World-renowned chef, restaurateur and author Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, famous for its great locally grown organic food, calls the mission to transform the way we eat in America The Delicious Revolution. Her term rises triumphantly like a banner from the intellectual bouillabaisse of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, an Italian-born campaign dedicated to the idea that “a firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of FAST LIFE.” Launched in 1986 with a protest against McDonald’s in Rome, Italy, Slow Food has grown into a worldwide effort to resist industrialized food culture and its dire health consequences. “It’s public face,” writes Albert Sonnenfeld in his introduction to Petrini’s wonderful little book, Slow Food, The Case for Taste, “has become that of a primarily educational organization, which realizes that food consumption cannot be divorced from issues of food production and distribution.”
Paradoxically, Slow Food has moved fast in communicating this message to the public, which is reflected in the rapid growth of local alternative food networks organized at the grass-roots level in the form of cooperatives, revitalized small family farms, and a proliferation of farmers’ markets, the later growing by leaps and bounds since the turn of the millennium. The entire arising seems to be a spontaneous yet concerted quest to fulfill Petrini’s proposal for a new model of agriculture, one that eschews the current order of unhealthy fast food dominated by the likes of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut and seeks to raise awareness of the benefits of traditional foods produced and distributed with an eye on biodiversity and sustainability. As Petrini characterizes the movement, the basic idea “is our conviction that alimentation is an essential part of life and the quality of life is therefore inevitably linked to the pleasure of eating in healthy, flavorful, and varied ways.” The Slow Food Movement, according to Petrini, aims “at gaining and spreading knowledge about material culture, preserving our agricultural alimentary heritage from environmental degradation; protecting the consumer and the honest producer, and researching and promoting the pleasures of gastronomy and conviviality.”
Local organic farms, community supported agriculture networks, natural food cooperatives, small family restaurants and neighborhood farmers’ markets are all powerful agents of change that can, in Petrini’s words, “Stop the fast-food virus and its collateral effects…If deranged habits of nutrition and fraudulently labeled foodstuffs threaten our health, then let’s rediscover the well-being that comes from healthy food; if the invasion of agriculture by the chemical industry and senseless management of land are menacing the environment, Slow Food supports growing methods that respect Nature.”
The motivations for the food choices we make are complex,” writes Harry Eyres in one of his memorable Financial Times columns The Slow Lane, and may go way beyond “lifestyle” or personal health concerns. Also included in the mix may be the desire to be part of a “virtuous” food production/consumption cycle, rather than a “vicious” one. “There is nothing more fundamental to our lives than food,” according to Eyres, “and we want the way we eat to be part of a virtuous sustainable order. Cattle fed with corn and pumped full of antibiotics, fields spread more often than that lamp-post you pass when you walk your dog, chickens crammed together, unable to graze and peck and dust-bathe, over-fished oceans—that is to say, the whole panoply of intensive industrial agriculture and fishing—no longer seems to constitute such an order.”
An Amish farmer in Pennsylvania establishing a “virtuous sustainable order” in harmony with nature.
The industrialization of agriculture, goaded by Globalism’s phony mantra of efficiency at the expense of a fragile environment, is now driving the ruination of biological and genetic diversity via petrochemical, monoculture farming techniques and in the process, creating the conditions for ecological catastrophe. According to The Food and Agriculture Organization, 75 percent of genetic diversity in agriculture has been lost during the past century. The metaphor for this carnage is warfare against nature, and the marketing message emanating from the propaganda mills of the pesticide and herbicide manufacturers is that to be successful a farmer must declare all-out war on the land with synthetic chemical weapons. Instead of promoting ecological farming methods, the corporate megaliths, in order to boost shareholder value, have established an adversarial relationship with the land—a state of perpetual war in a posture akin to the bellicose attitude the American empire now projects to the world at large.
In addition to the loss of more than half of the nation’s precious top soil over the past 50 years, the casualties of chemical pollution also include people. According to a 1998 government study over a million American children consume unsafe amounts of organophosphates from pesticide residues on food every single day. The Millennium Ecosystems Assessment recently concluded that industrial-scale agriculture is the “largest threat to biodiversity and ecosystem function of any single human activity.” As the world’s biggest user and exporter of pesticides, it’s not surprising that the US is also the planet’s primary armaments producer. Global agribusiness policies generated by American agribusiness have created an evil production and distribution system based on inhumane animal factories and unsustainable petrochemical, soil-eroding, mono-crop methods that have made food security a major survival issue. In the United States, factory farming accounts for over 70 percent of water contamination, primarily from pesticides, most of which miss their intended targets and end up poisoning the soil, water and fish. Forty percent of all US waters are unfit for swimming and fishing because of these fossil-fuel based agribusiness practices. Worldwide, forty percent of productive soils are seriously degraded and almost one-third of all farm land has been lost to erosion since 1960 and continues to be lost at the rate of twenty-five million acres per year.
Measured by the standards of what organic farmer/writer and activist Wendell Berry calls “good farming,” modern agribusiness is a disaster. “We agrarians are involved in a hard, long, momentous contest,” he writes, “in which we are so far, and by a considerable margin, the losers. What we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense, and fundamental decency—the high and indispensable art—for which we probably can find no better name than ‘good farming.’ I mean farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.”
Inspired by Berry’s agrarian principles, a growing number of small producers are in revolt against the forces of global monoculture and are intent on creating healthy alternatives to the ruinous industrial farming practices of the corporate multinationals. The antithesis of the get-big-or-get-out agribusiness brigade set loose on the land in the 1970s by Richard Nixon’s racist Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, the new breed of organic farmers are intent on employing methods that are ecologically and economically responsible, inspired by ideas in alignment with Berry’s agrarian “countervailing measure” to the industrial paradigm, a model that stresses the primacy of the family farm. “An agrarian economy,” writes Berry, “rises up from the fields, woods, and streams—from the complex of soils, slopes, weather, connections, influences, and exchanges that we mean when we speak, for example, of the local community or the local watershed…[Agrarianism] is a way of thought based on land and begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking, good eating and gratitude to God.”
Unfortunately, factory farms are the dominant players in the food business today and as Berry says, they’re winning their war to destroy the agrarian model. It’s now gotten to the point where just about everything we eat in the USA today is messed with in one way or another by some evil, transnational corporation, especially those fat mega-burgers carnivorous Americans love to overeat. Once integrated into the natural patterns of farm life, most of the cattle slaughtered in this country are fattened for market while confined in ultra-controlled environments in which every element of their lives—from the chow they ingest to their sleep cycles—is geared to maximize profit for the factory farmers who abuse them. Cows are routinely confined in pens or cubicles, forced to stand for months on end without exercise in their own feces, fed poisonous chemicals, and denied the health benefits of the great outdoors. Given the conditions they must endure, it’s no wonder these animals make for some mighty unhealthy burgers.
A 2008 Pew Commission report on Confined Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFOs) concluded that these factory farm enterprises present “an unacceptable level of risk to public health and damage to the environment as well as unnecessary harm to the animals we raise for food.” When cattle are confined in tightly controlled feed lots, the potential for disease outbreaks increases dramatically, which necessitates the use of hormones and antibiotics. More than half of the 25,000 tons of antibiotics produced in the US every year are used to treat animals raised for human consumption. The massive overuse of drugs has fostered resistance to some strains of bacteria, an alarming problem that the US Centers for Disease Control blames on “the heavy use of antibiotics in animals.” Cows that are free to graze in organically maintained pastures, by contrast, enjoy a more varied diet, get a lot more exercise and are able to build natural resistance to harmful pathogens lurking in the CAFOs. Free-range livestock also actively forage for medicinal plants on their own, which helps increase their resistance to illness. The burgers are better when the cows are free of feedlot hormones, steroids and chemical-saturated grains. Grass-fed beef also has more beneficial omega-3 fatty acids, the good dietary fats that promote heart health.
In America there are more than 200,000 CAFOs now operating where animals are raised for slaughter in horrific conditions. In addition to the cruelty to livestock, CAFOs produce huge amounts of untreated waste which pollutes air and water systems with hazardous chemicals, noxious gases, disease-causing pathogens, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, growth hormones and numerous other dangerous pollutants. Ideally, a Whole Foods, plant-based diet will eventually be the basis for reversing the damage inflicted by industrial animal agriculture and a catalyst for creating a new food future, one that’s ecologically balanced and sustainable. A plethora of extensive peer-reviewed studies indicate that limiting or better yet, eliminating the consumption of animals products in the diet would, in addition to ending the travesty of CAFOs, greatly improve the health of the planet and all of its inhabitants. Agriculture is a healthier proposition all around when it’s based on the common welfare instead of the impersonal, profit-driven demands of corporate agribusiness monoliths. We all want and need safe, healthy sources of protein, but we can no longer depend on the agribusiness system in place now to provide it. Only by raising beef and other animals naturally and by localizing the scale of our food production and distribution networks can we be sure that the products we eat are free of growth hormones, antibiotics and dangerous, genetically altered ingredients.
The petrochemical assault on plant crops is also a major threat to human health, a practice that evolved from America’s insecticide development programs during World War Two. The most famous of the chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides that emerged from that era is DDT, now banned, but quickly replaced by equally lethal organophosphate insecticides derived from nerve gas research development during the war. Well-known examples from this class of toxic chemicals still used widely in agriculture include 2,4-D, which was combined with 2,4,5-T to make Agent Orange, the highly carcinogenic herbicide used to defoliate forests in Vietnam. All of this chemical alteration of farming practices coincided with the propaganda disseminated by the post-war agricultural press claiming conveying the message that small, family-run farms were old fashioned and that farmers who wanted to succeed should operate their enterprises like factories. The result has been the loss of millions of family farms since the end of World War Two and the rise of huge, highly mechanized monoculture operations which have proven to be egregiously out of sync with the values of community, land stewardship, and sustainability. The industrial paradigm in place has waged it chemical war on nature for more than a generation and in the process laid the foundation for the “insect armageddon” recently documented by scientists. According to Patricia Hynes in her 1989 book Recurring Silent Spring, when Rachel Carson’s famous indictment of chemical agriculture Silent Spring appeared in 1962 there were 137 insects proven to be resistant to pesticides; today there are more than 500. In addition, after more than 50 years of “war,” the percentage of crops destroyed by insects has more than doubled!
Synthetic fertilizers are another weapon farmers deployed in earnest after World War Two, but that strategy has proved problematical as well. For one thing, synthetic fertilizers are not very efficient. Petrochemical inputs ignore the importance of the natural cycling of nutrients over time that promotes soil health and longtime fertility which reduces the soil’s resistance to soil borne diseases. Some fertilizers also increase soil acidity and most leach quickly, stimulating downstream pollution. High-input petroleum-based fertilizers, as well as pesticides, increase soil erosion, promote soil defamation, low-nutrient food harvests, soils salivation and a myriad of human health problems, all sufficient reasons to adopt organic farming methods that raise fertility, conserve soil resources and eliminate petrochemical hazards to farm workers, wildlife and consumers.
The infamous Dust Bowl catastrophe in the 1930s initially raised awareness of the value of healthy soil and congress now taxes all Americans to subsidize soil conservation programs, yet despite these soil-saving measures, topsoil is still being lost to erosion. The agribusiness “quick-fix” solution to soil has been to use petroleum-based fertilizer, a panacea doomed to failure in the long run because of dwindling fossil-fuel resources as well as the lethal effects of fertilizer nitrate residues on natural health-promoting soil organisms. Clearly, to continue such a strategy meets the definition of insanity, i.e., doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We are now at the point where in order to have poison-free food, we must stop using petrochemicals and develop a way of farming that ecologist Wes Jackson calls the “marriage of ecology and agriculture.” If we want healthy, intact soil, rivers and aquifers free of chemical run-off, and animal products uncontaminated by antibiotics and growth hormones, we have to implement a solution that Jackson describes as an agriculture “based on the way nature works.” The goal, in Jackson’s words, is “to arrive at a truly sustainable agriculture,” a task that begins with farming techniques that stop soil erosion and enhance biological diversity.
“In the last 40 years,” writes Jackson, “nearly one-third of the world’s arable land has been lost to soil erosion and continues to be lost at a rate of more than ten million hectares per year. Ninety percent of US cropland is losing soil above replacement rates 17 times faster than formation on average…In the United States we have lost three-quarters of all our agriculture biodiversity over the past 100 years.” Jackson and many others insist that the crisis demands that we say no to corporate control of agriculture before it’s too late and implement organic farming methods that enhance sustainability without synthetic chemical inputs, retain more water and soil nutrients, increase organic matter and beneficial soil microbes, thus preventing erosion in the first place. That means dismantling the unsustainable industrial agriculture model that’s so lethal to humans, livestock, and wildlife, and replacing it with a system of small producers that operated like the prosperous family farms that prevailed before World War Two.
In 1850, 90 percent of Americans lived on farms; by 1950, the number had declined to 37 percent, and today the total stands at about 0.7 percent. In 1930, an average American family spent about 24 percent of its income on food. By 2007, that figure had declined to about ten percent, less than any people in history. The efficiency and huge cost savings prompted the vigorous promotion of industrial agribusiness system, but unfortunately, it has proven to be a way of farming that also carries an unacceptable cost in terms of the well being of the American people and the environment. The threats to health posed by chemically poisoned soil, air and water are the booby prizes that go with the agribusiness factory system. The devastating impact of the industrial model forced on farmers in other countries via international trade pacts is also an ecological travesty, disrupting the web of life, depleting soils and water resources, polluting the air and destroying the livelihoods of small independent farmers everywhere. Repelling the global assault of petrochemical agribusiness is truly a David and Goliath contest, but one that David must win if mankind is to survive.
“The fight against corporate chemical-industrial agriculture, against corporate control of the global food system, against corporate ownership of life, and against corporate control of economic decision making,” writes environmental activist Dave Henson, “is the fight on this planet.”
Kellogg, an industrialized agriculture company and producer of processed foods laden with carcinogenic ingredients, just announced that consumers ( their serfs) should eat their falsely advertised nutritional cereals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The assault and oppression of these billion dollar corporations on vulnerable Americans needs to be stopped.
If only...
I shared this on Facebook, hoping others will be reminded how farms should be run.