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Easy Answers
A deconstruction of four food movements and their vitamin-fortified, locally grown, organic “solutions”
By Emily Garber
It’s impossible to ignore the new wave of food trends.
Walk into the Wedge Co-op on Lyndale and Franklin Avenues, and notice the number of people buying locally produced granola to go with their gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free organic brown rice milk (8 grams of whole grain per serving!).
With obesity rates rising, some are paying more attention to the health implications of their food choices. And until recently, we didn’t usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. But the increasing attention to nutritional and ethical implications of our diets could be due to recent popular interventions like Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation,” Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me,” says Rachel Schurman, University of Minnesota sociology professor. “All this press has been contributing to the sense that something is wrong with the food system,” she says.
But does any one of these ethics- and health-driven food movements have all the answers? Are modern food movements nothing but rhetoric and fancy packaging? How “organic” is your apple? Here’s a reality check on the organic, local, functional, and slow food movements.
The best of intentions
We live in an industrial society and the food business is no exception. Industrial agriculture focuses on cheap production and high yields. Though some are fed up with these ideas, they began with the best of intentions, thanks in part to a graduate from the University of Minnesota.
Norman Borlaug received his doctorate in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942 and went on to create disease-resistant, high-yield varieties of grain that can be globally produced. “He allowed us to produce an amount of food that could feed a population much greater than ever before,”says Mike White, a University of Minnesota animal science professor who teaches a global food production class.
Borlaug’s work won him a Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. But his discoveries paved the way for the development of factory farms, genetically modified organisms and artificial fertilizers, all of which allowed the world’s population—the United States’ in particular—to soar. This industrial food system also allowed people to become totally separated from their food’s production and origins.
Fast forward to 2004, when a study by Iowa State University economists showed that the annual “external costs” of conventional U.S. agriculture—effects such as erosion, water pollution and damage to wildlife—fall between $5 billion and $16 billion. (For context, that's as much as twice the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2005 budget.)
How could the ideals that won Borlaug a Nobel Peace Prize and fed millions of people be the same ideals that gave rise to a convoluted, environmentally damaging industrial food system that produces mealy, mutated strawberries in February? As White puts it, “there are always unintended consequences to even the best-intended things.”
If that’s true, wouldn’t it be just as easy for this to happen to these four modern morality-based food movements?
Organic: Not always what it seems
Rather than using chemicals, farmers who grow organic produce conduct sophisticated crop rotations and spread mulch or manure to keep weeds and disease at bay. The United States Department of Agriculture implemented national organic standards in October 2002, causing those little green-and-white stickers to pop up everywhere. According to a report by the USDA’s Economic Research Service, organic products are now available in 73 percent of conventional grocery stores. And while traditional food sales have gone up only about 2 percent per year since the late 1990s, organic sales have increased more than 20 percent per year.
“Organic food has turned out to be a lot more than a niche,” White says. Converting your diet to totally organic food can not only help avoid consuming unnatural and potentially dangerous chemicals, but organic food might be inherently healthier. A research review of 41 studies conducted by the University of California at Davis found that, on average, organic produce contains as much as 27 percent more vitamin C, 21 percent more iron, and 29 percent more magnesium than conventionally grown foods.
But what about the numbers? For those skeptical of the economic feasibility of organic food systems, Cuba is an interesting case study. When the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991 caused Cuba to lose more than 80 percent of its foreign trade, the Cuban government encouraged city dwellers to move back to farms. Currently, the country produces over 93,000 tons of natural compost a year, and small organic vegetable gardens cover 30 percent of Havana’s arable land. Peter Rosset, researcher at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, calls this “the largest conversion from conventional agriculture to organic or semi-organic farming that the world has ever known.”
Still, on a global scale, or even a national scale in the United States, “you can’t produce enough food to feed everyone organically,” White says. “It precludes everyone from participating.” A recent report by the Food Marketing Institute concluded that U.S. shoppers who consistently choose healthy and organic foods spend nearly 20 percent more on groceries.
If the organic market continues to expand, the cost per unit could drop, but the federal government heavily subsidizes traditional crops while scant money is set aside for strictly organic farmers. (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and even the European Union governments contribute to organic markets.)
The job to make organic accessible to all might remain in the hands of large corporations. “The organic sector has really been taken over by industrial enterprises,” Schurman says. “Some of the most successful organic products you see all over the place don’t live up to the image that they want to project, which is that they’re from small-scale farms using very strict organic methods.” For example, the Silk soymilk young idealistic vegans pour onto their granola each morning is a product of Dean Foods, Cascadian Farms is a General Mills brand, and Kraft owns Boca Burgers. But many people still believe organic is as wholesome as it was 40 years ago. “There’s a fetishism for the organic that isn’t really consistent with what it is,” says Schurman.
So, just because it’s organic might mean it’s healthier, but it doesn’t mean it’s economically feasible or that it lives up to its image. More people are discovering this contradiction, and are considering eating locally as a way to eat ethically.
Local: Are the answers in your own backyard?
The local food movement is an attempt to make close connections with the food you consume and reduce the distance your food travels, all while eating food almost directly off the farm.
There is even a term for those who eat only local food: locavores. We first heard the term when a group of self-described culinary adventurers from the San Francisco Bay area decided to only eat food grown within 100 miles of San Francisco.
According to the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), the number of farmers’ markets in the United States has grown from about 1,700 in 1994 to nearly 5,000 in 2007. Minnesota alone has nearly 30 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, all of which offer buyers and producers a chance to connect. And new restaurants like Common Roots on Lyndale Avenue in south Minneapolis serve their customers food and drink that's 59 percent local.
In “Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket,” Brian Halweil from Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research group, asks: “Isn’t there something wrong with supermarkets in Des Moines selling apples from China when there are apple orchards in Iowa?” Halweil also calculated that the average American meal uses anywhere from four to 17 times as much petroleum as a locally produced meal and, as a result, is responsible for up to 17 times as much carbon dioxide emission.
Environmental benefits aside, buying local food keeps your dollars circulating in your community and helps ensure that rural areas stay green and undeveloped. But does that mean buying locally is inherently ethical? The locavores’ San Francisco Bay region is one of the wealthiest local economies on the planet. In developed countries, most local economies near major centers of population are doing very well by global standards. If we can use our purchasing power in our local economy instead of buying products imported from poorer nations, should we?
Sometimes not. In “The Way We Eat,” Peter Singer and Jim Mason write, “If you have a dollar to spend on beans, and you can choose between buying locally grown beans at a farmers’ market or beans grown by a poor farmer in Kenya—even if the local farmer would get to keep the entire dollar and the Kenyan farmer would get only two cents from your dollar—you will do more to relieve poverty by buying the Kenyan beans.”
Increasing evidence suggests that local food might even be more energy-intensive to grow than to ship products from across the globe.
According to a study by the University of California at Davis, even a farmer driving his produce to a farmer’s market could very well use more gas for each strawberry than a huge truck traveling longer distances but with a larger capacity. Another important factor, especially for Minnesotans, is that local farmers must power their farms during winter in comparison to farmers in warmer climates who can take greater advantage of the sun, an absolute renewable energy source.
“I don’t think anything local is great if it uses three times the energy to produce it locally as it does to produce it somewhat farther away,” Schurman says.
Functional Food: “A pill in a meal”
Because many people lack the time or motivation to eat only local and/or natural foods, they make healthy food choices by eating fortified, or “functional food.” This is food that provides health benefits beyond its own basic nutrition, either by adding vitamins or minerals, or making health claims about existing aspects of the food.
Functional food is alarmingly popular. Cheerios has spent millions on advertising campaigns assuring consumers of its heart-healthy benefits, and the Vitamin Water rainbow displays take up generous portions of every on-campus market. Food is no longer merely a way to fill up your stomach on carbohydrates and fiber, but a way to steady your cholesterol levels and ease muscle pain. The precept “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food,” promoted by Hippocrates nearly 2,500 years ago, is receiving renewed attention.
The U.S. government has not yet implemented specific standards for “functional foods,” and to date, the only country that has is Japan (the term first emerged there in the 1980s). Even so, health-conscious baby boomers, who have come of age in a time of for-profit lifestyle drugs, have turned the vaguely defined“functional foods” into one of the leading trends in the U.S. food industry. Decision Resources, a medical marketing research organization, estimates the market value of functional foods at $28.9 billion.
It could be argued that functional foods have the potential to reduce disease and—in the long run—health care costs. Health-conscious marketing campaigns have undoubtedly raised public awareness of the importance of eating healthy and shed new light on calorie-dense food that offers little else.
And it’s not just health-conscious, affluent consumers that have embraced the potential of functional food. Large biotech companies have followed Borlaug’s example and enriched certain dietary staples, such as wheat, with vitamins or minerals in an attempt to tackle third-world malnutrition. The much-touted “Golden Rice,” or rice genetically modified to contain Vitamin A, is an increasingly popular remedy for the more than 2 million children at risk of Vitamin A deficiency-induced blindness in Asian countries.
Though the developers of Golden Rice had very good intentions, Schurman doesn’t believe it can solve the problem of hunger. “I don’t even know if it will solve the problem of Vitamin A deficiency … I don’t believe that technological fixes can solve the kind of problems that golden rice is attempting to solve,” Schurman says. The widespread Vitamin A deficiency, instead, warns us of broader dietary inadequacies between developed and underdeveloped nations.
Since the United States does not regulate functional food, we’ve given companies free reign to make dubious claims on behalf of their new wonder products. These new functional foods risk misleading consumers into switching from eating diverse healthy foods to relying on “functional” additives or modifications. “We've moved from the meal-in-a-pill future to the pill-in-a-meal,” writes Michael Pollan in a New York Times article, “which is to say, not very far at all.”
Slow Food: A different kind of movement
All these food ideologies and their pros and cons can be dizzying. “The ideal of eating ethically and locally and healthily is a great ideal to aspire to,” Schurman says. “But there are a lot of class issues and challenges. It’s a very complex system.”
Minnesotans are obviously eager to change things: our state boasts the largest number of natural and co-operative grocery stores in the nation. But Schurman thinks “it can’t just be a consumer- or individual-based approach. There have to be major institutional changes.”
With each new development in the food industry, there will undoubtedly be pros and cons—and in American culture where people are always looking for an easy, effortless panacea, this news doesn’t come easy.
Slow Food, a strange entity that hovers somewhere between an organization and a cultural shift, is the seemingly perfect solution to all of the empty promises of trendy food movements. It promotes a way of life, and it gives followers the chance to define their own moral guidelines instead of relying on someone else’s stickers and slogans.
The movement began when McDonald’s planned to build a restaurant near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome in 1986. Local activist Carlo Petrini organized a demonstration in which he and his followers wielded bowls of penne as weapons of protest. Soon after, he founded the International Slow Food movement and issued a manifesto, a response to fast food, fast life, unsustainable farming and the erosion of local economies. By the mid 1990s, Slow Food had grown phenomenally, lobbying the European Union on trade and agricultural policy and working to save endangered foods. It’s spread to the United States as well—Minnesotans even have their very own chapter here in Minneapolis.
Members of Slow Food believe that everyone has the fundamental right to pleasure and, consequently, the responsibility to protect the heritage of food, tradition and culture that makes this pleasure possible. Instead of being driven solely by changes in consumer habits, Slow Food is working to implement significant institutional changes, a factor missing within the other movements. Slow Food organizes fairs, markets and events locally and internationally, wherein participants visit apple orchards, host tastings, create school gardens and invite guest speakers or local producers to share a meal.
The movement encompasses ideas of the local and organic food movements, but it attempts to combat another problem in society: loneliness. “Eating together and drinking together at the end of the day is a kind of sign of friendship or communion,” Carlo Petrini said in an interview withThe New York Times, “and when that doesn’t exist, it’s a sadder, less cohesive society.”
So maybe there is a better alternative to our current food system, but it’s going to take a lot more than just passing a law or buying a certain type of brand. “I think it’s ineffectual to focus on any of these things and say, ‘OK, this is the answer,’” Schurman says. “But what’s exciting is that they’re challenges to the conventional food system. I think there’s a real potential for generating change.”