We
stayed overnight in Dodson, Montana in a charming Bed and Breakfast owned and
managed by Sandra Calk. At breakfast we got a peep view into her fridge. There
were fruit and vegetables, cheeses, juices, marmalade, honey pickles,
condiments and everlasting tortillas. There were eggs and rhubarb from a
neighbor but nothing else was from close by, the regular milk came from Texas, and the vanilla scented one from Idaho. Even most of the meat products did
not come from Montana, despite the state
having millions of cattle grazing its green rolling hills; Montana has more cows than people. Montana cattle are finished in huge feed lot operations
in Colorado, Nebraska
or Texas where they are fed on maize[1]
from the fertile Corn Belt of the United States.
This
snapshot of Sandra’s fridge is a mirror of the global food and agriculture
system. The example is in no way extreme. In most parts of the industrial and
urbanized world, people hardly eat anything that comes from close by.
Consumption has no direct link to local agriculture which is organized in the
same way as modern assembly lines, with parts being delivered from all over the
globe to be assembled as a Gorby’s pizza, a McDonald’s hamburger or a Ben and
Jerry’s ice cream. Indonesian consumers munched a stunning 14 billion packages
of instant wheat noodles in 2012.[i]
What is strange about that? Indonesia
produces no wheat at all – what has become a national dish is based on a raw
material that is completely imported.[ii]
When
anthropologists describe some preliterate society, the conditions of food
production and its role in society usually forms a central part of the
narrative. Taboos, gender roles, power, ownership are all linked to food. We
often fail to realize that food is also ubiquitous in our modern society, not
only providing nutrition, but also a strong determinant of most aspects of the
economy, society and culture. Regardless of which models or epochs we look at,
our relationship with food is one of the main shapers of human society. Many
people say, or think, that industrialism has made us less dependent on nature
and on farming. But, that is an illusion caused by human beings living further
away from nature. Although we get our electricity via cables and petrol from
tubes at filling stations we are no less dependent on nature for energy than a
hunter sitting around the campfire or the farmer putting another log on her
hearth. Nor are we any less dependent on farming than our ancestors; almost all
our food comes from farms.
In farming,
a few species of plants and animals are chosen and preferred over others.
These species are evolutionary partners of the human species. We nurture and
protect these faithful symbionts from other threats, at the price of ultimately
eating them. They are almost an integral part of our species, and certainly our
society, as it is today, couldn’t exist without them. Neither would they exist
without us, at least not on the scale they do now. Cows, sheep and goats would
not cover one quarter of the planet’s surface if we hadn’t put them to work for
us. Maize owes us as much as we owe maize. We have chosen a few species, and
then selected and developed the more valuable traits in those species to create
special varieties and breeds. Animals are bred to produce the most valuable
product – whether it is meat, milk, fur or wool. We have selected plants with
bigger, or more, seeds or more of an edible root, or a less bitter taste. This,
in turn, has made plants and animals more dependent on human beings and the
farmscape, as they would not otherwise survive outside of its boundaries.
The basis
for farming, the collection of solar energy via a few selected plants, mainly
grains, has been the basis for human civilizations for more than five thousand
years, and this is likely to remain the case. Despite the break neck speed of
change of human society, there has been almost no change in the fundamental
biological basis for our food production. The total biological production per
hectare remains much the same, but we take a greater and greater share of that
production, by transforming grains to have fewer roots and straw and more
kernel and by exterminating weeds, insects and wildlife in the fields.
Globally
our farming system is based on a few grains, root crops and oil crops
supplemented with animals, most of them known and used for centuries. Almost no
new plants or animals have been domesticated in the last centuries. The
balance between the staples has changed and instead of being bound to one or
two staples, (bread and milk in the Swedish case, rice for many Asians) we can
now eat rice, pasta, potatoes, cornflakes, meat, milk, cheese etc.
Increasingly we eat fast and processed foods. Yet, these processed foods, to a
very large extent, contain the same staples. The difference between food and
fast-food is not so much a difference in raw materials, but in the process of
making and preparing them.
Despite a
doubling of population between 1960 and 2000, the nutritional status of the
world’s population has improved considerably in this time. The farmers of the
world have reasons to be proud of their accomplishment. But it has come at a
price. For most of its history, farming has been based on sustenance,
reproduction, improving and building up capital in the soil, in the livestock
or in physical assets. It was also the bearer of culture and society at large.
But today, in many regions, food production is exceeding environmental limits
or is close to doing so. The use of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers has
passed the limits for a biosphere in balance. Our whole food system contributes
at least one third of man-made total greenhouse gas emissions and agriculture
is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss. The extraction of water for
irrigation exceeds the regeneration of water sources in many parts of the world.
Pesticides cause a major loss of biodiversity and hundreds of thousands of
direct deaths among farmers and farm workers. Nobody really knows how they
affect other aspects of our health. Taken together these factors (and others
not mentioned here), could compromise the capacity of the earth to produce
food in the future. The farming system is also socially and economically
unsustainable.
There is
growing concern over future food production and increasing competition for
resources in the food, energy and water nexus are reflected in a new interest
for investment in land and water. “I cannot farm myself out
of this water problem,” says Mark Shannon, a farmer who in 2010 had to let his
land in the San Joaquin valley be converted
into a solar power field.[iii] This
is a vivid illustration of the shortage of resources that will be a permanent
feature in the future, and how land, water and energy interplay. Shortage of
one can partly be compensated with another, but what happens if all of them
are scarce? We see today that the market does not distribute scarce resources
to those who are poor: if resources become scarcer the poor will be further
disenfranchised. In more extreme cases the rich will drive their cars with
fuels made from food crops that the poor cannot afford to buy and lack the
resources to produce themselves.
Our
industrial society is based on linear thinking and processes. We bring together
certain inputs, process them and create a saleable product, the output. This is
in contrast to how nature works, where matter and substances circulate or flow
back and forth. This is why our industrial society creates problems such
pollution, climate change and dead seas. The straight rows of endless
monocultures in Mato Grosso are reflected in the aisles of the supermarket and
the lanes of the highways full of lorries bringing goods into them and cars
transporting food to people’s homes. But the food system is a life support
system and should be based on the principles of living systems, not on the
perceived efficiency of the industrial model. Linear thinking and linear
processes are fundamentally at odds with the cycles of nature and, ultimately,
nature still rules.
Efficiency is a one of those misleading
words that obscure reality. Nature is not efficient in our limited way of using
the word. It is both abundant and contains a lot of redundancy. A tobacco plant
can have several hundred thousand seeds, which would be enough to plant a
hundred hectares of tobacco. One ejaculation of human sperm could in theory
suffice for more than a year of global births. Natural systems have huge
buffering capacities which make them resilient. In old times, societies stored
grain and other key resources over years to ensure their survival. People often
took it rather easy at work, the hours worked were often long, but the pace was
slow and saints’ days and festivals were abundant. A cow lived for fifteen or
twenty years. Through competition and markets[2],
these kinds of practices are too costly and have become seen as inefficient.
The store of global food is just enough for a couple of months; we work hard,
in systems that monitor our every movement and the poor cows only usually reach
four years before they are sent to slaughter and replaced by younger and more
efficient cows. We squander the capital of nature for short term gains. In what
sense is this efficient?
In many countries, there is a lack of trust
in the food industry’s commitment to providing healthy and sound food and a
desire to support local farms. Repeated food scandals and absurd transportation
of food adds to this. There are valid concerns for what happens to our food if
it is allowed to be fully subject to the logic of the market, where profit and
unlimited competition rule. Interestingly, this lack of confidence in the
global trading system’s ability to work well for food is widespread and can
even be found among countries that are otherwise committed to global free
trade. During the food price hike of 2008, several food-importing countries
made bilateral agreements with food-producing countries to safeguard their
supplies of food. Some went a step further and initiated large-scale projects
to produce food in other countries. Some food exporting countries banned
exports to ensure that they would have sufficient food for their own
population. And, in the wake of the financial crisis, community food production
and self-sufficiency is on the increase.
It is no longer very controversial to
question the direction our food system has taken. Twenty years ago there were
only a few isolated dissenting voices but today competent expert bodies, such
as the European Union’s Standing Committee on Agricultural Research, and the
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for
Development, clarify that ‘business as usual is not an option’. We simply have
to find new ways, whether we want to or not. But we will only be able to find
new ways if we understand the factors that determine how we farm, what we grow
and what we eat. Most of the mainstream commentaries focus on the technical
aspects of food production and farming, such as use of genetically modified
organisms and chemical fertilizers, and their benefits and drawbacks. But these
technical aspects of farming are only part of the problem, or part of the solution.
The food system is a socio-economic system and needs to be viewed as such.
There are three megatrends that have shaped our
food system over the last centuries: 1)
the commercialization of the entire food system, 2) the use of energy and
applied technology (be it in the form of machinery or nitrogen fertilizers) to
replace animate labor and processes, and 3) demographic changes, such as
population growth, demographic transition and urbanization, and the related
lifestyle changes. These three megatrends are mutually reinforcing. Any of them
alone would not produce the changes that can be observed today. For example,
the application of energy and mechanization in farming, in particular the use
of fossil fuels, has increased productivity per agriculture worker by between
fifty and two hundred times, which meant that the share of population engaged
in farming dropped tremendously. The use of nitrogen fertilizers (produced
with huge energy investments) has been a major driver for the increase of crop
yields per area unit. Without fossil fuels, globalization and massive
urbanization could not have happened. And without urbanization there would be
little development of markets for agriculture products. Similarly, without
commercialization of farming there would be little incentive to mechanize and
use chemical fertilizers, as both pre-suppose market driven farming.
The
existence of markets in most human societies for some thousand years or longer
is not at all the same as the existence of a ‘market economy’ and even less a
globalized capitalist market economy. As farmers become integrated into the
market economy, they no longer reproduce and regenerate their production
system. They buy their seeds and breeds in the market; they feel that they don’t
have to take care of the reproduction of the soil, because they can compensate
for this by buying chemical fertilizers in sacks. They don’t have to take care
of the balance between nature and what humans take away. Land, water and
forests have been gradually transformed from commons to tradable commodities.
The time perspective of farmers in my native Scandinavia
has, until very recently, been intergenerational, some refer it to as ‘glacial
time.’ The sustainable regeneration of productive forces, including labor and
the knowledge needed, was engraved in the memes of those farming societies.
This is in absolute contrast to the entrepreneurial approach farmers are
encouraged to apply today. ‘Farming as a business’ is a code word for farming
now from Narvik to Cape Town, from Alaska to the Tierra del Fuego and from Vladivostok
to Tasmania.
The market, initially just a tool for distributing surpluses, has become the
conductor of the whole food system, from farm to fork. The commercialization of
farming also leads us to view land, water, nature as private property and the life
of the land, our symbionts, as commodities. The divide between society,
culture, the economy and nature that we currently experience is a divide alien
to farming, and can never be sustainable. If the transition from hunting to
farming was the First Fall of Man, farming as a business is the Second Fall.
In most
human societies the distribution of the most important foods was done outside
the market and was strictly regulated. Gifts, taxes, rents, tribute and sharing
were important channels for food distribution. We can still see in times of
disaster, war or disturbance that societies rapidly shun the market as the
main mechanism for distribution, and public or community control over food are
the preferred ways of ensuring proper (that means somewhat equal) sharing.
Cooking and eating were for a long time mostly social activities done within
the household or in the community, with the work being done without pay and for
no costs. Gradually, cooking and eating have become commercialized and acquired
a total different meaning and role in society.[3]
It is this process that is the real tragedy for food, and makes a large
contribution to obesity because when food is a commodity its main purpose is to
be consumed.
Food
production is still not a limiting factor for human expansion. Starvation and
malnutrition are symptoms of an unfair and unequal society rather than signs of
overpopulation, and should be tackled as such. Access to food should be an
inalienable right. This is actually already agreed by world leaders in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. An equitable world will have the
potential to feed everybody. It will certainly ensure that the food is
distributed more fairly among the world’s population. Nevertheless, there are
biological limits for food production. The space used for farming cannot be
expanded much; however, the yields per area unit can be increased and
production systems can be changed to produce more food.
The challenge
of feeding a growing population is formidable, but managing the planet’s
ecosystem is an even bigger challenge. Considering that farmed landscapes
dominate more than half of the terrestrial area of the Earth, and even a bigger
share of its biological production, it is clear that the way we farm has an
enormous impact on the planet’s ecosystems; that human agricultural ecosystems
must be seen as planetary ecosystems. Yet, the food and farming system is
increasingly managed by signals from ‘the market’, which do not include the
signals from these ecosystems: of the species threatened by extinction and the
loss of biodiversity, of pollution and of greenhouse gas emissions. The market
signals also don’t include the feelings of the animals brutalized in our service.
The system is simply not geared towards stewardship of the planet and living
beings but to the maximization of marketable output and profit.
Some
efforts are being made to correct this, by payments for environmental services
and some regulations on harmful practices, such as animal welfare regulations
and the prohibition of particularly lethal pesticides. Overall, these have a
minimal impact and are insufficient to encourage farmers and consumers to adopt
behaviors that foster planetary stewardship. The Earth is our common home and
responsibility and should be managed as such. Markets, in their various forms,
are systems developed to organize the distribution of products between humans,
and they only partially fulfill that function. There is no reason whatsoever
for believing that a market is a good tool for regulating our relationship with
the rose, the eagle or the water in the ocean. Instead of trying to squeeze
more of the commons into the market, we should re-balance food towards public
goods. In this way eco-system services and food production can be balanced
within the same framework.
The
rethinking of food as a right, of farming as a management system of the planet
and the food system as a commons will lead us to develop new institutions that
complement the roles of the market and the state. This does not rule out
markets as one of several mechanisms for food distribution, but it rejects
market hegemony over our food supplies, and the doctrine that market forces are
the best way of allocating food-producing resources such as land, water,
knowledge and seeds. This sounds very revolutionary. Perhaps it is. But it is
not a completely either-or question. Even where market forces prevail, there
are many aspects of food and farming which are not left to the vagaries of the
market. Food and farming remain, together with energy, labor and housing, one
of the most regulated parts of the economy, even before we consider all the
cultural norms surrounding them. Even if many of the regulations are unnecessary
and many of the subsidies are silly, there are there for a reason; a
recognition that the free market doesn’t work. Or rather that it does indeed
work as it should, but we don’t like the result of its workings.
We
might believe that we chose to eat a certain food, but that is an erroneous
starting point for a conversation about which foods we eat and which we should
eat. Our palates have been shaped over centuries to like some things and
dislike others. The mere difference in local foods and food preferences is
proof not of how different from each other we are, but how well we adapt to
what is available. For the large part of human existence, we have eaten the
stuff that was locally available. If we were Inuit we liked caribou and whale
meat and fat, if we were Swedes we liked herring and cheese; Bantu people like
cassava and goat stew. Our habits have been dictated by what produce and which
food technologies were available. Fermentation, drying, freezing, curing, have
all played different roles in different countries. If you lived in the humid
tropics, your culture would never developed a prosciutto ham, as the conditions
for making the ham do not exist in such a climate. The availability of fats and
fuels determine your favorite style of frying or roasting or if you mostly eat
food boiled in water.
Today, our
food choices are by and large determined by the economy instead of ecology. For
sure, when standing in front of a supermarket shelf, or sitting at a table
reading a restaurant menu, there are many choices. But before we face all those
choices a number of people have made the selection for us to choose from. And
they in turn have chosen from other people’s choices. Governments and
agri-business are ‘choice architects’ and their decisions shape what consumers
can and cannot buy. The modern food system is simultaneously moving towards
uniformity and diversity. Globalization gives many people access to many more
kinds of foods than before, but at the same time the differences between
regional cuisines are diminishing. We are easily duped by the bright colors of
marketing messages and wrapping. A supermarket may carry some 50,000 food
items, but a very large part of them are variations made out of the ‘Big Five’ –
wheat, maize, palm oil, sugar and soybeans – and they are produced by a handful
large companies, which source the raw materials from a few selected key
locations.
Cheap food
allows people to eat meat, fresh vegetables and fruits all year round,
something most people could only dream of a few generations back – and
something many people in the world can only still dream of. People live longer,
are taller, and are generally healthier than in the agrarian societies of the
18th and 19th centuries. But the current food system has
also produced obesity, allergies and other diseases, while at the same time
destroying the environment. Food is cheap, too cheap, because we have
externalized many of the costs of producing and consuming it. We let someone
else – nature, other people, future generations, tax payers – foot the bill for
climate change, for the loss of biodiversity, for eutrophication, for nitrates
and pesticides in our groundwaters or even for losing the water or the soil
altogether. Farmers using nitrogen fertilizers create costs for society at
large that are on par with the economic benefits for them. But as long as the
cost for this is not included in the cost for food it makes economic sense to
use massive amounts of ammonium nitrate than to farm in an organic way.
European chickens or Chinese pigs are, to a very large extent, fed soy protein
from Latin America, much of it from the Cerrado, the Amazon or the Pampa, landscapes which
are razed and raped by agro-business. The extinction of species and the greenhouse
gas emissions caused by this are also not included in the price of chicken
breast or the pulled pork. We can no longer afford cheap food.
We have to
bite the bullet; the food system is not a smorgasbord where we can pick
out the bits we like and keep those we don’t like. There is no way to produce
good artisanal foods and biologically diverse landscapes for the masses in a
containerized, standardized and monopolistic food system. It is hard to see
that one can combine animal welfare with the view of animals as commodities, instead
we should see them as our symbionts and companions, for which we have
responsibility. There are also ample opportunities to produce more foods with
regenerative methods, such as organic farming. The ‘problem’, if you so wish,
is that it will cost us more in terms of the share of population engaged in
food production. This in turn affects how many people can be engaged in
producing iPhones and cars and serving us coffee. By and large, I think such a
shift will only be good for society, culture and nature.
“We can
never do merely one thing” is a basic tenet of ecology ascribed to the
ecologist Garret Hardin. It applies not only to ecology but to any system. It
is certainly true when we talk about food and farming. Few things are so
interconnected with each other and the rest of society and nature. And that is
one of the key things I hope readers will get from this book. I hope it will
contribute to a deeper understanding of the interactions between farming,
food, landscapes, culture and economy. The food system, the farms and what we
eat are part of an economic, political, cultural and social system, and without
understanding how that system shapes farming and food, efforts to change any
of them in a profound way, will be in vain. This is also reflected in the last
part of the book where I discuss the way ahead, the alternatives. I don’t
offer any silver bullet but advocate a mix of a ‘mice in the basement’
strategy, political action and new ethics.
Often when
I hold a lecture the organizers ask me to “give them hope, things they can do
here and now to make a difference”. This idea is based on the premise that
people are ‘empowered’ by a message that gives them three (or five) points they
can take home with them that can make a difference. And as things should be
easy and ‘actionable’ it comes down to individual choices. In most cases those
choices are about consumption. I always refuse to give those three or five
points. Personally, I always buy organic foods and, professionally, I was the
founder of one of the most successful organic labeling programs in the world
(Krav in Sweden).
I do think we have the moral obligation, as consumers, to buy humane, organic
or fairly traded goods. But as commendable as it is, this falls blatantly short
of changing the rules of the game. Telling consumers that they will change the
world or eradicate poverty by shopping is to deceive them.
We need to
build new relationships in the food system, new relationships that can
gradually take over most of the food system. Those relationships should be
based on food and farming as joint common activities. There should not be
‘producers’ and ‘consumers’, but co-production. The farming technologies
themselves should also be reoriented to the regeneration of resources, meaning
and relationships. Consumption as a separate category should wither and we
would cook and eat in harmony with production. There will most likely be
markets in the future, but not ‘the market’ that we know today, the globalized
market with unlimited competition. Political actions, of many kinds, are
needed. Some should be oriented to limit the harm produced by the current
system, such as bans on pesticides and harmful practices or reallocating
resources. Others should target the development of alternatives. This can range
from re-allocating research funds from industrial farming models to
regenerative farming, to revising tax codes to stimulate the numbers of people
engaged in farming and facilitating emerging new economic relations.
Finally, it
is about us as human beings. Are we ready for the great leap into an unknown
future, based on new insights and a new balance between matter and soul,
between restless improvements and innovation and a simpler life in nature? Do
we prefer the sterile and cheap, ready to eat, meal wrapped in plastic from the
supermarket over the earthy smells and tastes of nature, combined with more
sweat and toil? In the long term I don’t think we have a lot of choice. An
increasing scarcity of key resources will make the choice for us. But the ride
will be easier if we halt the depletion of resources and of nature and build a
regenerative food system now, before we are faced with the possibility of
worrying whether we will get any food at all before going to bed.
I
will tell the story in four parts. First, the Starters, the history: how
agriculture and food developed over millennia. The second part, Primi,
has five case studies representing critical parts of our food and farming
system. These are grains, grazing animals, sugar, fat and chicken. Taken
together, these products represent much of our food system. Third, in Secondi,
I dive deeper into many of the complex problems and challenges of the current
food system. In the penultimate part, Desserts, I point towards the
future. In Digestive, I provide background information on some of the
calculations I have made.Introduction to Global Eating Disorder.
[1] In this book ’maize’ is
used for what in North America mostly is referred to as ’corn’.
[2] In short, I use the term ‘the market’ to describe ‘the market
economy’, ‘the market system’ or ‘the globalized capitalist market built on
endless competition’.
[3] Interestingly enough, food recipes have not (yet) been subject to
intellectual property rights – and this certainly doesn’t seem to decrease
innovations in cooking.
