The Politics of Food Production and Consumption

Part I: The Politics of Food Production and Consumption

This blog post will be apart of a three part series called “What’s Eating Malik? (a spin off of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) where I will delve into a set of very important topics that have been troubling me lately. Here are the topics:

• Part I: The Politics of Food Production and Consumption (food and capitalism)
• Part II: What is the true cost of music? (education or entertainment)
• Part III: Why are our relationships so disastrous? (the human cost of ignorance)

So here goes Part I….there are 3 pieces of media/journalism that have truly transformed my awareness of the environment and my food eating habits. Animal slaughter videos from Peta.org, The Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan.

I just recently finished reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma which delves into the history of how fruits, vegetables have been produced, how animals are currently slaughtered and the politics behind food production. While reading this book I took down over 2 dozen interesting “factoids”. I won’t delve into ever single one, but I’ll throw out a couple.

How Super sizing was created, pg 105, 106

Kroc remained skeptical, so Wallerstein went looking for proof. He began staking out McDonald’s outlets in and around Chicago, observing how people ate. He saw customers noisily draining their sodas, and digging infinitesimal bits of salt and burnt spud out of their little bags of French fries. After Wallerstein presented his findings, Kroc released and approved supersized portions, and the dramatic spike in sales confirmed the marketer’s hunch. Deep cultural taboos against gluttony—one of the seven deadly sins, after all—had been holding us back. Wallerstein’s dubious achievement was to devise the dietary equivalent of a papal dispensation: Supersize it! He had discovered the secret to expanding the (supposedly) fixed human stomach

The taboo of “going back for seconds” was transformed into putting the second serving in one purchase. Super-sizing has been around for the last 20 years, and it has clearly shown its contributing impact on the growing waistline of America.

Marketing and shifting food eating patterns, pg 301, 302

The success of food marketers in exploiting shifting eating patterns and nutritional fashions has a steep cost. Getting us to change how we eat over and over again tens to undermine the various social structures that surround and steady our eating, institutions like the family dinner, for example, or taboos on snacking between meals and eating alone. In their relentless pursuit of new markets, food companies (with some crucial help from the microwave oven, which made “cooking” something even small children could do) have broken Mom’s hold over the American menu by marketing to every conceivable demographic—and especially to children.

A vice president of marketing at General Mills once painted for me a picture of the state of the American family dinner, courtesy of video cameras that the company’s consulting anthropologists paid families to let them install in the ceiling above the kitchen and dining room tables. Mom, perhaps feeling sentimental about the dinners of her childhood, still prepares a dish and a salad that she usually winds up eating by herself. Meanwhile, the kids, and Dad, too, if he’s around, each fix something different for themselves, because Dad’s on a low-carb diet, the teenager’s become a vegetarian, and the eight-year old is on a strict ration of pizza that the shrink says it’s best to indulge (lest she develop eating disorders later on in life). So over the course of a half hour or so each family member roams into the kitchen, removes a singe-portion entrée from the freezer, and zaps it in the microwave. (Many of these entrees have been helpfully designed to be safely cooked by an eight year-old.) After the sound of the beep each diner brings his microwaveable dish to the dining room table, where he or she may or may not cross paths with another family member at the table for a few minutes. Families who eat this way are among the 47 percent of Americans who report to pollsters that they still sit down to a family meal every night.

Another world changing figure is Fritz Haber. Donned as the “Father of Chemical Warfare” this man is responsible for food production (fertilizer, Haber-Bosch process) and the creation of the chemical Zyclon-B, the gas used in Hitler’s concentration camp. The Haber-Bosch process was a milestone in industrial chemistry, because it divorced the production of nitrogen products, such as fertilizer, explosives and chemical feedstocks, from natural deposits, especially sodium nitrate (caliche), of which Chile was a major (and almost only) producer. The sudden availability of cheap nitrogenous fertilizer is credited with averting a Malthusian catastrophe, or population crisis. (Wiki)

So what does Fritz Haber’s fixing nitrogen and how super-sizing was created have to do with each other? Well..actually…nothing. There just two pieces of random information but what is more important, is understanding how our food is created and why we eat the way we do. How many of you know the organic “pasture rule” by the USDA basically states that as long as an animal “has access to a pasture”, a farmer has the right to label their product organic. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to give an animal access to a pasture. The USDA has yet to provide the specific minimum grazing standards. Obviously this would give non-organic producing farms a huge loophole in getting the organic label, hence putting pressure on certified organic food producers. That’s like me owning an apartment and stating to my residents that we have “running water” but when you go to the apartment I have a bucket of water outside of your door.

The government gives huge subsidies to non-organic producing farmers which is why organic food tends to be more expensive. The food in the supermarket is riddled with pesticides, our meat pumped with hormones, not to mention the further synthetic nature of how or food is created. As a nation, we eat way too much meat, fried food, sugary foods, very little fruits and vegetables. By just changing our food habits we could change the environment dramatically, our health, and, yes our carbon footprint. If you want to know how, read the book.

1. Seek out reputable organic farmers in your area. The more food you buy from them, the less money your local supermarket will make, hence driving down the price that the small farmer will charge. That will put more pressure on the supermarkets to buy more certified organic fruits and vegetables. You don’t have to start with everything. Just start with one or a couple food items like tomatoes or bananas. Trust me, when the supermarket realizes that no one is buying their fruit and vegetables, they will catch on. Obviously this applies if you can afford it, but it’s not as expensive as you think. Here is a great website: Local Harvest; http://www.localharvest.org/ which allows you to search local farmers by zipcode.
2. Frequent the Organic Gardening website, http://www.organicgardening.com or subscribe to their magazine. They have a lot of information that will show you how to grow your own food garden.
3. >Grow your own food. This is already happening in many major cities. Check out this site: http://www.urbanfarming.org/ and contact them for more information. Or check out this site: http://www.verdant.net/food.htm I’m actually considering creating a hydroponics food and vegetable garden with a couple of friends. I’m researching the costs.

I really hate using this term, but “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and neither will our dependence on infected food. A little bit here and there, will eventually become a movement and we can send a message to the USDA, supermarkets, and our family that we are serious about our health and organic food can become the norm, instead of the exception. For the record I’m not against capitalism, but I’m against division of labor practices that undermine the health of the public. There must be accountability and responsibility in how our food is produced.

1. The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism: 20th Anniversary Edition by Daniel Bell
2. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
3. Rozin, Paul. “The Selection of Foods by Rats, Humans, and Other Animals.” In Advances in the Study of Behavior, edited by J. S. Rosenblatt, R. A. Hinde, E. Shaw, and C. Beer. Vol. 6. New York: Academic Press, 1976. Description of specific hungers.
4. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
5. Citizen-Activist’s Anti-Consumerism Website http://www.verdant.net/
6. Locally Grown food delivery service in San Fran http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/dining/22local.html
7. Future of Food: http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/380.html