"Food" v. "Environment"

I've been stewing over this article for days. In short, Time Magazine claims that the environmental movement is dying off and being supplanted by the food movement: You blew your chance, environmentalism. Screw off. Long live the food movement! To quote:

Even as traditional environmentalism struggles, another movement is rising in its place, aligning consumers, producers, the media and even politicians. It's the food movement, and if it continues to grow it may be able to create just the sort of political and social transformation that environmentalists have failed to achieve in recent years.

Part of me wants to celebrate the fact that a mainstream publication like Time is trumpeting the food movement's broad success... while my earnest inner hippie wants to muster a flustered defense of the environmental/green movement, and the (occasionally pedantic) stickler in me wants to split hairs. Part of me just wants to stomp my foot, because dammit didn't we already have this conversation back in 2004?

Let's go with splitting hairs for now. (I already covered the foot stomping IRL several days ago.) You can't talk about a rising food movement supplanting a dying environmental movement, because there is no precise distinction between the two. To do so is both inaccurate and ahistorical: concerns around food have been embedded in progressive politics generally and in environmentalism specifically for a long time.

"Environmentalism can trace its origins to the establishment of America's first national parks in 1899, but until recently, food wasn't really on the radar for progressives, beyond the mission of coping with world hunger," claims the author. This is patently untrue. What about organics? What about the back-to-the-land movement? Biodynamic agriculture has been around since the 1920s. Rodale started Organic Gardening in 1942. DDT, environmentalism's Ur-issue, was after all an agricultural pesticide. Here in SF, the seminal 1960s progressive group the Diggers were very focused on food. Chez Panisse opened in 1971, spawning California cuisine in all its green glory. In fact, of the progressive young people that migrated to rural areas in the '60s and '70s to take up small-scale organic farming, many are still at it today; they are the foremost heroes and instigators of what might be termed the modern food movement.

The Time article mentions Shellenberger & Nordhaus' much-debated 2004 essay The Death of Environmentalism, but then goes on to use the terms "environmental movement" and "green movement" interchangeably without comment. But (as flawed as it was) the Shellenberger-Nordhaus essay was notable for being the loudest manifestation of a greater identity crisis and debate within the environmental movement, which was fomenting at that time on multiple fronts. Coming off of the widespread policy failure that was the 1990s, environmental advocates in the early oughts began to both consciously evolve their own terms and to align themselves more explicitly with broader progressive issues. Green politics (with a capital G) had long been associated with environmentalism, but "green" now increasingly became the term of choice (along with sustainability).

So today the language and the focus has changed a bit, sure. But that is nothing new! The current prominence of good food is environmentalism's success (or one of them). Let's not obscure the complexity of this history for the sake of a good headline.

Local v. Organic? Some thoughts on the semantics of good food advocacy.

My boss at the sustainable ag nonprofit that pays my rent recently sent out an email to my program team that essentially posed the above question. As he put it, how and why should you make the choice for local, non-organic produce from Bentwood versus say organic from Chile? He's a bit of firebrand and a bit of an anomaly in the nonprofit world for his brassy Brooklyn attitude and for-profit professional background. He's new to the organization and the sector, and was seemingly brought on board to shake things up around here (generally a good thing).

Anyway, no one responded to his email for several weeks, until I basically replied with the below. This silence was less an indication that my team hadn't thought of it so much as a sign that we'd all thought about it too much to wrestle those thoughts into email format. Because it's a good question, albeit one that typically gets asked by those who are just beginning to investigate the wide and noisy realm of good food...

Local & organic are two very different sets of criteria (apples and oranges, so to speak), and each is a messy collection of factors and considerations that are in turn embedded in a hugely complex issue. So I think we -- as in, local food advocates -- should actually make a point of not answering the question of "local v. organic" whenever it's stated simplistically. We should push back on that and tease out the issues.

It's largely a matter of semantics, so the first step in any such argument would be to define the terms. Are we talking about Certified Organic? Certified by whom? And what about "local"? When we say local we don't just mean produced within 'x' number of miles. Our organization, and the local food movement at large, are advocating for a lot more than a reduction in food miles. We're advocating for a holistic system of good food and sustainable agriculture. I don't know of a single player in the local food movement that is only concerned with food miles, which is why anti-locavore arguments (such as those put forth by James McWilliams) tend to be mere straw men.

The implied attributes of "local food" are many: that it comes from a "small family farm", that the farm employs growing practices that are "sustainable", "natural", "environmentally sound", that the labor practices aren't exploitative, that meat is from animals that are "humanely" raised.

"Organic" used to imply a lot of those attributes as well, but the codification of that word into the label we have today meant that most of that was whittled away. "Organic" has been defined down to something very specific and measurable, for better or for worse. But as advocates rather than certifiers, we have the luxury of defining the word "local" out rather than defining it down. And we should take advantage of that luxury, because all of these sub-issues under the greater issue of "sustainable agriculture" (farmworkers rights, ethical animal husbandry, corporate ownership, etc.) are going to have their day in the sun very soon, and it will be hard to remain relevant if we stand for just one sliver of the larger picture.

So then the question becomes even harder to answer as stated. You can't say "buy local over organic in 'x' and 'y' cases, and buy organic rather than local in 'z' case." You have to ask, "well, in this specific instance, which product meets more of these attributes that we've identified as good?" And when we talk about local food generally, we need to make explicit that holistic picture of a distributed, small scale, equitable, healthy, sustainable, beyond-organic food and farming system that we are all working so incredibly hard to build. The Ethicurean, for example, promotes the idea of SOLE food: sustainable, organic, local, and ethical. (I don't necessary support such a deepening of alphabet soup syndrome, but the idea is good, I think.) If we don't make these things explicit, then I fear the wonderful, radical idea of "local food" will be captured by corporate marketers trying to maintain the status quo. It will be defined for us, defined down, and driven out of usefulness. And then we'll have to find a new word and start over.

GMOs Can't Feed the World

Every Thanksgiving meal entails at least one uncomfortable conversation. That seems given, given the company. Mine was a dispute over GMOs with my uncle, who was hosting. He's my mother's youngest brother, the college-educated one, who goes out of his way to distance himself from his uncouth, uncultured siblings back in Hawaii and the dark cave of Filipino-Catholic superstition from whence they all came. He frustrates his pious, ridiculously hardworking mother to the point of tears and virtually worships Richard Dawkins (case in point: his honeymoon was spent in the Galapagos on a tour led by Mr. God Delusion himself). Now he has his own gene sequencing start-up. I should have known what was in this can of worms, but for some reason the discussion caught me off guard.

For one thing, there are plenty of long-winded and ideological arguments out there that convincingly make the case against large-scale use of GMOs in food crops. Likewise there are plenty of straightforward facts and considerations that go into such arguments, but I don't know of anything or anyone that employs those facts in a way that is quotable, concise, and to-the-point. On the other hand, the big corporate players have their messaging down pat, and that message is repeated so often that it's accepted by the public as virtually self-evident.

I stumbled through the conversation on Thanksgiving. And then afterward I had to put my thoughts down in an email, since it bothered me deeply that someone so committed to the scientific process and the authority of scientific consensus would trumpet the tired and misguided notion that "we need GMOs to feed the world." This is what I told him, give or take...

The single greatest argument against large-scale implementation of GMOs is the existence of a landmark UN report that no one except sustainable ag activists has ever heard of. It's called the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), and it's essentially the result of a four-year intergovernmental process modeled after the IPCC. It was initially commissioned by the World Bank and co-sponsored by a bunch of impressive acronyms (UNEP, UNESCO, WHO, et al), and involved 900 experts and 110 countries. The goal was to assess the state of ag science and technology with respect to reducing global poverty and hunger, increasing public health, and facilitating sustainability. Particular attention was paid to the developing (read: hungry) world.

The IAASTD was ratified in April '08 in South Africa, but on this side of the pond it pretty much sank like a stone media-wise. This was at least in part because a number of developed nations (US, Canada, and Australia most notably) refused to ratify the final product due to its negative take on biotech as a real solution. Instead of relying on and investing heavily on biotechnology, the report calls for supporting small-scale organic farming techniques, improving physical infrastructure, providing low interest loans to farmers, and strengthening fair trade practices.

I don't have a problem with biotechnology as such. I could even foresee a time somewhere down the line when it could prove a vital piece of the sustainability puzzle. But I do have a problem with the current application of the technology within the agricultural sector and with the way the industry is structured -- which largely dictates that application.

The whole 'we need GMOs to feed the world argument' is frankly a bullshit PR line. It's based on a misstatement of the problem, namely: we don't have enough food to feed the world. We grow plenty of food. But most of it gets fed straight into an industrial system that rewards low-nutrient, high-input monoculture and drives the production of crops destined for cows and cars rather than people. The problem is already consolidation and homogenization, which in this case biotech only exacerbates. We need place-specific, bottom-up, distributed, and diverse solutions.

Biotech as it applies to food just isn't field-ready yet. GMOs haven't been adequately tested, and what has been done suggests that they may not be as environmentally benign as was previously supposed. That, coupled with the enormous power wielded by key industry players (you know who I mean) against efforts at building sustainable food systems, means that GMOs not only have very little chance of 'feeding the world' but also a very real capacity to cause serious harm.

There are lot of people out there making this argument well, if less succinctly. Here's an interesting article from more of a 'food sovereignty' perspective, primarily critiquing Gate's AGRA efforts. And another one discussing the withdrawal of Monsanto & Syngenta from the IAASTD process.