Cast Your Vote For Better Food And Stronger Communities

No act is more intimate than eating. We place food in our mouths, chew and digest it, transforming it into our own muscle, bone, blood, and energy. Given such unsurpassed intimacy, it’s strange that we think so little about the food we eat and how it is produced.

Modern science is just beginning to understand how much our lack of attention to what we eat creates negative outcomes for our health and the health of our planet.

The chemically engineered food substitutes we have become accustomed to consuming are making us fatter and physically and mentally sicker, unbalancing our planet’s carbon cycle, poisoning our rivers and oceans, depleting our soil and our underground aquifers, and—I would agree with Wendel Berry’s opinion on this—destroying the foundations of our democratic society.

Our only escape from this quandary is to once again cultivate an appreciation for the mysteries of the natural world, the bounty it produces, and those who act as stewards of that bounty.

A Call to Farms, a new book by journalist Jennifer Grayson (which I reviewed here), is a valiant and passionate attempt to reconnect consumers to the wonder of nature by introducing us to small-scale regenerative farmers and ranchers operating with creativity and grit from Oregon to South Carolina.

Grayson’s prose is as inspiring as her book’s titular call for a bloodless revolution. Even if one is not ready to give up one’s management consulting career to farm vegetables (as one featured farmer did), one cannot read this book without rethinking one’s relationship with food, nature, and community.

One might not apply “community” to agricultural pursuits, but Grayson’s book emphasizes its importance and returns to the theme time and again.

Farming and ranching require knowledge, discipline, patience, hard work, and creativity. But even possessing all these attributes—a tall order in itself—is not enough; acting as a successful steward of the land and producing healthy food for others is too great a challenge for any single person to overcome.

Growing food is the task of an entire community—assisting with physically challenging and sometimes monotonous labor, buying locally grown food, and economically rewarding (or at least not punishing) growers.

What can I do to stop climate change?

Buying food from local growers is the most immediate and practical way readers of this column can assist in the gargantuan task of realigning industrial agriculture in a more climate-friendly direction. Every dollar paid to a local grower instead of a national grocery chain is a vote for a more sensible food system, bringing us closer to rebalancing our out-of-kilter carbon cycle.

Which leads to another point that struck me reading Grayson’s book: the difficulty of making money farming or ranching.

The learning process is long, arduous, and often economically risky. The USDA considers anyone farming for less than 10 years a beginning farmer. Ten years is about the same amount of time it takes to train a doctor, but the average annual salary for a doctor (around $250,000 for a specialist) is nearly 10 times higher than that of a farmer (around $30,000).

Since Secretary of Agriculture Butz’s tenure in the early 1970s, Americans have come to believe that cheap food is a Constitutional right, and grower poverty has been exacerbated by USDA policies favoring factory food production.

Herein lies the crux of the problem: “cheap food” does not exist. Food can only be produced cheaply using industrial methods that treat plants, animals, and farmers as mere cogs in a food factory.

Farmers need not learn how to care for their soil and to be sensitive to the fragility of the local ecosystem; they only need to know how to apply for crop insurance and operate machines that distribute synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Chickens do not need space, sunlight or even strength enough to hold their bodies off a CAFO floor; they only need to stay alive long enough to be harvested. Cattle don’t need the grass that their digestive systems are evolutionarily suited to eat; they only need to be pumped full of corn and enough antibiotics to walk under their own power into the slaughterhouse.

In each of these cases, the people and animals involved in the food system pay a cost in poverty, misery, and separation from a meaningful existence, but the largest cost accrues to the ecosystem. Nitrogen fertilizers contaminate our water systems and create enormous dead zones in the ocean. The land turns from a carbon sink into a carbon source, further unbalancing our planet’s carbon cycle.

Walking into a grocery store, I am confronted by a wall of egg cartons ranging in price from $2.79 to $8.99. I am tempted to buy the cheapest dozen because all animals are evolutionarily hard-wired to consume the easiest calories first, which is why predators single out young and weak prey.

Even knowing that the $8.99 carton is the best way for me to vote in favor of a more sensible food system, paying an additional $6.20 per carton goes against a deep evolutionary instinct. However, I understand that if I don’t pay the additional amount, the farmers, animals, and ultimately, our ecosystem will shoulder the costs I defer.

In short, everyone who can afford it should spend more for food grown locally using regenerative methods. This is the most immediate way to make a concrete, beneficial change to our food system while becoming healthier at the same time.

Eating regeneratively grown food improves human health

This leads to the next key theme of Grayson’s book—good food’s effect on one’s own personal health. Grayson’s Chapter 7, entitled “FarmaSIS,” features several stories of African-American growers in the Charleston, South Carolina area, including Germain Jenkins.

Jenkins is the founder of Fresh Future Farm, a nonprofit community farm and sliding-scale grocery store established in an inner-city neighborhood that had not had a grocery store for eleven years before Jenkins created her organization.

Before Jenkins founded her small-scale regenerative farm and store, residents of North Charleston had three choices when it came to meals: chemically engineered food substitutes from a convenience store, fast food (i.e., hastily prepared chemically engineered food substitutes), or a fifteen-mile trip to a supermarket in a wealthier area.

Food deserts have a devastating effect on health outcomes for people living within one. People without access to healthy food disproportionately suffer from cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and hypertension.

Jenkins believes there is a deep, structural connection between the Black community’s separation from the land and the endemic poverty and lack of self-sufficiency in her own neighborhood. Research by National Museum of American History curator Pete Daniel suggests Jenkins’s intuition is correct. In Daniel’s 2013 book, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, Daniel points out that the number of Black-owned farms decreased by 93% from 1940 to 1970 in a process exacerbated by structural White backlash to the Civil Rights movement.

Reading about Jenkins and the dispossession of Black farmers brought me to a surprising conclusion: growing food is a political act.

Growing food is a political act

Growing food implies accepting the responsibility to steward the land on which one lives, taking control of one’s own life and health, and taking responsibility for the well-being of the people consuming the food one has grown. These are all elements of a successful polity: respect for property rights, self-reliance, and a commitment to act as a good neighbor.

If growing food is a political act, each of us has a vote that we cast with the purchases we make and the food we ingest. A vote for regenerative, local food is a vote for health—planetary health, mental and physical health, and the health of our democracy.