Organic, local, and slow
A guest issue by Samuel Barkin
I met Sammy Barkin because he ate at my restaurant. At the time, he and his partner Beth DeSombre had just published on a book about fish and fisheries and were working on a second. The subject of this issue is taken from the title of a talk Sammy gave last year, which was so clear and so insightful that I’ve wanted to feature it here since starting this newsletter. He tells me it’s his first foray into “writing for a popular audience”, which might be the first time anyone has described this publication as “popular.”
A few weeks ago Tse Wei started a post with a link to a critique of, among others, Michael Pollan. Pollan discusses a number of issues with the contemporary food system, from monocultures of #2 industrial corn to the artificiality of McDonald’s. Pollan’s answer to the problems of our food system, at its most basic, is “eat food.” By food he means fresh, whole, minimally-processed, and ideally prepared at home. As Tse Wei has already pointed out [Ed: To be fair, it’s the authors of Pressure Cooker who point this out, I was merely writing about their book, which you ought to read.], this answer is problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is that many people simply don’t have the resources to follow it. But there’s another problem with this answer as well; it isn’t clear what the question is.
Pollan’s is not the only answer out there to the questions we have about our food system. Others include organic food, local food, and slow food. Organic is supported by formal government standards. Local isn’t, but is if anything even more commonly seen as a claim in restaurants and high-end supermarkets. Slow hasn’t really caught on yet in the United States but is a well-organized movement in Europe; it even has its own university in Italy, near Turin. When I talk to students about the food system (I’m a college professor, which explains the unfortunately pedantic writing style; I occasionally teach courses on the politics of food), they often talk about organic, local, and slow as if they’re interchangeable, as if they’re all parts of one big solution to solving the problems of the contemporary global food systems.
But they aren’t interchangeable. In fact, they’re answers to three distinct and different questions. Organic is the answer to the problem of chemicals in food. Organic standards distinguish between ‘natural’ fertilizers, pesticides, etc., that are deemed acceptable, and artificial ones that are not. Local is the answer to the industrialization of food production, the focus on planting monocultures designed for efficient production rather than taste or nutrition. In an industrial food system crops are planted intensively where they can be grown most efficiently, and then shipped to where eaters are. The food, itself, has to be made in a way that can withstand long-distance transport and consumption long after it was harvested, changing the character of what we eat. Local food has to involve a broader range of crops, because local is about not being shipped far. Also, local means that food is more likely to come from an identifiable farmer, and therefore less likely to be farmed to a narrow set of monocultural standards.
Finally, slow is the answer to the commercialization of the food system. While the Slow Food Movement has yet to really catch on in the US, much of what Pollan is talking about when he tells us to “eat food” is saying the same thing; take care in the preparation of food, and know the food you eat. This isn’t about farming. It’s about what happens to the food between farm and table. Commercialization is the process by which food companies that are the intermediaries between farm and table find ever more ways to process food, to “add value” in the capitalist sense of the term, because the more processed food is, the more of the price can be captured by processor rather than farmer or retailer. Processors are in this sense being driven by a profit motive rather than by demand, and often need to create the demand for the processing they want to do (think packaged apple slices, which, being sliced, need to be protected by preservatives, rather than apples; or processed cheese slices with 17 ingredients rather than cheese with 3). Commercialization is in essence about replacing expensive ingredients and processes with cheaper ones that create a simulacrum of the same product.
Commercialization, industrialization, and chemicalization (yes, it’s a real word) don’t necessarily happen together. Agriculture in the Soviet Union was heavily industrialized but the food system wasn’t particularly commercialized. Much of the organic food to be found in supermarkets is also fairly industrialized, meaning that de-chemicalization does not mean deindustrialization. And the green revolution in places like India has introduced widespread use of chemicals but has not for the most part resulted in concomitant levels of industrialization or commercialization.
Even so, is there any harm in conflating organic, local, and slow? Yes. It stops us from thinking about what our priorities in the food system are, and what a workable food system in a world of more than seven billion people would look like. Because not all of our food can be organic, local, and slow.
By way of example, a few weeks ago I found myself at the farmers’ market in Santa Barbara, California, at the peak of the local strawberry season (which, granted, lasts half the year). Several stands, not surprisingly, were selling similar-looking strawberries at similar prices. But one stand was selling theirs for twice the price. I wandered by and asked about it. The folks there told me that theirs was a different varietal, and that they would be the best strawberries I’d ever tasted. They gave me a sample. It was in fact easily the best strawberry I’d ever tasted. So I bought a pint, for $8. All the strawberries in the pint were just as good as the sample.
These berries were in ways the epitome of the contemporary food movement. They were organic and local, a simple unprocessed piece of food grown for taste rather than efficiency (although I don’t have any information about the working conditions of the people who picked them). And they cost three or four times more than strawberries in a supermarket. Artificial strawberry flavoring, meanwhile, costs just pennies to flavor the same volume of processed food as a pint of strawberries would.
In other words, some of us some of the time can get food that’s fully organic, local, and slow, but much of the world can’t get it, and couldn’t afford it if they could get it. It’s isn’t clear that we could grow enough organic, local, and slow food to feed almost 8 billion people. This leaves the question of what we want our food system to look like; how we want our food to be grown and processed. The answer involves trade-offs among nutrition, taste, cost, convenience, and accessibility, among other things. Thinking of organic, local, and slow as undifferentiated measures of food goodness doesn’t allow us to make those trade-offs in a thoughtful way.
This is my sister scraping up the last bits of last night’s ikan bakar (Spanish Mackerel, rubbed with sambal tumis, wrapped in a banana leaf then grilled directly on a gas burner). It was the first meal I cooked for her - specifically for her, rather than the family at large - in as long as I can remember. We have blood deep memories of our mother and aunts and grandmother sucking on fish bones, building little cairns of translucent needles beside their plates as they brought another dinner to a close. The ritual was an expression of tenderness, for the fish’s fillets had first gone to our father and to us; but it was also an expression of their regality, a demonstration that they could both serve the family and keep the best parts for themselves, that they knew how to live and we, children, still did not.
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Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. It’s socialist at heart, but it’s not this socialist every week. And as always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
best,
tw
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