Things Consumed

 

The Nation's FOOD Issue

Yes, it's possible for my favorite news magazine, The Nation, to gush about my favorite topic. The Nation is great for news and politics, and of course food is VERY political. The September 11, 2006 issue of the Nation is its first ever food issue, and it's a good one, edited by Alice Waters, Sylvan Brackett, Anna Lappé. There are many highlights, and I couldn't tear myself away until I finished reading the entire issue. My favorite highlights:

-letters from readers about their favorite food institutions

-a forum with many fabulous contributors on one thing they would change about food in this country, featuring Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, Carlo Petrini, and others

-a revealing article about how "farming is farming" for farmworkers, who labor under lousy conditions with low wages regardless of whether they are working for a big conventional farmer or a big organic one. Hard Labor by Felicia Mello, has some very good points to make. It makes clear that, just because you pay more for organic food, doesn't mean that the workers are necessarily getting a better share. It points out that some organic methods, like hand-weeding, can be absolutely back-breaking, and workers can be injured by doing such jobs all day. But it also makes clear that labor, despite being the biggest cost associated with food production, isn't necessarily the biggest factor in the cost you pay.

Is agriculture a zero-sum game, where we must choose between access to affordable healthy food and decent living standards for the people who grow it?

Feenstra, the UC Davis researcher, doesn't think so. "I think it's a false choice," she says. "Most of the money in the food system, about 80 percent, is in the marketing, processing and distribution sector, compared with 20 percent for production. Organic food is not just fruits and vegetables; a lot of it is processed, and that shoots the price up. So when you're talking about labor costs, they're probably going to add 1 or 2 cents, compared with what you're paying for excess packaging, transport from here to there, all those layers of cellophane and bright-colored boxes."

It's a good article. And it includes details on "first and only California organic farmer to negotiate a union contract with his workers," and tells how he managed to break the mold and really be different from his competition.

-Eric Schlosser's 'Hog Hell' on the horrid conditions of meat packing plants is illuminating about the numbers game the industry plays along with its regulators.

... in 2001, the meatpacking industry had the nation's highest rate of serious injury. It was about three times higher than the national average for factories, despite widespread underreporting of slaughterhouse injuries. The rate of cumulative trauma injury in meatpacking was about thirty-three times higher than the national average. Today it's impossible to know how many meatpacking workers are really getting hurt. In 2002 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration changed the form that companies must use to record meatpacking injuries--and thereby reduced the injury rate by 50 percent.

The article also points out that public outrage over Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle was not so much over the treatment of meat industry workers, but over the widespread contamination of the meat itself (!!).

-Mean or Green by Liza Featherstone looks at Wal-Mart's increasingly vast scale of organic products, some of which it plans to ship great distances to achieve efficiencies of scale, which will result in transportation-related pollution. Our current food culture is very polluting:

According to research by Brian Halweil of the Worldwatch Institute, our food typically travels 1,500 to 2,500 miles to reach our plate, 25 percent farther than in 1980. By the time we sit down to eat it, a meal from a conventional grocery store has used four to seventeen times more petroleum than a meal made from local ingredients.

The article gives me a new reason not to buy Horizon products (which I haven't in the past because they're not local, but there are more!), and points out that the inaccessibility of healthy organic foods to many consumers because of price doesn't necessarily mean that organic food costs too much; rather, it can also mean that people aren't paid well enough if they can't afford the food that's best for them.

And the book reviews are an absolute delight.

It's wonderful to see the high human costs of cheap, unhealthy foods criticized on so many levels, with so many solutions proposed.

The Nation is always a great read: you now have a food-related excuse to pick up this issue.
posted by Arlene (Beth)11:04 PM