Slow Food for a Dying Planet

[COUNTRYBUMPKIN]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/H021705A.shtml



Slow Food for a Dying Planet
By Mark Winne
In These Times

Thursday 03 February 2005

Take I-40 east from Albuquerque, N.M., for about three hours and
hit the brakes just before the Texas border. Don't worry if you don't
have a road map, the smell of cow manure will tell you where you are,
and if you have your windows down to enjoy the scent of the high
plains, the flies will soon be helping you drive. Welcome to Clovis,
N.M., home to Cannon Air Force Base, the Santa Fe Burlington Northern
Railroad, 65 dairy farms, five feedlots, what will be North America's
largest cheese plant, and approximately 200,000 head of dairy and beef
cows. If you want to see America's industrial food system in action,
you're in the right place.

The train tracks give the feedlot operators and dairymen-many of
them forced out of California by local health officials who deemed
them polluters-a direct pipeline to the Iowa/Nebraska Corn Belt. The
grain elevators located along the tracks unload 110 train carloads at
a time, or a little over 20 million pounds of corn. The cows, held in
open pens and milked three times a day, never graze on open pasture.
In return for free room and board, each cow produces 75 pounds of milk
a day and four tons of manure a year. For now, the milk is shipped to
processing plants all over the Southwest, but when the cheese plant is
operational in late 2005, the milk will travel only a few miles. There
it will be turned into Velveeta-style cheese at the rate of one
truckload per hour. When the 200,000 black and white Holstein cows are
past their prime-about two to three years-they are sent off to a large
slaughterhouse in Texas where they are ground up into beef patties for
guess who: McDonald's, America's largest buyer of spent dairy cows.

Suspend disbelief for one moment and admire this system for what
it is: a modern miracle of agriculture and food science, the triumph
of capital over the limitations of man and nature, and a multistate
food factory that has optimized the relationship between inputs and
outputs for the near-perfect commodification of mankind's sustenance.
But look again and you'll see the reality that Christopher Cook lays
out in Diet for a Dead Planet: a food system that, like cows in a
feedlot, is down on its knees in the muck, unsustainable, unhealthy
and dangerously close to extinction. With a well-deserved bow to
Frances Moore Lappe's classic Diet for a Small Planet, Cook goes after
the oligarchical forces of multinational agribusiness with guns
blazing. His take-no-prisoners style targets the evil-doers, junk-food
purveyors, and despots of deception and greed whose system of mass
food production and distribution will leave the earth in ruins and us
humans simultaneously obese and starving.

Cook paints a grim picture. From the skull-and-crossbones on the
book's cover to its penultimate chapter, he unrelentingly disembowels
Wal-Mart, the Bush administration's Department of Agriculture, Archer
Daniels Midland, and, of course, McDonald's. He reminds us that
Americans have purchased their cheap food supply (we spend less on
food as a percentage of our household income than any nation in the
world) by depleting our topsoil and polluting our water, using growth
hormones in livestock and pesticides on crops, maiming workers (many
of them from Mexico and Central America) in our meatpacking plants,
and using more energy resources than any other country on the planet.

What does Cook want us to do about it, short of hurling Molotov
cocktails at the Golden Arches (a fantasy I'll confess to having on
more than one occasion)? First, he recommends that we "avoid as much
[junk food] as possible and seek out healthy unadulterated
alternatives.'' In other words, buy food with the planet in mind, and
eat as if it were a moral act. But he acknowledges that our individual
choices are not enough and encourages us to promote local alternatives
like farmers' markets, Community Supported Agriculture farms and local
food policy councils. Beyond that, he urges the promotion of
"aggressive [federal] policies addressing a system of food production
and consumption that is profoundly unhealthy and unsustainable." This
means taking on the defenders of power and privilege in Congress when
they draft the next Farm Bill-the current one subsidizes unhealthy
food and industrial agriculture.

In contrast to Cook's gloom-and-doom prognostications, the release
of the paperback version of Carlo Petrini's Slow Food: A Case for
Taste celebrates the joyful indulgence of good, locally produced food
and wine. Petrini-an Italian whose charming prose ripples with
gustatory rapture and thrasonical outbursts-pleads with us to slow
down, taste the summer mountain grasses in the Asiago Stravecchio
(nothing Velveeta-like, here), sip a Vino Nobile di Montepulciano on
the terrace of a sunny Tuscan villa. Not that he is any more sanguine
about the industrialized, globalized food system than Cook. Indeed,
his outrage at McDonald's proposal to sell Big Macs at the sacred
Spanish Steps of Rome galvanized the Slow Food Movement, which now has
65,000 members in 45 countries (http://www.slowfoodusa.org).

The Slow Foodistas have bolstered the case against industrial food
by addressing the loss of biodiversity across the planet. Petrini
alarmingly notes that since the beginning of the twentieth century we
have lost 75 percent of our agricultural products' genetic diversity
and half of our livestock breeds. Not only does this loss make us
species-poor, it is, he writes, a major contributor to the
"standardization of all [food] products and the flattening out of all
flavors." That is why the land, the farmer and the location of food
production are at the center of the Slow Food mission. As their U.S.
home page states, they are an organization "dedicated to promoting
stewardship of the land and ecologically sound food production ...
regional, seasonal culinary traditions ... and living a slower and
more harmonious rhythm of life."

Now I can fully support most of this, and I'm even capable of
enjoying a good Asiago (when I can afford it), but living a slower
life doesn't always suit my chemistry. A couple of weeks ago, I
attended a Slow Food event in Santa Fe, where if anything, people
suffer from flavor overload. The event featured a discussion about
squash-its variety, aesthetics, taste and cultivation. Good,
well-intentioned folk spent two hours waxing enthusiastic over the
variety of cucurbita arrayed before them, but no one mentioned that we
live in New Mexico, one of the poorest states of the country, where
nearly 15 percent of the population is hungry or food insecure. It
seems a trifle self-indulgent to enjoy such esoteric pleasure in the
midst of so much want. And how can love of squash topple the
dairy-industrial- complex, which at that very moment was metastasizing
within the state's borders?

To their credit, Slow Food people are asking similar questions. In
the book's excellent introduction, editor Albert Sonnenfeld challenges
the movement to address the "food gap" between rich and poor, the
"perils of elitism," and the group's propensity to use Latin words
like convivia and Presidia in describing their organization. (Using a
dead language is one sure-fire way to muzzle your message.) Clearly,
Slow Food is as intent on cultivating their members' social
consciences as much as their palates. There is no contradiction
between these important issues and Petrini's shameless advocacy of
pleasure. After all, no one said the revolution couldn't be delicious.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

[jlxian]

Good, but horrifying, article. This is the kind of information that makes me want to raise my own pigs, chickens and calves. I like meat too much to go vegetarian, I have to admit.

To quote the article, "In other words, buy food with the planet in mind, and eat as if it were a moral act." A great line!!