What do you think is the biggest problem facing food production in the world today?
my opinion is that in the united states, north america and much of the world, we have built a food system on the basis of very low paid and, in many cases, illegal labor. we’ve built this entire edifice on people at the bottom of the economic ladder, and it’s not sustainable. And that goes for restaurant workers as well as farm workers. It is a disaster. There have been a couple of good examples recently in the US showing this to be the case.
You are reading: Books about food industry
the state of georgia implemented a very tough law against illegal immigration and when it went into effect earlier this summer, suddenly there were not enough people in the state to harvest the crops. they lost more than $600m (£374m) worth of crops because migrant workers are just migrants. And then, learning nothing, the state of Alabama did the same thing in October, with farmers complaining that there was no one to pull the crops out of the field.
That brings us neatly to your first book choice, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, which looks at what’s going wrong with government policies towards food production.
Michael Pollan looks at food production across four meals. one is a fast food food, the other is an industrial scale organic food, then there is a small scale organic food and finally it goes out and grows or kills, in the case of meat, all the food itself. that’s the narrative.
The premise is that every day we have the dilemma of what we are going to eat.
yes, if you’re a panda bear you don’t have a dilemma because you only eat bamboo shoots, but as an omnivore you have options. It looks at how we subsidize large commodity agriculture in the United States, and there are some problems with the subsidies. i think that is true in many places in the world, including europe. fosters an artificially cheap system for poor nutrition. for example, we subsidize the cultivation of corn and turn it into high fructose corn syrup at an artificially low price, which of course is making us fat at an unbelievable rate.
The same corn that is subsidized is fed to the cattle that are made into hamburgers. and we are eating too much of it and the conditions in the massive places where they are raised are not good at all.
what do you think governments should do about it?
I don’t think they should support the richest farmers. often the people who receive these subsidies you wouldn’t even call them farmers. they are more corporations than farms. instead of focusing on them, the government should pay attention to improving small and sustainable regional food systems.
Another group of corporations blacklisted by many in the world of food production are fast food companies. eric schlosser’s fast food nation really got people thinking about what actually makes us eat a hamburger a day.
eric schlosser takes a single fast food meal apart and shows not only how it affects our health but also how the people who serve it are treated. It also sees how people are treated in slaughterhouses that work with livestock, giving you the true picture of American food: burgers and fries.
and this book has had an effect on that industry. big companies like mcdonald’s seem to be going out of their way to show how things are sourced and make an effort to offer healthier options and provide more information about their food.
yeah it’s been 10 years since that book came out and i recently interviewed eric schlosser and asked him if things had gotten better and he said yes. people are becoming much more aware of childhood obesity and the role that fast food plays. And certainly in the states, fast food restaurants are required to give calorie counts, so people can see how much sugar and fat is in some of these things. Eric said there has been a lot of progress on that front, but unfortunately the job situation has gotten worse.
Your next pick continues this idea of how our current diet is causing obesity in many areas of the world. But Raj Patel also points out in his book Full and Hungry that many people still don’t have enough to eat. then you get the two extremes provided by the global food system.
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patel is a very intelligent man, a scholar in the true sense of the word. he takes this huge global picture. the book travels everywhere from india to brazil to south africa and looks at how the global impact of industrialized food has led to this outrageous situation where there are a billion people consuming too many calories a day and a billion of people who don’t get enough. again, he often has a lot to do with the economic decisions that government agencies and non-governmental organizations make.
but do you really believe that an efficient and healthier way to provide food for an ever-expanding world lies in locally produced food? is that really feasible?
I absolutely do and so does the United Nations. The Food and Agriculture Organization did a study a few years ago that shows that’s the way to do it. what there hasn’t been is a real study of how the current system leaves a billion people starving today. how is that happening?
locally produced food might work where you live in vermont, but how about a place like war-torn somalia?
yeah, vermont is a small farming state that is very food conscious, so it’s relatively easy for me. Even though we are a northern state right across from Canada without a long growing season, we can still get by. the growers and people here are very attuned to the idea of sustainability. war-torn somalia has so many problems that i think it would be better to take another example.
okay, what about namibia?
What has happened lately is that they have adopted some new crops, some of which are genetically modified. they are primarily cash crops, so the crops are meant to be sold and are encouraged to do so. These crops require large inputs in terms of fertilizers, which is an additional expense. so you get the situation where you’ve taken people away from producing food for themselves and turned them into producers of cotton or wheat or whatever. that’s true in other countries like india and much of agricultural africa.
and suddenly they discover that things have changed. In the past, they could at least farm on a subsistence basis, but now they have stopped and are not making enough money because of the cost of growing these GM crops or hybrid crops that are designed to be used in connection with chemical fertilizers. you have situations in places like india where there is an epidemic of farmer suicides. These were countries that used to feed themselves and now they can’t. The UN study pointed to the idea that if they went back to smaller food crops they would be fed.
Some people would disagree with that and would say that the only way to feed an ever-expanding population is through GM crops and big cash crops.
I can collect half a dozen major academic studies, including the one I just mentioned from the United Nations, that show that this is not the case. organic is probably the only way we’re going to be able to feed nine billion people. I read about this all the time, people ask how are we going to feed all these people organically. well, there is plenty of evidence that we can. what is missing is evidence that we can feed more people with the current system.
is a system based on petrochemicals. fertilizer is nothing more than natural gas turned into ammonium nitrate and stuff like that. It’s basically natural gas. many of the pesticides are derived from petrochemicals. almost all fuel used for farming and transportation is based on petroleum products and we all know that they are not a long-term solution.
but a lot of people complain about how expensive organic is. Do you think we should be prepared to spend a higher proportion of our income on food, as we did in the past?
i think in places like europe and the united states there are two things at stake. one is subsidies, which we talked about earlier, and the other is economies of scale. if you get more organic it will be cheaper.
four fish by paul greenberg takes us to the ocean to explore some of the solutions to overfishing and fish farming.
This book is completely unbiased and very serious about finding solutions to the world’s fishing problem. choose four iconic fish to use as examples that work across the spectrum. then there is tuna, salmon, cod and sea bass. doesn’t condemn fish farming outright, but explores ways to do it so that we continue to fish in the last wild place we get our food.
What kind of solutions can you think of?
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For wild fish, it says flatly that we need to reduce fishing effort. there are too many fishermen in too many boats chasing too few fish. he suggests that certain areas of the oceans be completely off limits to fishing, and that we manage stocks of fish like tuna, which can travel across oceans, globally.
For fish farming, it says that the species we raise must be efficient. salmon, for example, is a carnivore that must be fed more fish protein than it produces. that is not efficient. tilapia can survive on a vegetarian diet. so it is more efficient. any farm should not harm wild systems and we should limit the number of farms in a given area.
last one is john mcphee’s oranges, a classic book on how food is produced and the people who produce it.
oranges is a model for a certain type of journalism. the big food companies don’t want you to know how their food is produced and who produces it. they want you to think of it as something that arrives at your supermarket already wrapped. this book is a model for me. every day on his way to work mcphee passed by the train station in new york city and there was a place you could go and they had a container full of oranges and a machine and they squeezed you a glass of orange juice while you waited .
“The big food companies don’t want you to know how their food is produced and who produces it.”
mcphee started to think about that and decided that he would basically follow that glass of freshly squeezed juice to where the orange was produced. she wanted to find out everything, the history of that kind of cultivation. it’s a short book and it’s not a political book in the sense that it’s not beating drums, it’s just telling you how it’s done. and you leave without being able to look at an orange in the same way again. you will look at it and meet the people who grow it and have financial problems. and it will no longer be a pretty waxed orange in front of you.
You discovered similar things when you were doing research for your tomatoland book.
Like I said, I think the big food industry goes to great lengths to hide these things.
what kinds of things did you discover?
focused on the florida winter tomato and found tomatoes tasteless compared to a tomato from 50 years ago. they are harvested when green and then exposed to ethylene gas, which causes them to take on the correct color. Ethylene is a gas that the leaves of a tomato plant naturally emit when the fruit is ripe.
And that ties into the whole debate about what shoppers expect in supermarkets: this idea of uniformity in fruits and vegetables, which doesn’t necessarily mean taste.
Yes, one of the tomato growers I was talking to told me that the supermarket shopper doesn’t taste the tomatoes before she buys them. she buys them with her eyes. he was also the one who said you don’t get paid a penny for flavor or nutrition, you get paid by the pound. so I discovered that since the 1970s, commercial tomato breeders have focused almost exclusively on yield. That’s what they were paid to do, so the flavor and nutrition were lost.
another thing i found out was that you have to use a horrible amount of chemicals to grow tomatoes successfully in florida because the conditions there are not right to grow them naturally. the climate is too humid for tomato growing conditions, which must be dry and sunny like in italy. Too often, workers are affected by the large amount of pesticides found in tomatoes. leading in some cases to birth defects and cancers.
I was also very surprised to discover that there is still abject slavery in the United States. and this is not just occasional. there have been seven major cases brought to justice in the last 15 years. I’m talking about people who are bought and sold and chained up at night to prevent them from escaping. this is all in the court records, in writing.
as consumers, what would you urge us to do about these issues?
Fortunately, very recently, some fundamental changes have been made in the relationship between the people who grow and raise tomatoes and the people who work for them, which could improve many of these conditions. the workers’ rights group has been working for years to bring about these changes and, in fact, they were carried out last year. so at least there is a mechanism that can deal with a lot of the labor abuses that are going on. workers have time clocks in the fields to show how long they are working, they never used to. there is a complaints procedure. so the template has already been created and it looks like things could be a lot better.
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