2000: A Food Odyssey

The choices made one hundred years ago determined the agricultural developments of the last century. That century was marked by dramatic changes in the quality of our food, how our food is produced, and the nature of our communities:

-- In the last century, we in the US have gone from half of our population involved in agriculture in 1900, to just over two percent of the population involved in agriculture as of 1990. The average farmer is 55 years old.

-- The farmer's share of the food dollar has dropped from 60% of each dollar spent in 1950, to just over two percent by 1998. (For every dollar spent on food, the farmer receives about two cents.)

-- Animals have been replaced by tractors. The fertility they once provided now comes in the form of petroleum-derived chemicals. Now animals are raised in confinement, often stacked on top of each other, and their manure is a toxic concern.

-- Farmer plant breeders have been replaced by experts. Over 97% of the vegetable varieties we knew in 1903 are now gone. 87% of the pear varieties, and 82% of the apples, are now lost forever. Now our seeds feature nifty gene-spliced tricks to turn off traits if royalties aren't paid or if a certain chemical is not applied by the farmer.

-- Farmland is disappearing at the rate of thousands of acres per day throughout the United States. Topsoil is disappearing at a rate of fifteen inches per acre per year in some of our most productive farmland. Organic matter is disappearing at a rate of several tons per acre per tillage event.

-- Obesity is the new form of malnutrition. The vitamin and mineral content of some of our food has declined 800% since 1914. As our soils are depleted, so is our food, and our bodies struggle to eat enough to survive.

-- Insect species, fish species, bird species, and plant species are disappearing from the landscape, as the average fruit or vegetable travels over 1,400 well-paved miles to reach our table.

-- Our aquifers are being drained, our groundwater is contaminated with chemicals, our food is full of carcinogens, and our soils are laden with the residues of DDT and other noxious agricultural toxins.

Just what was it that created this breadbasket of abundance and devastation? How did we arrive at this place, and where are we headed?

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mechanical, chemical, and biological advances allowed us to indulge our love of technology and our paradigm of bigger is better. The internal combustion engine, new farm equipment, chemical fertilizers and crop protectants, hybrid seed varieties, the Green Revolution, the Interstate Highway Act, chemical food preservatives, mergers and acquisitions all led to and helped fulfill the thundering cry of Richard Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz: "Get Big or Get Out!"

But losses in fertility, masked for a while by seeds bred to respond to petroleum inputs, are now obvious. Pesticide use continues to increase, while crop losses to insects and pests remain constant. Tractors get bigger and average farm size continues to double as farmers buy out their neighbors, and bankers become the decisionmakers in modern agriculture.

All of our "progress" is hailed in the call for "Feeding Our Burgeoning Masses." Yet it now takes eight apples instead of one to keep the doctor away. Our agricultural crisis is not missed by our scientists and policymakers, and they are struggling to find the next "Silver Bullet" to fuel our global competitiveness.

The most recent candidate for "Savior" is Biotechnology, or more specifically, genetic engineering. Now we can have pigs and broccoli in the same bite, crops that rely on chemicals in order to flower, and plants that will not harvest the energy from the sun until the appropriate royalties are paid. A new generation of Pinkertons are chasing down the last farmer scabs who continue to save their own seed. The Supreme Court has embraced the notion that genetic resources should be owned by the companies that discover them, ushering in a new wave of claim staking. Now the "Gene Rush," not the Gold Rush, promises to deliver the raw resources of the new economic epoch, as we proceed from the Industrial Age to the Biotech Age.

We are at a crossroads: It is time to choose the silver bullet, or to not shoot. In the wake of our agricultural progress there has risen a brave and solid contingent of organic farmers and gardeners. Though only a fraction of our total food system, the organic community has embraced the woolly mastodon, and found allies in "dirt," "shit," and "pests." Rather than devise new methods of eradication and extermination, these growers have found answers in the soil, fertility in manure, and made allies with bugs and weeds. The result is a revitalized food system full of nutrition, beneficial to the landscape, and engaging to our communities.

As we consider the paths taken in the past century we should pause for a moment of reflection to ask ourselves about the quality of our food, how it is produced, and the effect it has on our communities. Before we launch the next silver bullet we should ask what we are shooting. And when we spend our next food dollar we must remember that with that small act we choose not only our own health, but the health of our community and our world.

JJ Haapala is editor of In Good Tilth, from which this article is adapted. Contact Oregon Tilth, 1860 Hawthorne NE, Ste. 200, Salem, OR 97303, (503) 378-0690, [email protected]