What we eat

Several of the books I’ve read recently had to do with food production and/or eating locally: The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan; Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon; and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. Needless to say, it’s got me to thinking about quite a bit.

I started with The Omnivore’s Dilemma (and admittedly haven’t finished it quite yet), which I think was a good place to start. Pollan begins by looking at industrial farming, and the massive changes that have not only changed the fundamental workings of farming but of how and what we eat on a daily basis. Even being from Iowa, I had never fully understood the implications of industrial farming, whether for the farmer or myself. I was aware enough to understand many of the dangers, and paid attention to the many things I heard about the loss of family farms and flocking of young people from rural areas to urban areas (me being one of those young people). He then moves through the process of production for other foods, including spending a week on a farm that is basically completely self-contained. The farmer uses no chemicals or outside agents, and instead has created an incredibly intricate web of interdependence between human, animal, and crop. It’s too complex to get into here, but I was blown away by his ability to produce a sizeable amount of food in this manner.

I moved onto Plenty (mostly because I own OD and this was a library book), which was written by a couple who live in Vancouver and undertook the mission of only eating food that was grown within 100 miles of their home for a year. While I found the tone of the book to be somewhat pretentious (I can’t really figure out why, I just did), it was really interesting to read about their experiences- struggles and joys- of trying to stick with their goal. They learned a lot about the history of food production in their geographic area, and along the way learned about the devestating impact of environmental hazards on local food production. Apparently this book has set off a movement known as “The 100-mile-diet”.

The most recent of my reads (and my favorite so far) is Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and chronicles her family’s attempt to eat locally for a year. I love her style of writing- The Poisonwood Bible has a solid place on my top 5 favorite books list- and I found her book to be much less pretentious than Plenty, even though most of the food her family ate was grown on their 40-acre farm. She references the Vancouver couple in her book, as they had apparently started their year just previous to her family starting theirs. If I had to choose between the two, I would recommend this book over Plenty, although I would really recommend reading both.

Both Plenty and AMV point to the same statistic as one of the main reasons for their goals: most food, including produce, at your local grocery store travels an average of 1500 miles to get there. This statistic bundles together a host of issues: the cost- in dollars and in damage to the environment- of oil for the transportation, fair trade, the loss of the family farm in the U.S., and our society’s collective loss of identity with our food, just to name a few.

This last issue was the one that hit me more prominently than the others, probably because it was the one I had thought about the least previous to my encounters with these books. In the U.S., we rarely know where our food comes from. We know what grocery store we bought it at, but beyond that and reading the packaging to see where the company that produced it is located, we don’t know anything about how the food was produced or the people who produced it- or the policies that regulate the growth, transportation, and sale of those items. We don’t know what vegetables grow in what seasons, or what crops are best for growth in our region of the country. Sure, those of us who garden may have some knowledge of this, or those of us who visit farmers markets regularly enough to know what is being sold there during what time of the year. But in general, we have become incredibly disconnected from our food for the sake of convenience. Don’t even get me started on the stuff they inject into cows that end up in meat- let’s just say I’m glad I haven’t eaten red meat in about 8 years.

When I started reading OD, it was right at the time when a lot was starting to come out about the Farm Bill that’s now making its way through the U.S. Senate. I started looking into it a little more at a time, and while it’s an extremely complicated bill, one thing is starkly clear- it affects ALL of us. Yes, you- even if you live in a city and have never set foot on a working farm. One of the most excessive ways this happens is in the production of corn. Pollan chronicles the changes in farming policy over the past 80 years or so (the first version of the Farm Bill came up during the Great Depression in order to assist farming families who were loosing their livelihoods), and talks about the impact of the Farm Bill on what gets produced in our country. There are five crops that are the most heavily subsidized in the U.S., and of those corn is #1. Because farmers got paid to produce corn, they produced it. Then we started having too much of it and needed other ways to use it, so we started feeding it to cows and other animals intended for meat production. These are animals who are not created to live on corn- they’re supposed to eat grasses. And then we started turning corn into, well, everything…sodas, Twinkies, lots and lots of food that tastes good but is horrible for us. In the meantime, fruits and vegetables receive NO subsidies…yes, that’s right, NONE. So the USDA puts out food charts that tell us how many servings of fruits and vegetables to eat, and that we should keep our intake of saturated fats to a minimum, and then they support a Farm Bill every five years that rewards the production of foods that have little nutritional value. Should we stop producing corn? In the name of Iowa, no! BUT, there needs to be some serious consideration of the direct impact our policies have on what we put into our bodies on a daily basis.

There are so many other things that are a part of the Farm Bill that we need to be aware of- a lack of funding for locally produced foods, funding for Food Stamps, support for local farmers markets. The House Democrats lowered the ceiling for the amount a farm could take in and still receive subsidies from $2.5 million to $1 million…which is great until you find out that the Bush administration wanted it capped at $200,000 (who would have ever thought I’d side with the Bush administration on something?). Your Senators need to hear from you…if you want reference material, check out the Oxfam website, or for a faith-based perspective, visit Bread for the World or the ELCA Advocacy website.

If you want some resources on how you can start eating more locally and support family-owned operations (many of which are organic), the USDA has a website listing farmers markets all across the country, and this website has a ton of options for people who are looking for locally grown/produced food. I’m really excited about this place that’s just about a mile from my house that delivers produce, meats, and dairy that come primarily from within 200 miles of Chicago…now if I would just find out if I’m being offered this job in Madison, I would know if I should sign up or not…