginning in the early 1970’s, food surfaced on the map as a political issue as several activists began bringing to light the misdemeanors of industrialized agriculture. Since then, mainstream media sources have increasingly advocated for the use of organic and local products. Unfortunately, the very forces which organic and local farming originally intended to combat — huge agricultural entities — have adopted such labels on their products as a marketing niche. Now with each purchase we make we buy into a particular ideology, whether consciously or unconsciously, and thus another layer of complication has been added onto making food choices. Organic and local can no longer be taken at face value and must necessarily be engaged with critically. In order to cut through the recent dogmas that have developed, McWilliams implores us to go past our preconceived notions of organic/local farming versus more conventional farming and find a happy medium between the two. However, being a “centrist” can mean a variety of things, depending on which issues we put up on the continuum of extremes, and there are quite a few, such as environmental sustainability, farmer rights, worker rights, economic growth, anti-globalization, animal rights, and health concerns. For McWilliams, environmental issues take the limelight as his main agenda, in particular scaling a sustainable food system to a global level. Yet for others, different factors weigh in more heavily, such as developing local economic autonomy, compensating workers fairly, as well as revitalizing a healthy connection between human beings and their food sources. Sandor Katz, author of The Revolution Will Not Be Microwave: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements, feels more strongly about such issues than thinking globally. This paper will summarize, compare, and contrast the viewpoints of McWilliams and Katz, and then argue that in the immediate future it will be more important for us to trend towards developing localized and organic food systems before embarking upon larger systems of global scale, because operating in reverse would be complicated by the existing clutter of agribusiness interests.
A no-nonsense realist who spent several years as a “locavore” himself, James McWilliams teaches history at Texas State University–San Marcos, and specializes in environmental history. He brings a refreshing amount of critical thinking and scepticism into the food conversation, and implores us to go deeper past the terms “organic” vs. “conventional” and “local” vs. “global.” In his book, Just Food, McWilliams critiques both local farming and organic farming, two approaches (often done together, but not always) which have more limitations than meet the surface. He feels compelled to design global systems in order to accommodate the predicted population of 10 billion by 2050. He sees farming itself as essentially representative of a battle with nature, and implores us to strive for minimizing environmental damage, rather than pretend to eliminate it or believe in the possibility of harmonizing with nature. In terms of organic farming, this means using well-designed chemicals where appropriate, such as in situations where they would prevent more damage in the long run, and thinking of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) as simply the next step in the long history of humans manipulating nature for their benefit. McWilliams also criticizes the local movement in that it expects people of all places to eat seasonally and only food produced within a certain radius; this would be such a drastic dietary change for some that he simply cannot see it happening.
Sandra Katz, on the other hand, takes a different approach to the food movement. Although a classic proponent of local and organic farming — the very approaches McWilliams critiques — she does so for reasons other than environmental efficiency. Katz practices organic gardening as a hobby at her home in Short Mountain Sanctuary, a communal living space for queer people. She does not trust the calls for us to “feed the world,” and writes that thinking of food in terms of feeding millions or billions of people renders it far too abstract and impersonal. Food production on such a scale is the province of experts, specialists, and people with accumulated capital–that is, capitalists. They promote the lie that without their expertise and technology, there would not be enough food for everybody (3). For Katz, local food production can solve all the issues that global corporate agriculture firms would like to solve for us. The reasons she lists for ending big agribusiness include the artificial food predictability produced by it across location and season, the loss of community, and the upheaval of local economic power. Food miles and going local are not just about reducing carbon emissions for her, they are about building a connection with one’s food supply, ending unnecessary middlemen and processing intermediaries, getting fresher food (nutrients diminish when food ships for longs periods of time), and making sure farm workers get compensated fairly. She pairs up local and seasonal food versus the “constant convenience consumerism” which agribusiness generates, arguing that the ability to get the same goods anytime, anywhere has caused us to be disconnected from the land we live on and the natural flow of the seasons. She encourages us to “bring food production back to the earth, making it production we can see and be part of, production based in the community and sustaining the community” (10). Katz feels that organic farming represents a movement towards a more holistic and connected form of working with the land to produce food.
Katz and McWilliams both clearly care profoundly about our food systems and the ways that they affect our lives and our environment and are passionate about creating positive change. Within both of their accounts lies a general plea for consumers to become more educated and aware about the decisions they are making. Both of them also acknowledge other points of view and do not come off as being stuck to a single frame of reference. There are several points which Katz and McWilliams feel similarly about: ending subsidies which support unsustainable farming practices, forcing farms and corporations to internalize their external environmental costs, and being critical of corporate marketing around local and organic. On these points they agree, but on many they do not, and below these differences and similarities will be fleshed out in the order of environmental, economic, and ethical.
Although both Katz and McWilliams have concerns about the effects of food production on the environment, their underlying difference seems to stem from their ideological underpinnings: Katz sees a need for us to get back to some sort of symbiotic, harmonizing relationship with nature, whereas McWilliams admits this never existed nor will it ever exist. He writes:
This misunderstanding ultimately boils down to the misleading allure of a lost golden age of food production–a golden age of ecological purity, in which the earth was in balance, humans collectively respected the environment, biodiversity flourished, family farms nurtured morality, and ecological harmony prevailed. Thing is, there was no golden age…For over 10,000 years humans have systematically manipulated nature to our advantage by making plants and animals do our bidding. I honestly don’t believe this basic relationship will change (6).
McWilliams thereby feels we should focus on achieving the lesser of evils: minimizing our eco-footprint. This may perhaps illuminate why he has an easier time admitting that we should utilize chemicals at times when no other option is possible. Katz argues that organic should be favored over conventional, chemical-driven agriculture, in that the chemicals used often destroy biodiversity, pollute the land, as well as cause human health problems. While McWilliams does agree that in certain cases organic dramatically reduces pollution, he points out that the chemicals used today are much safer than their pre-1970 counterparts during the beginning of the agricultural Green Revolution (62). He also contends that organic requires 65% – 200% more land to produce the same amount of production output as well as hauling in tons of animal manure from off-site, which in the end may create more pollution than just using conventional fertilizers (57). Identifying lowering “food miles” for the sake of the environment to be the main motivation behind “going local,” McWilliams explains that during comprehensive studies called “life-cycle assessments” (LCAs), which measure total fossil fuel usage during all stages of food production, this motivation has been proven to be ineffective. One study found that transportation accounted for only 11% of all fossil fuels used, while production and processing accounted for 45.6% (25-26). Consequently, he argues we should be focusing on revising our production systems instead of trying to restructure their size and eliminate transportation. McWilliams also feels that the mantra of “go local everywhere,” falls short in places where humans live in which proper food systems would require expensive and damaging reallocation of farming resources, such as in Las Vegas. Like McWilliams, Katz does see problems with efficiency in our system; for example she writes about a trucker friend of hers who ships Idaho potatoes to Maine, and Maine potatoes to Idaho (5). Her solution, however, for this is to scale production down, while McWilliams advocates to keep the scale as is, but rearrange transportation patterns like this to maximize efficiency both from a financial and environmental standpoint.
In terms of the economic factors behind food production, McWilliams feels that we should focus on efficiency and minimizing waste and costs, which he feels can be done best in large production facilities, whereas Katz, although concerned about the environment, expresses a general mistrust of anything beyond the local sphere and feels food systems should scale down to a community level to stimulate the local economy. She argues that traditionally food production created wealth within the immediate community, and today
globalized corporate food follows a long and largely inscrutable chain of transactions, most of which is invisible to the consumer. In this food system, only a tiny proportion of what consumers spend on food at the store goes to the people who grow it (2).
Katz cites that farmers on average only receive 19% of the total money consumers spend on food; by eliminating the middlemen of the processing chain and purchasing food locally, the money spent by consumers goes back to the community and farmers who produced the food, and not to an anonymous profit-driven corporate entity. McWilliams, on the other hand, feels that the loss of middlemen jobs would be detrimental to many people who work in those fields and also that the use of organic methods costs too much for most people. He wants us to find a happy medium which can utilize environmentally friendly methods as much as possible, thereby keeping food cheap enough to feed the expanding human population while maintaining the level of convenience consumers live by today. Katz feels that the cheap prices of food in America made possible by agribusiness have many hidden costs they do not account for, such as environmental damage, unfair farmer compensation, and human health hazards. She comments:
In our consumer culture, we expect food to be extremely cheap. The average proportion of household income that Americans spend on food is under 10 percent, half of what it was fifty years ago…Food is cheap in our country because the people whose labor is involved are paid virtually nothing, and many of food’s true costs are hidden (4).
In this sense, a fair price of food must necessarily be more expensive, and even so may minimize other costs in the long run such as health hazards and long-term environmental damage.
Besides the environmental and economic issues surrounding food, the ethical dimensions also remain equally important to consider: community ties surrounding food and personal connections to the land. Katz feels that industrial agriculture has given us efficiency and low cost, but at great expense: “This industrial-scale global trade system requires uniformity and standardization. We sacrifice quirks of flavor, texture, nutrition, biodiversity, and the specificity of local culture in exchange for convenience, predictability, and a plethora of empty choices” (16). She sees the rise of farmers markets, urban farms, and CSAs (community supported agriculture), as evidence that people desire to take back what industrial agriculture has taken from us. McWilliams’ reasons for scaling production tend to miss out on the more intangible benefits of local food production. Katz feels that participating in farming, though difficult for the busy and overworked people of America, has a contemplative and relaxing benefit to it. On the other hand, McWilliams seems to not have faith in people to want to make good lifestyle decisions for their food and so aims to work on a structural level to ensure agricultural firms follow environmentally friendly practices. Katz argues against using a system of standardization to prevent exploitation by big business. She feels that the USDA’s attempt to “standardize” organic food with their labeling system can be eliminated simply by removing the separation between farmer and consumer, and developing trusting relationships in which consumers can find out for themselves the methods farmers use. She associates going local with bringing back power to ourselves, and making food about health instead of business: “In order to eat well and live healthy lives, we must revive and encourage food production in every local community, not further abdicate it to huge economic entities that are driven by profit rather than our well-being” (3). In this sense, organic and local can remain about community and having a good relationship with the land, instead of getting wrapped up in political labels which corporations can exploit.
McWilliams’ Just Food stands as an important reminder to value compromise and to not get stuck in extremism. However, his assumption that we must support a human population which will live the same lifestyle as we currently do, presupposes that the earth can even support this. Many climate scientists already feel we have breached this barrier, and thus we would be getting even worse come 2050. Following this, we should not be giving people a green light to continue living as they are, but rather implore people to change their habits, or face the consequences. On similar grounds, it seems that it would be jumping the gun to try and create global systems of sustainable agriculture when there are so many profit interests mixed into the big systems at this time. We should work on getting it right on a small scale before even thinking about moving into a larger scale, if at all. Environmental sustainability involves having some sort of relationship with the land, romantic or not, and this should start with the land that is right before us: we do not need a company or a government to walk us through this process. The latter sort of mentality would likely continue to produce the addiction to convenience and unnatural cross-seasonal predictability which Katz critiques. Despite the benefits of sticking to small scale, McWilliams may have it right when it comes to GMOs and chemically-supported agriculture, if such methods can minimize the harm done to the environment overall. In the meantime, we should also focus on increasing transparency within existing big food producers, and developing laws which force them to pay for their external costs. As McWilliams puts it:
If food producers were required to pay for the negative environmental effects they create, and if this were accompanied by the elimination of perverse subsidies, the landscape of food production would be transformed. Under their own economic logic, corporations would have to adapt and innovate to produce goods in a way that minimizes or reverses damage to the environment (200).
This sort of step Katz and McWilliams could both agree on. The benefits of these laws would be quite extensive, and may even illuminate whether scalable solutions could be possible or not.
With looming issues of overpopulation, climate change, and economic unrest hanging over the heads of government leaders worldwide, the chaos of our time may culminate in a ripe new space in which new ideologies can replace old ones. Thanks to the many food and environmental activists and writers including McWilliams and Katz, food production and sustainability have been pushed into the public political awareness. The generation of youth and college students who are growing up in the midst of these issues will ultimately face the challenge of building new ideologies that reflect their state of consciousness. When it comes to food, hopefully we will go beyond the face value of organic vs. conventional and make smart decisions according to the unique challenges presented to us, and also value both the importance of local economic autonomy as well as the benefits of trading food goods with other places beyond the local sphere.
