This past summer I (Martha) read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” by Michael Pollan, a manifesto on thinking about what we eat. Pollan traces four meals to their starting points: McDonald’s, Whole Foods, a farmers’ market, and one which Pollan actually hunts and scavenges for himself (no joke, he kills a wild boar. Amazing shit.). You can probably imagine what he digs up—McDonald’s comes from factory-farmed, government-subsidized, fossil-fuel-fertilized, genetically-modified corn and soybeans which are processed into multiple chemicals or stuffed into unhappy cows hundreds of miles away; Whole Foods’ suppliers work within the same national factory system but with no fossil fuel fertilizers and no chemical pesticides (which makes life a lot harder for the people who work on the farms); farmers markets are super-quaint and have a tough time fitting the large-scale requirements of the organic label; and hunting for wild boars is hard. Pollan is snobby but convincing, and his book freaked me out enough that I stopped eating meat (unless it’s locally raised) and started spewing to anyone who would listen about how one-fifth of the fossil fuels we consume in America go into our food production and transportation (more than cars!) and how corn products make up the majority of our diet (check your labels; it’s in everything). At the same time, I was wondering how I could reconcile this new stuff with the other things I know about food production and consumption, namely that (1) my uncle is a small-time farmer in Iowa who farms genetically-modified corn and soybeans and uses fossil fuel fertilizers and (2) local food is really expensive and not realistic for lots of people to buy. I wanted to be a part of the food revolution, but I couldn’t deal with its consequences for farmers and most consumers.
I found one solution in Just Food, an organization in New York City that helps to set up CSAs and community produce gardens in the city. CSA stands for community supported agriculture—basically you buy seasonal shares to support local farmers, and then every week you get beautiful fruits and veggies from their farms. In NYC, CSAs fill the gaps in many neighborhoods where you can’t find any fresh produce. They help good farmers get the financial support they need to be organic, and they make healthy food affordable for consumers. Just Food helps to set up the CSAs, and then the farmers and the communities work cooperatively to keep them going. I volunteered for Just Food, visited some CSAs, and even took a trip to a farm outside the city where they grow 20 kinds of basil!
And it’s not as if this concept of food is just cropping up in America. Last week Slow Food, the international organization largely credited with raising the profile of the adverse effects of globalization on food, held its annual meeting. Drawing together international food celebrities, activists and more than 500 local producers from all over the world, Terra Madre provided the world agricultural community a place to convene. Delegates came bearing local food products–cheese from Latvia, vanilla from Madagascar, sweet potatoes from Peru, even Cape May oysters from New Jersey, all to remind the international community of the great diversity of food from around the world. Slow Food’s mission reaches beyond simple celebration of global cuisine. As an organization, it hopes to protect small, culturally important producers and the biodiversity they encourage, to combat people’s dwindling interest in what they eat, and to promote understanding of how individual food choices have global significance. Even among Slow Food’s grandiose manifestos of taste education, defense of biodiversity and radical cultural revolution, it’s possible to see the underlying hope of the organization’s more than 80,000 members. Three simple words mark out Slow Food’s meme – good, clean, fair. Good in taste and in quality, clean in production method, and fair in distribution for farmers and consumers alike.
As Wesleyan embarks on its latest dining services bid process, we should remember to ask questions about where the food comes from, how it’s produced, how it’s prepared, how workers are compensated. For ourselves and the world, we ought to demand campus dining that is good, clean, and fair.
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