What Happened to Good Food?

Thanks to Chicken Little, the Boy Who Cried Wolf and an unending list of recent imitators, it is a tough sell for authors who want to grab attention for the trend they are writing about by forewarning that the end is nigh—for work, science, religion, nature, the atmosphere, capitalism, liberalism, socialism or whatever.

With years of down-home farm experiences in Michigan, Quebec and Ontario to draw on, and with home-style storytelling skills developed as a founding editor of Harrowsmith, veteran agricultural journalist and award-winning environment writer Thomas Pawlick is game to try out the “end-of” thesis on food.

Pawlick tends to use “the end of food” as a literary device, an all-purpose putdown and grab-bag for a host of fiendish farm and food fiascoes, ranging from soil degradation to genetic engineering to mad cow disease. However, he spells out three specific trends that herald an apocalyptic end for food. The declining taste and nutrient value of food form one trend. If this trend were plotted on a chart, he says, one line would depict the sharp decline in the nutritional value of food, while another line would depict a dramatic increase in the toxic additives included in food. The end of food comes at the point where the two lines meet, he says, and food becomes primarily an industrial synthetic that deals in death, not life, with ingredients that feature “a witches’ brew that would make Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, cackling over their cauldron of ‘double, double toil and trouble,’ blanche.”

The second trend relates to the increasing importance of the “corporate, factory-farm food system,” what Pawlick calls—in a great play on the phrase once used to describe the horrors of early industrialism—“dark, satanic barns.” This loss of humanity in agriculture is most gut­wrenching when applied to farm animals, but Pawlick emphasizes that the imposition of mass production mechanics on living beings treats farm families and communities as cruelly as livestock. The dominance of industrialized agriculture has degraded “the art of farming to something akin to an outdoors paint-by-numbers hobby kit, whose products are judged not by consumers, but by corporate accountants cubicled in some distant city high-rise,” he writes.

The third trend rounds out the circle on the end of food; it relates to the way food is increasingly consumed, and the decline of mealtime as an occasion for sharing, celebration and togetherness. “To make the neglect of food a habit, its production a mere conveyor-belt, assembly line routine measured in some corporate ledger book, and the eating of it a peripheral event to be gotten through quickly, is to make it a habit to forget what makes us human,” Pawlick argues.

This end-of-food thesis has the start of an analysis with profound implications for public debate and public policy. In Canada, most government-supported income protection programs for farmers are based on the assumption that food production carries an unusually high burden of risk due to the fact that it is full of vitality, and therefore subject to all the chaotic and unmanageable ups and downs of life and nature. Government-backed crop insurance schemes, for instance, respond to weather events beyond the ability of any person or process to control. Likewise, government-backed “supply management” of dairy and poultry products flows from the realities of dealing with products that so embody live processes that they spoil quickly when cut off from life; as a consequence, conventional free market price bargaining would be unfair and unsafe, since producers would be under enormous pressure to move products fast, before they go bad. And government-funded bailouts, increasingly the main vehicle for delivering public support to agriculture in Canada, are predicated on the assumption that farms exist in living countryside communities that must be sustained. As food becomes more synthetic, and as food production becomes more like manufacturing than growing, the end is nigh for most of Canada’s farm support programs.

The end-of-food argument also has major consequences for food regulations. Contrary to the conventional stereotype, food is not a highly regulated sector of the economy. Transportation, energy, health, culture and education sectors are all more closely watched and managed by public authorities than food is. Consumers are entitled to know more about how their clothes and cars are made—what country the products come from, what materials the product is made of, and how they work and should be cared for, for example—than they are allowed to know about their food; consumers do not even have the right to know if the food they’d like to choose has been genetically engineered or sprayed with pesticides. Advertisers and marketers are given pretty much of a free hand, especially when it comes to advertising junk foods to children and, until recently, using government agencies such as schools and hospitals to promote the sales of nutrient­ robbing foods. The exception to this low level of regulation—and the likely reason most people do not know that due diligence is far from the norm when it comes to public oversight—hovers around a narrow band of food safety issues related to human mishandling of food handling; it is the safety of food, especially as it bears on contagion, that comes in for regulation, not the healthfulness of food to consumers or the larger social or physical environment.

I suspect the reason the food industry gets away with such a low level of government, consumer or self-regulation is that people feel comfortable that more can go right than wrong with food, which is basically both an essential and a good thing in life. Professional dieticians, for instance, commonly argue that “there are no such things as good foods and bad foods,” even though the staples of the North American—coffee, pop, pastries, burgers and french fries, if we care to admit the reality—are mostly harmful to health. All foods have some good in them, and few foods do much harm if eaten in proper proportions, the argument goes, so the individual has to learn to choose well and government does not need to regulate such choices.

Pawlick’s end-of-food thesis greases the skids for another approach to government regulation of the food sector. The case could be made that foods reaching the point in Pawlick’s chart where they are more toxic additive than food essential should be regulated in the same way as other legally manufactured toxins that come off the farm, such as tobacco kiosks, and they should not have fast food courts or junk food vending machines either, this argument would go. We do not allow alcohol or tobacco companies to advertise to youth, and we should not allow food companies to advertise either, the same (sound, in my opinion) logic would run.

I do not think it is an accident that Pawlick does not deal with such implications of his thesis. Some of the individualist and communitarian values associated with the alternative food movement that come out of the 1970s counterculture accidentally parallel the North American regulatory culture surrounding food—namely, the less public and government influence, the better. Pawlick’s inner back-to-the-lander—he did it back in the 1970s during his Harrowsmith days, and plans to write his next book about his next try at low-input farming—is revealed at several points. He refers to politicians as a class as “whores,” a description that no doubt flows from his anti-establishment disgust with “sellouts” of the public interest by politicians, not from a corporate opposition to political meddling in private business. But, aside from the inaccuracy and imbalanced judgement in such a wholesale assessment of politicians, we know from the results of Canada’s 2006 federal election that public fury against political corruption is as likely to feed far-right politics as progressive politics.

Pawlick’s title suggests he will deal with “what you can do about” the end-of-food, which I mistook to mean the same thing as solutions. But he means the “you” in “what you can do about it” literally. What you can do about it is to grow your own, using organic methods and seeds swapped with neighbours, buy from local farmers at farmer’s markets, and get informed, mainly through the internet community—“tune in, find out,” he writes, in a sly send-up of a famous saying from the old hippie drug culture. The notion of growing your own comes up rather naturally in a community and generation raised on growing your own non-food products. Pawlick dresses up the analysis for this drop-out-of-politics loosey-goosey approach to doing your own food thing by saying it is borrowed from the aikido approach to martial arts, a term first applied to environmental strategy by energy guru Amory Lovins. The essence of the aikido strategy is to avoid head-on confrontation with a stronger opponent. “The way to defeat corporate power is to make it as irrelevant as possible to our daily lives by setting up our own, alternative systems …effectively while they grow and mature,” Pawlick argues in the chapter entitled “Think Locally, Fight Locally.”

That is pretty well the end of it, with no suggestions that farm subsidies go to provide incentives for environmental stewardship or local sales from diverse farms, or that the power of corporations to use public airwaves to impose their marketing messages on vulnerable populations be limited—just to name two obvious public policy measures that could start to turn the tables on the food-enders.

I am a big fan of growing your own, and of buying locally in farmers’ markets, an urban commons that makes a bold statement asserting that food belongs in community and celebratory spaces, not box stores. However, such tactics are not up to either resisting or reversing the forces responsible for the end of food. They are a good guide for individuals with the time, money, resources and commitment to take their food preferences that personally and seriously. But such methods have little reach beyond the counterculture and groups of innovators and early adopters. When confronted with something as stark as the end of food—and we must thank Pawlick for raising the rhetorical stakes on what is at issue with today’s food trends—such methods are, to borrow from another phrase arising from the militant protests of the 1970s in Quebec, “only the beginning.”