Why the Food Movement Must Not Shirk Politics
By Michael Pollan
Originally Posted in the
New York Times
One of the more interesting things we will learn on Nov. 6 is
whether or not there is a "food movement" in America worthy of the
name that is, an organized force in our politics capable of
demanding change in the food system.
People like me throw the term around loosely, partly because we
sense the gathering of such a force, and partly (to be honest) to
help wish it into being by sheer dint of repetition. Clearly there
is growing sentiment in favor of reforming American agriculture and
interest in questions about where our food comes from and how it was
produced. And certainly we can see an alternative food economy
rising around us: local and organic agriculture is growing far
faster than the food market as a whole.
But a market and a sentiment are not quite the same thing as a
political movement something capable of frightening politicians
and propelling its concerns onto the national agenda.
How California Proposition 37 Can Change the Politics of Food
California's Proposition 37, which would require that genetically
modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just
that to change the politics of food not just in California but
nationally too. Now, there is much that's wrong with California's
notorious initiative process: it is an awkward, usually sloppy way
to make law. Yet for better or worse, it has served as a last- or
first-ditch way for issues that politicians aren't yet ready to
touch whether the tax rebellion of the 1970s (Prop 13) or medical
marijuana in the 1990s (Prop 215) to win a hearing and a vote and
then go on to change the political conversation across the country.
What is at stake this time around is not just the fate of
genetically modified crops but the public's confidence in the
industrial food chain. That system is being challenged on a great
many fronts indeed, seemingly everywhere but in Washington.
Around the country, dozens of proposals to tax and regulate soda
have put the beverage industry on the defensive, forcing it to play
a very expensive (and thus far successful) game of Whac-A-Mole. The
meat industry is getting it from all sides: animal rights advocates
seeking to expose its brutality; public-health advocates campaigning
against antibiotics in animal feed; environmentalists highlighting
factory farming's contribution to climate change.
Big Food is also feeling beleaguered by its increasingly
skeptical and skittish consumers. Earlier this year the industry was
rocked when a blogger in Houston started an online petition to ban
the use of "pink slime" in the hamburger served in the federal
school-lunch program. Pink slime so-called by a U.S. Department of
Agriculture microbiologist is a kind of industrial-strength
hamburger helper made from a purιe of slaughterhouse scraps treated
with ammonia. We have apparently been ingesting this material for
years in hamburger patties, but when word got out, the eating public
went ballistic.
Within days, the U.S.D.A. allowed schools to drop the product,
and several supermarket chains stopped carrying it, shuttering
several of the plants that produce it. Shortly after this episode, I
received a panicky phone call from someone in the food industry, a
buyer for one of the big food-service companies. After venting about
the "irrationality" of the American consumer, he then demanded to
know: "Who's going to be hit next? It could be any of us."
So it appears the loss of confidence is mutual: the food industry
no longer trusts us, either, which is one reason a label on
genetically modified food is so terrifying: we might react
"irrationally" and decline to buy it.
Millions of Dollars Spent Counteracting Growing Food Awareness
To win back this restive public, Big Food recently began a
multimillion-dollar public-relations campaign, featuring public
"food dialogues," aimed at restoring our faith in the production
methods on which industrial agriculture depends, including
pharmaceuticals used to keep animals healthy and speed their growth;
pesticides and genetically modified seeds; and concentrated animal
feeding operations. The industry has never liked to talk about these
practices which is to say, about how the food we eat is actually
produced but it apparently came to the conclusion that it is
better off telling the story itself rather than letting its critics
do it.
This new transparency goes only so far, however. The industry is
happy to boast about genetically engineered crops in the elite
precincts of the op-ed and business pages as a technology needed
to feed the world, combat climate change, solve Africa's problems,
etc. but still would rather not mention it to the consumers who
actually eat the stuff.
Presumably that silence owes to the fact that, to date,
genetically modified foods don't offer the eater any benefits
whatsoever only a potential, as yet undetermined risk. So how
irrational would it be, really, to avoid them?
Surely this explains why Monsanto and its allies have fought the
labeling of genetically modified food so vigorously since 1992, when
the industry managed to persuade the Food and Drug Administration
over the objection of its own scientists that the new crops were
"substantially equivalent" to the old and so did not need to be
labeled, much less regulated. This represented a breathtaking
exercise of both political power (the F.D.A. policy was co-written
by a lawyer whose former firm worked for Monsanto) and product
positioning: these new crops were revolutionary enough (a "new
agricultural paradigm," Monsanto said) to deserve patent protection
and government support, yet at the same time the food made from them
was no different than it ever was, so did not need to be labeled.
It's worth noting that ours was one of only a very few
governments ever sold on this convenient reasoning: more than 60
other countries have seen fit to label genetically modified food,
including those in the European Union, Japan, Russia and China.
To prevent the United States from following suit, Monsanto and
DuPont, the two leading merchants of genetically modified seed, have
invested more than $12 million to defeat Prop 37. They've been
joined in this effort by the Grocery Manufacturers Association,
whose president declared at a meeting last July that defeating Prop
37 would be the group's top priority for 2012. Answering the call,
many of America's biggest food and beverage makers including
PepsiCo, Nestlι, Coca-Cola and General Mills have together ponied
up tens of millions of dollars to, in effect, fight transparency
about their products.
What is the Fight Over GM Food Labeling REALLY About?
Americans have been eating genetically engineered food for 18
years, and as supporters of the technology are quick to point out,
we don't seem to be dropping like flies. But they miss the point.
The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety
or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The
fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol
of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate
control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for
consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of
pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of
seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of
humanity depends.
These are precisely the issues that have given rise to the
so-called food movement.
Yet that movement has so far had more success in building an
alternative food chain than it has in winning substantive changes
from Big Food or Washington. In the last couple of decades, a new
economy of farmers' markets, community-supported agriculture (also
known as farm shares) and sustainable farming has changed the way
millions of Americans eat and think about food. From this
perspective, the food movement is an economic and a social movement,
and as such has made important gains. People by the millions have
begun, as the slogan goes, to vote with their forks in favor of more
sustainably and humanely produced food, and against agribusiness.
But does that kind of vote constitute a genuine politics? Yes and
no.
It's easy to dismiss voting with your fork as merely a lifestyle
choice, and an elite one at that. Yet there is a hopeful kind of
soft politics at work here, as an afternoon at any of America's
7,800-plus farmers' markets will attest. Money-for-food is not the
only transaction going on at the farmers' markets; indeed, it may be
the least of it. Neighbors are talking to neighbors. Consumers meet
producers. (Confirming the obvious, one social scientist found that
people have 10 times as many conversations at the farmers' market as
they do at the supermarket.) City meets country. Kids discover what
food is. Activists circulate petitions. The farmers' market has
become the country's liveliest new public square, an outlet for our
communitarian impulses and a means of escaping, or at least
complicating, the narrow role that capitalism usually assigns to us
as "consumers."
At the farmers' market, we are consumers, yes, but at the same
time also citizens, neighbors, parents and cooks. In voting with our
food dollars, we enlarge our sense of our "interests" from the usual
concern with a good value to, well, a concern with values.
This is no small thing; it has revitalized local farming and
urban communities and at the same time raised the bar on the food
industry, which now must pay attention (or at least lip service) to
things like sustainable farming and the humane treatment of animals.
Yet this sort of soft politics, useful as it may be in building new
markets and even new forms of civil society, has its limits. Not
everyone can afford to participate in the new food economy. If the
food movement doesn't move to democratize the benefits of good food,
it will be and will deserve to be branded as elitist.
From Soft to Hard Politics
That's why, sooner or later, the food movement will have to
engage in the hard politics of Washington of voting with votes,
not just forks. This is an arena in which it has thus far been much
less successful. It has won little more than crumbs in the most
recent battle over the farm bill (which every five years sets
federal policy for agriculture and nutrition programs), a few
improvements in school lunch and food safety and the symbol of an
organic garden at the White House. The modesty of these achievements
shouldn't surprise us: the food movement is young and does not yet
have its Sierra Club or National Rifle Association, large membership
organizations with the clout to reward and punish legislators.
Thus while Big Food may live in fear of its restive consumers,
its grip on Washington has not been challenged. Yet.
Next month in California, a few million people will vote with
their votes on a food issue. Already, Prop 37 has ignited precisely
the kind of debate about the risks and benefits of genetically
modified food; about transparency and the consumer's right to know
that Monsanto and its allies have managed to stifle in Washington
for nearly two decades.
If Prop 37 passes, and the polls suggest its chances are good,
then that debate will most likely go national and a new political
dynamic will be set in motion.
It's hard to predict exactly how things will play out if Prop 37
is approved. Expect the industry to first try to stomp out the
political brush fire by taking the new California law to court on
the grounds that a state cannot pre-empt a federal regulation. One
problem with that argument is that, thanks to the bio-tech
industry's own lobbying prowess, there is no federal regulation on
labeling, only an informal ruling, and therefore nothing to
pre-empt. (I believe this is what is meant by being hoist with your
own petard.)
To avoid having to slap the dread letters on their products, many
food companies will presumably reformulate their products with
non-G.M. ingredients, creating a new market for farmers and for
companies selling non-G.M. seed. The solidarity of Monsanto and
companies like Coca-Cola which reaps no benefit from using G.M.
corn in its corn syrup might then quickly crumble. Rather than
deal with different labeling laws in different states, food makers
would probably prefer to negotiate a single national label on G.M.
foods. Consumer groups like the Just Label It campaign, which has
collected 1.2 million signatures on a petition to force the F.D.A.
to label G.M. foods, thus far to no avail, would suddenly find
themselves with a seat at the table and a strong political hand.
Time to Prove the 'Real Food' Movement is Real
One person in Washington who would surely take note of the
California vote is President Obama. During the 2008 campaign, he
voiced support for many of the goals of the food movement, including
the labeling of G.M. food. ("We'll let folks know whether their food
has been genetically modified," he declared in an Iowa speech in
2007, "because Americans should know what they're buying.") As
president he has failed to keep that promise, but he has taken some
positive steps: his U.S.D.A. has done much to nurture the local-food
economy, for example. Perhaps most important, Michelle Obama began a
national conversation about food and health soft politics, yes,
but these often help prepare the soil for the other kind.
Yet on the hard issues, the ones that challenge
agribusiness-as-usual, President Obama has so far declined to spend
his political capital and on more than one occasion has taken
Monsanto's side. He has treated the food movement as a sentiment
rather than a power, and who can blame him?
Until now. Over the last four years I've had occasion to speak to
several people who have personally lobbied the president on various
food issues, including G.M. labeling, and from what I can gather,
Obama's attitude toward the food movement has always been: What
movement? I don't see it. Show me. On Nov. 6, the voters of
California will have the opportunity to do just that.
About the Author
Michael Pollan is the author of ''Cooked: A Natural History of
Transformation,'' which will be published in April by Penguin
Press."
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