I spend a great deal of my time on extremely small-scale food production.  Growing, procuring, cooking, eating, and writing about locally produced food is my bread and butter.  Thus picking up a copy of Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations was in some ways a departure for me.  Authors Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas are examining a world that looks to me much the same as the Grand Canyon must look to a mouse.

Culinary history is a truer history though than almost any taught in schools.  Most of what we were taught in high school or even college was little more than the chronology of war.  You may remember that the Norman Conquest occurred in 1066, you probably don’t know about the advances in agriculture that resulted from it, like the invention of the moldboard plow.  The authors suggest that this one innovation might well rank alongside the wheel or steam locomotion in terms of its importance to human development.

Across 12,000 years of history, Empires of Food lays out in clear and compelling terms the ways our world has been shaped by the repeated, head-on collision between politics and the production, transportation and consumption of food.  We learn how the Romans knew of the effects certain vitamins had on health and strength even if they didn’t know what the vitamins themselves actually were; how the ancient Chinese were ahead of even today’s methods of seed selection; of the inescapable importance and value of clean, fresh water.

They put some emphasis too on the flaws in our modern food systems and our seeming inability to learn, as a species, from our own checkered past.  “We devote much of our earth to a very small number of crops.  But instead of relying on prayer, dung and ditches to coax out a harvest we use machines, chemicals, and satellite-guided sprinklers.  The results overflow our silos, our supermarket shelves, and our waistbands.”  It is hard to tell whether the feasts of our current forms of agriculture will lead first to famine or death by excess.

All of this is fascinating, instructive, and vitally important.  But where they are most enlightening  is at the end, in a conclusion titled “The New Gluttony and Tomorrow’s Menu.”  They rail against those who consider food as fashion – what Carlo Petrini described as “wearing produce like jewelry” as people promenade through trendy, shop-to-be-seen markets.  The true threat though is not pop culture, it’s oil-addicted agriculture.  We worry about the effects climate change will have on shorelines and even in our fields, but we pay very little attention to the fact that when the oil runs out (and it will run out), the current food empire run by the likes of Monsanto, ADM and ConAgra will face a 50% loss in fertility and 170 million more empty mouths to feed.

This is what Slow Food proponents and other food activists mean when we say that what we have is not a sustainable food system.  What we must work toward is one that is Good, Clean and Fair.  By Good we mean that the food is good tasting and good for you.  By Clean we mean that it is not polluted and does not pollute – that there is nothing in the food that isn’t food (and if it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it isn’t food now).  And by Fair we mean that the people who produce the food should be justly compensated for their labor. That would be a sustainable food system.

To get there though we must know our history, and Empires of Food is a great way to learn it.  As the poet says, can’t know where your going if you don’t know where you’ve been.

Consumer advocates for sustainable, healthy food are fighting with farmers, not because either picked a fight with the other, but because the knowledge gap between them has grown so expansive that misunderstandings rule the day. Credit the gap to industrial specialization and consumer marketing, which I will return to in a moment. Often times, these misunderstandings turn personal, further driving apart two groups that have much to gain by working together.

How this benefits the industrial food players may not be obvious, but by fighting amongst ourselves, we are paying less attention to the mechanized system generating massive amounts of unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly food and unprecedented concentrations of profits.

For the average consumer, and likely many farmers, the “black box” of industrial food is a mystery. There is little to no transparency, except through increasingly common investigative journalism and documentaries, which industrialists and their associations quickly line up to discredit.  Keeping us in the dark allows industrial food processors and large food retailers to paint an idyllic picture of grassy fields and red barns backed annually by an estimated $33 billion¹ spent on advertising to reinforce a desired, yet highly inaccurate image of where our food comes from.

Unfortunately, they have most of us fooled, which is why it is critical that we – consumers and farmers alike – find a shared set of priorities to unite our voices in securing safe, healthy, tasty food for generations to come. Let us abandon overused stereotypes and language that divides us, and instead concentrate on educating consumers about where the food they eat comes from, including industrial and “alternative” food systems.

Closing the farm-to-plate knowledge gap won’t be easy. With the earliest advances in agriculture resulting in food surpluses, people, no longer physically needed on the farm, moved to urban centers to pursue non-agricultural careers. As the years passed and the complexity of the food system increased, people came to rely, exclusively in most cases today, on food processors and retailers to provide for them. In effect, we traded knowledge for convenient, cheap food.

On the surface, this seems like a great tradeoff, and for most of agriculture’s history it has been. Civilizations prospered. Farmers made a decent living. Consumers readily found fresh produce, meats, and other ingredients to prepare wholesome, nutritious, tasty meals. But things started to change. Industrialization intensified. Corporate consolidation accelerated. Seeds became intellectual property (protected by patents). High-paid lobbyists proliferated. Politicians bowed. And, most important, people stopped paying attention.

Take a snap shot of today’s food system. Study the details. What you find are a number of increasingly dramatic side effects that most people are not aware of, most of which are getting worse.

• Today’s average farmer makes about 55 percent less money for the food they grow than they did 50 years ago. According to the USDA, farmers’ share of consumer food expenditures dropped from about $0.40 per dollar in 1950 to around $0.19 in 2006. The balance of consumer expenditures, termed the Marketing Bill, goes to “value-add” (i.e., industrial food companies).
• While farmers’ financial situations have deteriorated, food manufacturers’ fortunes have skyrocketed to the tune of $3.1 trillion in revenues per year with above average profit margins. Judging by the fact that the Top 50 Food Processors and Top 50 Supermarket & Grocery Chains all have over $1.0 billion in annual sales, with Wal-Mart topping the list at nearly $100 billion, increasing concentrations of power are clear.
• One billion people are obese, thanks in part to value-add convenience foods (e.g., fast food, prepared meals, snacks, sodas), massive advertising campaigns, and time-constrained lifestyles (e.g., two income households with kids). This, while another one billion people go hungry, bypassed because they are unable to provide profit margins required by industrial food.
• According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, obesity (one of the “western diseases” attributed to diet) accounted for $75 billion in extra medical costs in 2003. The Journal of the American Medical Association attributed some 112,000 premature deaths in 2000 to obesity. These additional health care costs, half of which are paid for by taxpayers, have all but erased the cost-of-living savings claimed by the makers of cheap, convenient food. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
• Analysis by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reports that agriculture contributes 14% of human-released greenhouse gases each year, through methane from livestock and rice paddies, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, and fossil fuel use during production. In an era where controlling carbon emissions is critical, the industrialized food system must change or give up market share to environmentally friendly alternatives.

We have turned our food over to a system that doesn’t have our best interests in mind, despite what billions of dollars of advertising tell us. Power is concentrated, not by farms or consumers, but by multi-national corporations. Increasing complexity rules the day, making it harder for even those in industry to keep food safe. And the halls of Congress are jammed with food system lobbyists fighting for more power, or, at a minimum, maintaining the status quo.

It’s up to us – farmers and consumers – to take back control of the food we eat. At a minimum, we need to fight for the checks and balances needed to ensure safe, affordable, and environmentally-friendly food for generations to come. It won’t be easy given the stacked deck industry is playing with. But by thoughtfully considering each other’s perspectives, while separating ourselves from the complex, concentrated, industrial food system, we will find the common ground necessary to drive the change we seek.

As the U.S. faces continued peanut butter product food recalls and seven deaths due to the recent salmonella outbreak stemming from Georgia-based Peanut Corporation of America, other bad news about our failing food system broke in the heartland. Last week, University of Iowa researchers published the first study documenting methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in swine and swine workers in the United States.

The study, published online in PLoS ONE, a journal for peer-reviewed scientific and medical research, tested 299 pigs and 20 workers from pig farms in Iowa and Illinois and found a strain of MRSA, known as ST398, in 49 percent of the animals and in 45 percent of the humans caring for them.

Staphylococcus aureus, often called staph, are bacteria commonly carried on the skin or in the nose of healthy people. According to the Mayo Clinic, MRSA, a superbug, is a type of staph that is resistant to the broad-spectrum antibiotics commonly used to treat it. Deaths from MRSA infections in the U.S. have eclipsed those from many other infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, and recent data show that MRSA caused 94,000 infections and over 18,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2005.

Most MRSA infections occur in hospitals or other health care settings, such as nursing homes. Older adults and people with weakened immune systems are most at risk, but more recently, otherwise healthy folks have been hit as a different strain of MRSA has surfaced in gyms and nursery schools.

Dr. Tara Smith, an associate professor of epidemiology in the University of Iowa College of Public Health and lead author of the study noted that because ST398 was found in both animals and humans, it suggests transmission between the two. She warns that the findings suggest that once MRSA is introduced, it may spread broadly among both swine and their caretakers.

As Iowa ranks first in the nation in pig production, the researchers recommend surveying retail meat products for MRSA contamination, studying larger populations of swine and humans to define the epidemiology of MRSA within swine operations, and assessing MRSA carriage rates in other livestock.

Smith told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that a national survey of meat products should be conducted and other animals like beef, poultry, lamb and goat should also be checked out for MRSA. Smith added that her study reinforces the importance of vigilance in food handling and cooking procedures. “It’s likely that cooking will kill any MRSA present on the surface of meats, but anyone handling raw meats should be careful about cross-contamination of cooking areas or other food products, and should make sure hands are washed before touching one’s face, nose, lips, etc.”

Photo: Gretchen Rolland