Looking closely at where our food comes from and why: a rant in B minor

MMMMMMMMM....The collards I ate last night.


I think it hit me a couple of years back as I peeled the sticker off the apple that said it originated in New Zealand. Thoughts that were going through my head:

1. That's a long way for an apple to travel

2. Wow, that's a really long trip for an apple

3. I want to go to New Zealand, but it would cost thousands of dollars

4. I wonder how it would be cost effective to send apples all that way if it costs so much for people to fly

5. I guess they go on boats, because flying apples wouldn't make any sense

6. If they go on boats, how long would it take to get from New Zealand to Alabama? Months?

7. How do they keep them fresh all that way? Chemicals? Refrigeration?

8. Wow, a LOT goes into delivering this apple: fuel, refrigerant, boats, people, inspections, etc

9. The apple is quite tasteless: wonder why they took all this trouble?

10. If it costs that much to send this apple and here I am only paying a dollar for it, how much did the farmer get paid for it? Probably next to nothing!

11. We have really tasty local apples here: I wonder why I can't buy them in stores? Don’t say that we can’t grow apples here because I grew up with several apple trees in my yard, and they were great. And what’s more is we never sprayed them. Not to make the argument that trees don't need to be sprayed, because they usually do, but, well....

I have a sneaking suspicion that it all has to do with subsidies, tariffs, the value of a dollar, trade deals, and all that other stuff I don't fully understand. Things that aren't food, things that don't include this idea of people and apples coexisting in the same place. That would sound too much like ecology or nature or common sense or any of those other radical, totally impractical communist things.

Food. The more I think about food, the more I realize that all food is bound up with complex socio-cultural, environmental, and economic questions like these, questions that peskily present themselves at all turns. I often wonder where my food comes from, why it usually has mysterious ingredients like "xanthan gum", why we don't have access to real variety or fresh produce, even though we live in one of the richest agricultural areas of the country. I wonder why Alabamians are among the most obese, diabetic people in this country, why generations of children are being fed fast food, why small farms have continued their slow decline, why we've all sat back and watched this happen.

Because we don't know what's in our food, where it comes from, how it's produced, or who produces it, none of these questions have any immediate answers. Best not to ask. While everyone recognizes that home-grown food is best, we lazily accept gassed tomatoes, cardboard-tasting strawberries, canned corn, and a variety of chemical junk masquerading as food. Thinking about why things are the way they are invites confusion and despair. But a closer examination reveals that there are very specific reasons why we are so disconnected with our food:

1. It's cheaper to produce crops in huge quantities in places where the growing seasons are longest and there's a massive supply of cheap labor (South Texas, South Florida, California). There's a series of implicit assumptions here that Americans don't want variety of produce, food that tastes like food, food that was produced ethically and sustainably, etc. Because all those things will cost a little more money, and people would rather pay less for tasteless food. We're just wolfing our food down in McNastiness anyway, right?

2. Because we produce all of our "food" in vast monoculture on corporatized farms, all that stuff must be stored somewhere en masse, chemically treated to stay fresh or ripen because the distribution chain is so long that things must be picked before their time, trucked thousands of miles to people at great cost (also contributing to environmental degradation and degradation of infrastructure). Economies of scale. These make sense when we do not factor in environmental costs of transport and the externalities of farming (e.g., creating the giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico due to ag runoff from irresponsible land management), costs for health care of obese people, etc.

3. Because marketing and distribution of food in the current system consumes so many resources, production must be really cheap, which means that farmers barely scrape by on razor thin profit margins, cheap migrant labor is necessitated, farmers cannot afford to be conscientious stewards of the land. Agribusiness gets rich, we get bland food. All of this is based on the assumption that we all want (or will accept) cheap, uniform calories in the form of uninspiring, chemically treated "food" that comes from faraway places. I mean, it's almost as if no one's read Grapes of Wrath!!

4. Subsidies of agribusiness – a topic for a later time, a can of worms.

As Southerners (by the grace of God) we value our traditions and our traditional food: my favorites are fried okra, black eyed peas, and creamed corn with a big hunk of cornbread with fresh butter. But nowadays, you generally can't get any of this stuff that was locally produced (although there are occasional exceptions), not in most grocery stores, not even in most farmers' markets, not even when things are in season. On close inspection, you find that all (ALL) corn products come from the Midwest, or if they are produced here they are under contract to big Midwestern firms, usually just feed corn because aflatoxins so afflict big scale operations where large-scale grain storage is necessitated. The peas and okra come from Florida or Texas (still the South, I realize, but just barely, and even they deny it). Even if you can get locally milled grains - and you can, if you look hard enough - none of those locally milled grains originated in the state of Alabama. All from the midwest. And local grain producers are mostly under contract to big midwestern firms. Forget local butter – it doesn't exist. All the food that is produced here is shipped elsewhere, while all the food available to consumers is trucked in. What gets lost in the balance is fresh traditional food, taste, connection to the land, and the rest of it. I'll bet Dreamland doesn't even get local meat - o sacrilege! Enquire the next time you are there, and you'll get funny looks, I promise.

So what to do? Producers and consumers in this state will have to start connecting, and there are some admirable efforts being made on both sides as people strive to reconnect with their food and producers start thinking outside the box when it comes to marketing. The Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign, for example, of the Alabama Farmers' Markets. But to date, these efforts have been very small-scale and I still can't find local corn meal. Milled locally, yes, but not produced and milled locally. And the state of Alabama is a huge place, with wonderful agricultural diversity and tradition.

Eat well, y'all. And don't get caught up in asking too many questions.