A Sweeping History of What We Eat
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“Intended or not,” Mark Bittman writes, “the tragic result of the push
to standardized monoculture was that scientists and researchers became
allied not with farmers but with bankers, equipment manufacturers, and
sellers of seeds and chemicals.”
“Intended or not,” Mark Bittman writes, “the tragic result of the push
to standardized monoculture was that scientists and researchers became
allied not with farmers but with bankers, equipment manufacturers, and
sellers of seeds and chemicals.”Credit...Burcu Avsar
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ByTed Genoways
* NYT, Feb. 22, 2021
ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, JUNK
A History of Food, From Sustainable to Suicidal*
*By Mark Bittman
384 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.
Mark Bittman’s latest book arrives at a momentous time. In the opening
weeks of his term, President Biden has not only rejoined the Paris
climate accord, announced new emissions reduction targets, and canceled
permits to build the Keystone XL pipeline and drill in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, but also made climate change an essential
consideration in foreign policy and national security, directed federal
agencies to invest in communities of color that are bearing the brunt of
climate change, and promised to address the impact of this crisis on
immigration and the economy.
But there is at least one area where Biden’s climate critics remain
skeptical: his approach to reforming the food system. Tom Vilsack, the
nominee to head the Department of Agriculture, is not just a holdover
from the era of Barack Obama but a Clinton-style, pro-corporate
moderate. Vilsack has promised to tap the U.S.D.A.’s Commodity Credit
Corporation to encourage sustainable and climate-conscious growing
methods, but he has said little about how he plans to convince farmers
and ranchers in threadbare and dying rural communities that now is the
time for big change.
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So Bittman’s “Animal, Vegetable, Junk,” a comprehensive treatise on
humanity’s relationship to food, matches our moment — evincing a
necessary sense of urgency but also making no bones about the challenge
before us. “You can’t talk about agriculture without talking about the
environment,” he writes. “You can’t talk about animal welfare without
talking about the welfare of food workers, and you can’t talk about food
workers without talking about income inequality, racism and
immigration.” Every issue touches another.
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Just recognizing the awe-inspiring scale of the problem has persuaded
most writers to take on some narrower slice and go deep. But Bittman
clearly relishes the mad ambition of his undertaking (“perhaps too
ambitious,” he says in a sly aside, “you’ll be the judge of that”),
often buoying the reader across waves of information with the sheer
momentum of his narrative. If it feels a bit breathless at first,
Bittman settles into his story soon enough, delivering a clear and
compelling compendium of modern agriculture.
Image
In particular, his rendering of the early mechanization of the American
farm is epic and engrossing. We feel swept up in the promise and
possibility of all that new technology, so much so that the turn from
agriculture to agribusiness, though we know it’s coming, still delivers
a crushing blow. “It wasn’t an entirely cynical process, and some might
even call it an innocent one,” Bittman writes, but “intended or not, the
tragic result of the push to standardized monoculture was that
scientists and researchers became allied not with farmers but with
bankers, equipment manufacturers, and sellers of seeds and chemicals.”
This is a keen insight — and it points to what may be Bittman’s greatest
strength. He doesn’t lapse into the polemic of some policy wonks who too
often want to make every error seem foreseeable or the product of some
unforgivable flaw. His careful delineation of the difference between the
ignorant and ruthlessly statist food policies of Joseph Stalin and the
American-style “laissez-faire attitude toward unchecked
corporatization,” for example, is extremely welcome. Likewise, he
recognizes that the development of canned food and later fast food was
an outgrowth of the increasing importance of women in the workplace
after World War II and the large numbers of middle- and upper-class
women who were, for the first time, “doing the majority of domestic
labor themselves.”
These nuances not only allow us to approach policy issues with more
complexity, they also temper our moral certainty. By the time Bittman
reaches his final section, simply titled “Change,” he has earned the
right to damn the evident flaws of our system. He has the wisdom not to
dwell on the shortsighted ambition that brought us here but rather to
offer an equally evenhanded assessment of several failed attempts to
undo our errors. “Humans’ impact on the environment is often
unintentional and unforeseen,” Bittman writes, “but we must still
recognize it and act accordingly.” In the end, he arrives at a place
that may be familiar to readers of Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s
Dilemma,” Raj Patel’s “Stuffed and Starved” or Tom Philpott’s recent
“Perilous Bounty”/—/that the only solution is to focus on sustainability.
Still, I’m freshly persuaded by Bittman’s framing. The food system, he
notes, isn’t broken. In fact, it works almost perfectly for large seed
and chemical companies, and it “also works well enough for around a
third of the world’s people, for whom food simply appears, to be eaten
at will.” But that means that change will be resisted by those with the
most power and will be inconvenient for the majority of Americans too.
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So it’s going to require some poetry in the early stages of mobilizing
the public, and then, it’s going to require an equal measure of bold and
sure-footed action. As Bittman clearly shows, we don’t have the luxury
of making well-meaning missteps or settling for half-measures. The time
for big change is now.
Ted Genoways is the author, most recently, of “This Blessed Earth: A
Year in the Life of an American Family Farm.”
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