On Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, farmer, poet and food movement hero Wendell Berry, physicist and seed-saving advocate Vandana Shiva, nutritionist and professor Marion Nestle, and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales were among the speakers at The Future of Food, a conference put on by the Washington Post at Georgetown University.

The media was quick to focus on the comments by Prince Charles, who has been farming land on his Highgrove Estate for 26 years and selling produce under the name Duchy Originals, the profits of which are given to charities. But though the Prince gave a thorough and informed 45-minute speech about soil loss, the importance of biodiversity, and a critique of U.S. agriculture policy (you can read the whole speech here), some media and online comments focused on the perceived hypocrisy of the Prince as an environmentalist with a huge carbon footprint, and the old fall-back of detractors of the food movement: Elitism.

Chris Clayton, agriculture editor for The Progressive Farmer, tweeted “You just don’t make your case of what is needed in ag by tweeting “HRH Charles… His Royal Highness says. #FoF definitely #foodelitism”

Phillip Brasher, agriculture reporter for the Des Moines Register, didn’t use the word elitist, but used hyperbole to imply it. The title of his article: “Prince Charles: Save the world with organic farming.”

Elitism has been one of the hardest critiques for the good food movement to shake. For the last 50 years, conservative politicians have gained currency by slamming their opponents as elitist, pointy-headed liberals, and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” And food, which is often viewed as a liberal cause–even though conservatives are some of its biggest supporters–has become the latest hotbed for this fight (See Cookiegate). Making things more difficult, food is personal, habitual, and even addictive, and Americans are willing to cling to cheap food despite clear and present assessments about its toll on our health, our national deficit, and effects on our air and water.

Eric Schlosser, an investigative reporter and author of Fast Food Nation, among other books, kicked off the Future of Food event by saying:

Today, the chemical companies and the biotech companies like to dismiss organic food as something trendy or elitist. Well you know who needs organic food more than anyone else? …the two million farm workers who pick by hand almost all of the fresh fruits and vegetables in the United States. And their children need organic food, too. For them, the need for organics …is literally a matter of life and death. Pesticides are poisons. They have been carefully designed to kill insects, weeds, funguses and rodents. But they can also kill human beings. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that every year, 10,000-20,000 farmworkers in the United States suffer acute pesticide poisoning on the job, and that is probably a great understatement.

Though representatives from General Mills, Panera Bread, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association sat on panels, The Future of Food did bring together many known critics of the current food system. But the question is not whether the system should change, but how.

In fact, saying the system has to change should not be controversial. While the Farm Bureau and industry groups are preparing a PR campaign to change the consumer’s mind about industrial agriculture, it has become obvious that change must happen even at big corporations like Monsanto, Mars (which sponsored the event), and Walmart, which are all constantly trying to associate their image with sustainability. Meanwhile the price of oil is rising, the world water supply is becoming more tenuous, and extreme weather conditions and biofuel production contribute to food price spikes, all of which is leading to system collapse. Letting industry defend the current food system is akin to letting climate change deniers have a seat at the table while the science has long been settled.

Moreover, the two sides in this discussion are not equals. One is supported by an army of lobbyists and lawyers who shape legislation and feed talking points to the media. The other is an upstart with popular support based on overwhelming evidence that the system we have now is broken.

Just last week we saw what happens when you give too many industry spokespeople the stage at a similar event, put on by The Atlantic magazine. That event was sponsored by DuPont, Dole, Coca-Cola, and the Council for Biotechnology Information, a group funded by the industry. Each got to place staffers on the panels in return for funding. What resulted was a biased panel on “sustainable agriculture” that focused heavily on one thing: biotechnology. It also featured a panel on obesity, during which a Dole staffer and an American Beverage Association spokesperson marginalized the debate to focus on things like soda can sizes. Dr. Zeke Emmanuel, Chair of the Clinical Center Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, struggled to move the conversation toward discussing deeper solutions to the problem.

While bloggers lamented these biases, and asked whether or not this was what it takes to stay afloat as an independent magazine publisher, The Atlantic event was not a complete loss. White House chef and policy adviser Sam Kass spoke. The event also featured Alice Waters, who tweeted before taking the stage that, “The true elitism is a food system controlled by a handful of corporations,” and sent out a photo of the refreshments table, which featured bottles of Coke.

The Future of Food event instead featured a delicious lunch prepared by Bon Appétit Management Company, a locally-sourced and organic-committed caterer. But aside from the food served, the main critique I have of both of these events is their lack of deep, meaningful debate. For The Atlantic event, the debate was stunted by industry, for The Future of Food, there were too many people on each panel and a lack of time and direction by some of the moderators. And both events lacked diversity and youth voices. The Future of Food took place on a college campus, and yet the students who showed up didn’t stay after Prince Charles spoke. Indeed, the event could have been better publicized if the goal was to engage students on Georgetown’s campus.

If we are going to sit together in a room and discuss the finer points of food policy, we need to have real, solid debates and solutions. It’s time we get down to brass tacks about genetically modified foods, antibiotics in livestock agriculture, health concerns surrounding pesticide use, and other subjects, featuring scientists and those unassociated with industry. We need to talk about the barriers to producing research when it is missing, the consolidation in the industry and how this effects choices, and bring more farmers into these discussions to speak for themselves.

Otherwise, we should be rolling up our sleeves to build new models for food access. Dr. Hans Herren, a scientist and lead author of the IAASTD report, who was on a panel about international food policy, said it succinctly when he pointed out that we need to stop talking and writing reports and do something. “The time to act was yesterday,” he said.

Writing new policies will also help put to bed the tired old argument of whether or not organic vegetables are elitist. “Smart sustainable food policy is common sense,” said Senator Jon Tester in the closing keynote at The Future of Food. “And if you fight for it, you can win.”

In the end, calling those who want to change the food system elitist is merely a way of diverting our attention from the very real problems we face. In an opinion piece last week, Eric Schlosser wrote:

This name-calling is a form of misdirection, an attempt to evade a serious debate about U.S. agricultural policies. And it gets the elitism charge precisely backward. America’s current system of food production—overly centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels—is profoundly undemocratic. It is one more sign of how the few now rule the many. And it’s inflicting tremendous harm on American farmers, workers and consumers.

Photo: AP

The session was moderated by Sam Fromartz, author of Organic Inc. and the Chews Wise blog. Fromartz asked his diverse panel how their media organizations reported on sustainable food issues.

Jane Black, a writer for the Washington Post, began by commenting on the changes in the media world. She noted that “newspapers are operating under rules that blogs aren’t,” that is they have stricter reporting standards such as utilizing multiple sources. These stricter standards are one of the primary advantages of newspaper reporting.

Black continued by saying that in the newspaper world, “we have to be objective and not have an opinion – and anyone who knows me knows that I do have an opinion.” This is an extremely important point when it comes to sustainable food topics.

Writing for both a newspaper group and a blog as I do, I understand her point about objectivity. Since I am a columnist for the newspaper, not a reporter, I am able to interject some of my personality into the mix – but there are distinct limits. As a blogger I have much greater freedom of expression.

An excellent example relates to my recent reporting of CAFOs in relation to the H1N1 flu outbreak. I had to edit my description of some of the CAFOs negative effects for my newspaper column, while I was able to freely discuss some distressing research (increased infant death rates) in my blog story.

Black finished by asking: “How do you write a good story?” Answering her own question, she said the key is to find the right person to personify it. For example, she said, the White House Garden story received a mountain of press attention not because most people care about gardening, per se, but because the Obama’s are such prominent personalities that people really want to know what they are doing. And it is this crossover that will introduce sustainability issues to a new audience.

Finally, Black noted, she keeps writing the same story again and again. The story is: How does this transition to sustainable food happen? The key is finding the most interesting people and angles that amplify the message while keeping it fresh.

Barry Estabrook, contributing editor at Gourmet Magazine, echoed Black’s sentiments when he said “Never, Ever Preach – and Always Tell it Through People.” People are always interested in the people who bring them food, Estabrook continued, and it is often that interest in other people that leads them to explore sustainability.

But he also noted that “it’s really important to pick the right boss,” saying that Gourmet Editor in chief Ruth Reichl was committed to “articles about where food comes from.” But, he criticized, “we as food magazines do not do a good job of bringing issues of sustainability to our readers. That’s a weakness from our corner of the business.”

“There’s this perception that isn’t panning out,” Estabrook said, “Our editors think our readers don’t want to learn about declining fish stocks. But interestingly, in practice, people seem to like these stories. Our circulation has remained very robust since we’ve introduced this element to the mix.”

Katherine Alford, a Vice President with the Food Network, agreed that communicating sustainable issues through people was important. “We will never have a show just about sustainability,” she declared bluntly. “We want that to come through our talent, someone that people relate to.” She conceded that the Food Network’s audience was very mainstream, and that they were in the entertainment business. So, Alford said, sustainable topics can also come through the ingredients. “By using certain ingredients, and talking about where certain ingredients come from,” we can communicate our passion for these ideas, she said.

She also had an interesting perspective on sustainability as it relates to television. “TV is expensive…and so we have the idea of evergreen TV shows.” That is, producers don’t want an episode of a show to be obsolete because an ingredient isn’t available anymore. “You can’t do a issue with Chilean Sea Bass because it’s not available. Over the years, people have gotten more and more receptive to that story,” Alford said.

Finally, Alford thought that television cooking programs could do a better job of connecting people directly with their food. “I think that the food media has done an amazing job of connecting to chefs, but at the detriment to home cooking.” He continued,  “I think we do a horrible job, in the food media, of saying ‘think like a chef.’ And this makes people think they can’t be involved…and those are the people we need to reach – you want them to go the farmers market.”

She concluded “We have to celebrate cooking a meal, and the skill level that comes with it.”

Finally, if you’re watching TV or a movie and you see characters discussing sustainable food issues, there’s a good chance that you’re looking at the work of Debbie Levin, president of the Environmental Media Association.
Celebrating their 20th anniversary, the EMA links “the power of celebrity to environmental awareness.” They pitch environmental ideas, story lines, and products to place in TV, movies, and directly in the hands of celebrities to get the eco-message across.

Levin loves working with sustainable foods, because “with food, you can wake up and make sustainable choices each day,” she says. She cautions us to never “underestimate the power of using celebrity to role model positive trends.” Addressing all the non-profits and sustainable food executives in the room, Levin said “you give us the information, we can get it out there.”

The stimulus package has passed – and despite whether you are pushing tax cuts or waving the flag of infrastructure spending, perhaps its worth reconsidering the underlying goal either version looks to achieve: growth.   I’m not the first to propose that our entire economic system is in need of an overhaul, but thinking back even further, I think we could take a leaf from Helen and Scott Nearing.

The Nearings moved from New York City to a Vermont homestead in 1932 because they perceived the capitalist economy was failing due to fundamentally bad underlying principles.  Essentially what they started in the New England countryside was a small farm, with a cash crop – maple syrup – which made enough money to help them buy building supplies, seed and necessities. Now, reading their book, Living the Good Life, during the current economic crisis, I cannot help but wonder the same thing they wondered then: Are we suppose to seek profit above all things?

Farming in America got a closer look last week when the ag census for 2007 debuted and we could crunch some hard numbers.  Total small farms (1-9 acres) increased by about 50,000 to 232,849 — 80% of whose farmers are making under $10,000; while 75% of the agricultural production (read: commodity crops) took place on 125,000 of the largest farms.  Here money and size correlate; our “Get Big or Get Out” mentality has produced giant farms — producing things we can’t eat without processing — which get a continuous flow of government subsidies, and grow in size as they buy up their neighbors in a quest for the almighty dollar.

But what I am most interested in here is those small farms, where more and more young people are gravitating, where organic is often practiced with or without certification, and perhaps most of what is being produced is used by the family unit or sold to neighbors.  These small farms might be a chance to learn, or an example of how land expense for a beginning farmer is just too great, or maybe these new farmers, too, have made a political decision to be self-sufficient.  But this phenomenon could be part of a real revolution going on in the way we think our society should be run, as well as a hat tip to the pioneering Nearings.

La Vida Locavore took a look at these small farms in detail last week, and saw that most farmers were turning a small profit or breaking even.  Now I know what I am about to say is controversial, but couldn’t this be considered a good thing?  I am not trying to insist that we all become peasants again, that we should give up coffee and chocolate, learn how to slaughter a chicken, throw out our laptop and iPhone and never, ever travel again.  Nor am I saying that the government shouldn’t be helping new farmers with land access and funds: they most certainly should.  But I ask, with a full belly and satisfying work, isn’t it time we re-frame our society’s expectations for growth of the bottom line at any cost?

Scott Nearing was an economist and social theorist who lost his job as a professor in the city due to his anarchist and pacifist beliefs.  Both Nearings had strong opinions about the uses of money, and self-sufficiency.  Here’s are the Nearings on the economics of consumption:

Life’s necessaries are easily come by if people are willing to adjust their consumption to the quantity and variety of their products. Difficulties begin when the subsistence advocate enters the market with its lures and wiles for separating the unwary and the dullwitted from their medium of exchange. Never forget that the private ownership of the means of production, through the monopoly of natural resources and patents, the control over money, the imposition of the tribute called “interest”, the gambling centers, which trade in commodities and “securities”, to price control and the domination by the wealthlords of the agencies which shape men’s minds and the machinery of government, the entire apparatus of a competitive, acquisitive, exploitive [sic], coercive social order is rigged and manipulated for the rich and powerful against the poor and the weak. Keep out of the system’s clutches and you have a chance of subsistence, even if the oligarchs disapprove of what you think and say and do. Accept the system, with its implications and ramifications, and you become a helpless cog in an impersonal, implacable, merciless machine operated to make the rich men richer and the powerful men more powerful.

The two things Americans value most are money and god, which often act to segregate us.  What then should we value in our society?  My answer would be community, quality and real justice for all living creatures; and food could be the most fundamental way through which we change our ways of thinking because it is a central front in our daily lives, and has the potential to bring us together.

That change is starting already, and Washington will have no choice but to listen from here on out.  According to the ag census, organics are growing in demand. (Collin Peterson, are you paying attention?) This speaks to the fact that we are becoming more concerned about the quality of the things we put in our mouth and the effect our food choices have on our community and environment at large.  Woody Tasch, an advocate of what he calls “Slow Money,” where the investor is concerned with building a stronger community, said in a recent interview that “there may well be a whole new, wider role for the investor as earthworm, rather than the investor as master of the universe.”

But first, as Civil Eats environment editor Aaron French reminded us in a recent post, we must define sustainability.  It seems we have been dragging our feet about this for fear that ridicule from the growth-focused economy would pummel anyone who dared say something bad about profit.  Well here goes: Using growth as the final and absolute indication of a healthy economy is bound to blow up in our face, whether by creating empty calorie foods to increase intake of commodity crops (leading to heart disease and diabetes, and a ballooning tax payer burden of health costs) or starting wars to increase sales of weapons (leading to an endless struggle and antagonizing much of the world in the process) or ignoring science so that we don’t have to act on climate change by regulating industry (at our future peril) – we can all agree these things are not sustainable.

In an article in the New York Times last weekend, Secretary of Ag Tom Vilsack was quoted encouraging diversification as a means to make small farms sustainable — focusing on energy production, carbon sequestration, conservation and ecotourism aside from crops and livestock, which he referred to as the “new rural economy.”  He also said last week that the USDA should represent “eaters” and not just farmers, which made many of us eaters cheer.  It is my sincere hope we continue to hold him to his word, because while the Nearings have set a fine example for homesteading, we must work together for change as we are linked through interdependence.  The food community must stay in dialog, pushing the fundamentals of our economy towards awareness, justice and quality for eaters everywhere.

Photo: Helen and Scott Nearing