The New York Times ran a special food-themed issue of its Sunday magazine a week back. It was kicked off by a fine piece by Mark Bittman, who observed quite rightly that the conversation being had in the magazine’s pages reflects America’s new, and healthy, interest in what they’re eating.

Indeed, just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine this sort of interest, and even harder to imagine that the New York Times would countenance the sorts of politics espoused in Michael Pollan’s Farmer in Chief essay, or David Reiff’s subtle dissection of the Gates Foundation’s African Adventures.

I like David’s piece a great deal, not just because I appear in it as a reasonable person, but because he captures exactly what’s wrong about the Northern do-gooder in Africa. For the record, a mistake crept in to the piece – I’ve never actually met Raj Shah – but the piece certainly captures how I feel about the Alliance for a New Green Revolution in Africa.

And yet, despite all that, the issue had one or two gaping holes. Labour didn’t really get a look in and, most important, the entire issue was almost wholly silent on the issue of gender. One doesn’t have to look far to see women food producers and food-makers taking on the inequities of the modern food system. Just today, from their meeting in Maputo, the women of Via Campesina released this declaration. And Dan Moshenberg, who sends much of the finest material to me for this blog, took the lead in writing this letter to the editor which, alas, the editor decided not to print.

Dear Editor

The New York Times Magazine October 12th Food Issue is a measure of how far the debate around agriculture has come. A few years ago, it would have been inconceivable that Sunday’s glossy section could be devoted to a mosaic of pieces about the politics of food, from belly to bourse, from private purchases to public policy. We still, however, have far to go. One neglected element would have brought coherence to the disparate pieces: women.

Certainly, women were mentioned in the issue. Mark Bittman noted that cooking is no longer the exclusive purview, burden, or task of those called `housewives’. With women pressured or choosing to enter the waged labor force, men are encouraged or forced to cook for themselves and even, occasionally, for others. In her discussion of the ethical kashrut movement, Samantha M. Shapiro recalls the cultural and religious traditions of her own family, in which men would slaughter, skin and butcher animals, and women would purchase the meat, soak and salt it, and prepare it for the family. Michael Pollan urged the next President of the United States to expand the WIC program for low-income women with children.

There’s much to admire in, and much to debate over, these descriptions of women. But women are more than contemporary household cooks (since they are still a minority among paid chefs), more than the stories of how it was done in our family in the good old days, and more than the recipients of government handouts.

In much of the world, and in particular in the Global South, women are the primary toilers of the earth, even if they are a minuscule portion of the owners of land. For example, while women produce the majority of food consumed in the Global South, the OECD has noted that women own 1% of the land mass of Africa. If that seems a little far away, there are plenty of examples of women producing food closer to home – consider the fate of Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, a farmworker who died of heatstroke in May this year while harvesting grapes in California, the latest in a long line of women casualties in our modern food system.

Women aren’t only central to understanding how food is produced – it’s hard to tell the full story of food distribution and food consumption without them either. The food crisis discriminates against women – 60% of those going hungry are women and girls. Michael Pollan almost touched on this when he noted that in recent months more than 30 countries have experienced food riots which are, more often than not, protests that result from planned and coordinated action by women.

All of these stories, and the big story they add up to, is a story of women. Women farmers, women care providers, women wives, women mothers, women daughters, women aunts, women heads of households, women consumers, women workers, everywhere in the world. If food matters, as we certainly agree it does, then women must be accounted for because, when it comes to food, women count. Perhaps in the next food issue, the Times might move a little further to doing this particular piece of arithmetic.

Sincerely
Dan Moshenberg
Raj Patel

Photo: sajla1, women of Chhattisgarh

[Cross-posted from www.stuffedandstarved.org]

Yesterday, Michael Pollan spoke on The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio about his New York Times Magazine article, Farmer in Chief: What the Next President Can and Should do to Remake the Way We Grow and Eat Our Food.  He argues that we should “re-solarize” the food system, an essential step to the energy independence both candidates are talking about because bringing food from farm to plate is responsible for 20% of our oil consumption.  His plan touches on the cultural elements of food: a re-valuation of farming, changing the federal definition of food, the future president’s role in re-engaging us about what we eat.  He also suggests a new view of policy, which currently has us mired in corporate welfare and poor land stewardship.  For this all to work, he says, we need more farmers, and those farmers need to have access to land, resources and education.  And we need a President who is willing to look at the long term effects our current practices are having (like factory farm operations, shown in the photo above, and the multiple waste lagoons we as taxpayers probably helped pay for), and be willing to make a definitive change.  Listen to the program here.

Photo: Uncle Kick-Kick, factory pig farm near the Escalante Desert in southwestern Utah

Yesterday, Oprah spent her entire show discussing the treatment of the animals we raise for meat in this country. No wilting flower, Oprah did not shy away from discussing a subject that got her into a lot of hot water in the late 1990s, when she was sued by cattle ranchers for food disparagement when she admitted during the period of fear surrounding the early outbreaks of mad cow disease that she was “stopped cold from eating another burger.”

Back then, she didn’t have the eloquent ammo provided in Michael Pollan’s New York Times Magazine letter to the next commander-in-chief on Sunday, which focused on the perils of letting growth be the single factor in running the food system: “When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.”

On Oprah’s program, the issue at hand was the upcoming vote in California on Proposition 2, a referendum on changing the way laying hens, pregnant sows and veal calves are kept in confinement. A reformed eater of the standard American diet, Oprah has discussed issues of health on her program before, such as earlier this year when she ate a vegan diet for three weeks to lose weight. At the beginning of the program, she stood before her audience and presented visual representations of the current standards in confinement: six hens to a cage not large enough for any one to open its wings, a six foot long sow in a seven foot block with no room to turn around, and a calf in a similarly small paddock. The debate was on. We would be presented with both sides of the argument, and Oprah would refrain from bias, even though she stated that we are “the measure of how we treat the weaker among us,” twice.

Lisa Ling was on hand to talk about the videos at both caged and cage-free chicken operations, and confined and free-range pig farms. At both, we witnessed smaller “caged” operations, run by families who insisted that Proposition 2 was the kind of legislation that could put them out of business. They argued that they just didn’t have the space or money to retrofit their barns to fulfill this obligation. A representative speaking against Proposition 2 stated that the results of this bill passing would be less available food. Should Proposition 2 pass in November, these fears of mid-sized operations need to be eased. At the free-range farm, space was plentiful, and the animals seemed to fulfill the romantic vision farming holds in our consumer minds. The most interesting moment, arrested by a commercial break before it could come to fruition, was when the free-range pig farmer reached out to the confinement operator and said that he used to think that putting the pigs free to roam outside would be too hard, that they would be cold in the winter or would be difficult to breed and maintain. But that now he has come to realize that it just isn’t so. I really hoped Oprah would let him go on, but the schedule of daytime television was set in stone.

Back from the break we were on to veal calves. Apparently no confinement operator would let Oprah’s cameras on the premises, because they used fuzzy footage taken in the most horrible conditions imaginable by an activist: calves that could not stand up, that had never even learned to walk, and were chained by the neck to their paddock. It was reminiscent of the videos released last year of the California slaughterhouse that set in motion a change it the public thinking about the treatment of the animals we eat. As a contrast, Oprah’s camera crew visited a free-range cattle farm in Wisconsin, where calves were raised on their mother’s milk with the other cows, distinguished only by a tag on their ear that they would be sold as veal calves. For a contrasting view, a representative from the veal processor’s union argued that Proposition 2 was unnecessary, because producers were already moving in that direction. To that I ask, then why oppose it?

The fact that the argument has reached Oprah’s stage is telling for where we will continue to see this discussion going forward. As she reaches on average 14 million viewers per program, we can assume many new people have been brought into the fold, and have been given images of where our food comes from to turn over in their mind. What Proposition 2 might lack in assistance for small factory farmers to make the transition could be gained in the seven years before the implementation of the law. While not perfect, Proposition 2 calls for the humane treatment of the food we eat, something that was practiced up until we laid the foundation for industrial agriculture. We have been detached from these truths about where our food comes from for too long, and whether Proposition 2 passes or not, the argument for changing the way we farm, and specifically, raise the animals we eat in this country has gone mainstream.

Photo: gthebash