Barbara Kingsolver contributed an op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday about dirty work. She argues there, as she does in her other writings and as scores of other agrarian-minded thinkers and practitioners have argued, that personal and civic virtue can be found from getting your hands dirty, from literally working to grow your food and be connected to the land as a consequence. In this, she argues against the grain of common sentiment: "My generation has absorbed an implicit hierarchy of values in which working the soil is poor people's toil."
I was at first put off by the piece, reading it as the opportunity of a first-world upper middle-class writer to laud the virtue of dirty work. As is often pointed out, yes, wouldn't it be great if we could all go back to the land...but there isn't enough land for all of us, we'd destroy it if there was, and we'd end up without the ability to feed ourselves. This is the basis for the organic-v-industrial arguments that are starting to spread, the ones along the lines of an either/or: 'we can all eat if the food is industrially produced or we can all eat if it's organic, non-chemical and not super-mechanized.' So as with this research (and this post; and this reply), which looked at competing evaluations of recent empirical studies on which food system is better, we get funneled down into a debate about how to feed the world.
I find those arguments in part misplaced. The non-industrial system is not meant to replace the industrial one. And even so, the non-industrial system offers numerous advantages that go beyond fuel usage alone and that go beyond calculations of efficiency. As well, the ways we produce and consume our food are far more than subjects of material production--these are cultural arguments through and through, in a number of ways. One can't easily calculate, quantify, and then compare such cultural variables.
Fortunately, once into Kingsolver's op-ed I found that such was not her point anyway. Instead, with reference to Vandana Shiva, she helped clarify a point I try to make frequently to students, which is that we're dealing with more than just farmers when we're dealing with the technological system of food production. Michael Pollan has said a few times that if we called the Farm Bill the Food Bill people would be more interested, they'd realize that it was about something relevant to their everyday lives, food. (And I've noted him saying that a few times a few times myself.) Kingsolver's point, or my reading of it from Vandana Shiva's quotes, is consistent with that--talking about who farms and why is not just a conversation about those with their hands dirty, it's about the entire network of associated workers and agents who make the food system viable.
The common stat is that it now only takes 2% of the population to feed the rest. For many, this is the history of agriculture, industrialization, and modern society in one sentence--look how far we've come. Mechanization, automation, the green revolution, chemical inputs, genetic modification...
But that's baloney.
2% may be farmers, working the land as their direct occupation, but, as Shiva calculates, probably half the population is devoted to building our food system in some way or another. "[N]o matter what, whether the system is highly technological or much more simple, about 50 to 60 percent of a population has to be involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture did not 'save' anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service."
Earlier in the op-ed Kingsolver was set off by this comment:
A woman confided to me at a New York dinner party, "Honestly, who has time to cook anymore? My daughter will probably grow up wondering what a kitchen is used for."
Follow that line and it might unfold the entire hidden fabric of our food system that Shiva is speaking to. Underlying the New York dinner partier's comment is the sense that eventually we'll all be eating at restaurants or with pre-cooked meals. This doesn't mean we no longer eat food--because we no longer have kitchens. It means our food gets to us in different ways. It helps us see, perhaps, that truckers, grocery store checkout clerks, stockboys, restaurant waitresses, short-order cooks, fancy chefs, the Food Network, refrigerator manufacturers, microwave producers, and on and on are all part of the means by which we get our food. They are all part of the system of food production, distribution, and consumption. They don't get their hands dirty in the fields themselves; they are removed from the land. But they are still part of the food system that begins in the dirt. And they certainly comprise more than 2% of the population. Consider your Ziploc bags and then think how they are part of a food system. Then think about how much of the plastics industry is devoted to food - packaging, shipping, storing, marketing, etc. Plus the carton, the box, the microwaveable plate your Lean Cuisine lunch comes in. Or the valet, coatcheck girl, and happy-birthday singer at Olive Garden. Or the people working to produce pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, their managers, the engineers, and the chemists and more who come to understand how all of this works at a molecular and genetic level. They're all working in the food production system.
2% of the population? Not so.
The payout for seeing the broader system is that we undermine the easy claims of the pro-chemical Green Revolution advocates or those who pursue an agricultural argument based on the binary of "all industrial' or "all organic."
Kingsolver again:
Since the 1970s, while global grain production has tripled, an estimated 30 percent of the world's farmland has become too damaged to use. Also shrinking are the fossil fuel reserves for a system that requires petroleum to run the farm machines, serve as the chemical base of fertilizers, fuel the milling and processing plants and drive the food to widely dispersed consumers. Shiva puts it this way: "The new modified crops brought to us by the Green Revolution were described as 'green oil of the future.' Ironically, that has turned out to be correct in a way, as the Green Revolution makes a renewable resource -- food -- into a nonrenewable one, just like petroleum."
We're all connected. It's just that instead of working to produce that food, we work to come up with ways to convince ourselves we're disconnected from it.
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"A woman confided to me at a New York dinner party, "Honestly, who has time to cook anymore? My daughter will probably grow up wondering what a kitchen is used for."
My first response was, what a typical stupid New Yorker attitude. But in fact, there's no question that nationally, the percentage of America's food dollars going to restaurants has increased substantially in recent decades, and in supermarkets much more space is devoted to prepared/instant meals.
We don't have time to cook, but we have time to watch TV, play videogames, read blogs on the Internet, go to dinner parties to eat food likely prepared by a catering service?
To some extent it is not so much about the time and effort it takes, which is not really that much if you know what you're doing, but on the value we place on the work itself. Which is very little. Personally, I like to cook; I get a lot of satisfaction from making things that are good and other people will enjoy. But the message you get from the food producers is that cooking is a waste of time; convenient, easy, and quick is the name of the game, so you can get on to doing more "important" things. Concerns of quality, health, and the hidden costs of production are ignored.
I don't think it's necessary for everyone to "get back to the land" and get their hands dirty, but we've certainly made it easy for large numbers of people to be completely disconnected from any actually productive process. All of their earthly needs just magically appear in stores to be purchased.
I don't really see the point of thinking of people that don't cook for themselves as lazy or detached somehow. Living on a grad student stipend, I eat many of my meals out - often local, organicy-type places - at the cost of not being able to buy large chunks of plastic and SUVs, and I think I'd rather see my money spent on quality food that's prepared for me than about anything else. It's easy to romanticize a time when we all had stay-home mothers that spent two hours each day preparing dinner, but I don't have a family now. Unless I can round up some friends, I could easily spend an hour and a half planning, buying food, cooking, and doing dishes, and cleaning, all for just myself. At that point it's a simple matter of efficiency.
"Living on a grad student stipend, I eat many of my meals out - often local, organicy-type places..."
Guess things have changed since when I was a grad student. Back then, it was much, much cheaper (and nearly as fast)to prepare meals (either alone or with others) than buy them. Perhaps student stipends are more generous now.
I don't think it was the eating out all the time that makes that NY lady sound detached, it is thinking that her daughter will not know what a kitchen is that makes her detached.
And eating out can be a vibrant part of a 'local' economy. For instance, yesterday I bought 10 tamales from a little old lady on the street corner. Tamales are a local tradition in the Sonoran Desert from early fall until New Years and most people buy them because they take all day to make. A lot of abuelas around here make their Christmas money cooking tamales.
I'm not against restaurants or prepared meals per se; I use them myself. I'm actually a big fan of street carts. I am also not helpless in the kitchen. What makes me mad is not the people use restaurants, what makes me mad is the fact that knowing how to cook is no longer considered a valuable skill in our culture. This is not unrelated to fact that traditionally it was "women's work."
Indeed, in my student days, it was vastly cheaper (still is, really) and faster to prepare my own meals. I did it because i usually couldn't afford to do otherwise. In what way is going out more "efficient"?
Perhaps it was Bernays who turned Adam Smith's productivity into a parasite daisy chain, perhaps it started earlier, but careful purchasing from the bottom of the chain in raw meat and vegetables, will save far more than you will spend working to earn the money to pay for the convenience of not spending that time cooking.
Unless of course you have a favored position in the parasite daisy chain.
In Third World the average rise to minimum 30% peasant agricultural workers and his family produce food for themselves and a half averago or urban villages.Is the other face against industrial agriculture producing foods with high technoloy,many pesticides and polution od environment.Organic agriculture has more future in third world countries.
Adding another grad student perspective to the mix (and maybe my stipend is more generous than in the past), but I eat out a lot too. I think blaming it on laziness is probably fair, at least in my case. That and that I don't like to do it. Of course, I'm usually lazy when it comes to having to do things I don't like. Which explains the pile of laundry building in my room...
I should clarify; I never called it "cheaper", I said that there were trade-offs - most of my other living expenses are very low, so it's simply a decision I make. Obviously ramen is cheaper.
By more efficient, it's simply an economy of scale. Jimmy John's (for an example) makes hundreds of sandwiches every day - they have a whole assembly line and it takes about 15 seconds of human labor to make the sandwich. For me to carefully assemble the ingredients at home, after having bought them, put them away, etc, put them in a container (sometimes separate so tomatoes don't soak bread, etc.), bring them to work, and put it together into a sandwich makes a lot of labor on my part. It's the same reason I don't build my own furniture. I guess it would be cheaper, but sheesh, what a waste of time.
People that like to cook are just often weirdly sanctimonious about it, and I don't get it. It's one thing to take pride in things you do that effect other people - for example, I commute entirely by bike, and I don't feel bad being a little preachy about it - but how to prepare food seems fairly personal, unless you want to get into the origin of the ingredients, and that's independent of whether you cook it yourself.