Watershed Media: Food Fight Excerpts

Excerpts

Food Fight — Excerpts

Somewhere in America's Heartland

Somewhere in America’s heartland, the sun rises over a 10,000-acre cornfield. By season’s end, that field, blessed with some of the world’s deepest glaciated topsoil, a subterranean aquifer of ancient snow melt, and an eye-popping arsenal of John Deer equipment and petroleum products, will yield a bumper crop of 200 bushels per acre.¹

Somewhere in Mexico, a dozen campesinos make their way across a desert landscape toward the 1952-mile wide border shared with the United States. For the past ten years, U.S. distributors have exported government-subsidized corn to Mexico at well-below world market prices. Dumping is the economic term for this, and by accepted rules of international trade, the practice is “trade distorting” and illegal. Corn farming, long a primary occupation of Central American farmers, has become a curse of poverty. If these refugees successfully navigate the perilous border crossing, survive bandits, and manage to evade or abide by “La Migra” (the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service), they may find employment in fields, orchards, vineyards, factories, restaurants, or private homes.² The lucky ones can then send dollars home so their families can buy the under-priced American corn that forced them north in the first place.³

Somewhere inside the vats, pipes, and tanks of a wet mill processing facility, manufacturers transform mountains of corn kernels into dozens of value-added materials. Cornstarch, corn meal, corn oil, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and other additive ingredients find their way into breakfast cereals, snacks, chicken nuggets, sodas, salad dressings, and thousands of other highly processed and industrially packaged foods. Not far away, in a confinement animal feedlot operation (CAFO), 10,000 cows stand ankle-deep in their own manure as they munch away on raw corn, processed meal, and antibiotic-laced “energy and protein units” to keep pace with the world’s voracious demand for meat, dairy products, and fast food. And at a gas station near you, “flex fuel” vehicle owners righteously fill their tanks with E85 ethanol fermented from surplus bushels of U.S. corn. Depending on how the numbers are crunched, however, it may require almost as much energy to synthesize liquid biofuels from cornstarch as they produce. This “net energy balance” could drastically improve with technical advances or the evolution of cellulosic ethanol, which ferments stalks, grasses, and other fibers rather than food and feed grains, but market-ready innovations are still possibly years away.⁴

In clinics and hospitals across America, physicians, nutritionists, and public health officials struggle to connect the dots of emerging epidemics: obesity, type II diabetes, coronary disease, and other dietary- and food system-related maladies. For the first time in modern history, the next generation may die younger than its parents due to dietary deficiencies. News headlines warn of surging incidences of lethal virulent diseases, such as E. coli infections, mad-cow disease, and avian flu, which can be transported from meat and poultry operations to humans.⁵ Accounts of mass slaughtering of poultry and bans on beef exports, to contain these outbreaks, no longer shock or surprise.

Elsewhere across the country, biologists confront the realities of broad-scale pesticide and nutrient contamination of the nation’s waterways.⁶ This has negatively impacted fish and wildlife in a majority of our creeks, streams, rivers, and lakes. Pesticides and other farm chemicals also move up the food web, particularly affecting infants, children, women, and the elderly. Somewhere along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, shrimp fishermen return to port with empty nets, due to a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. This oxygen-starved, lifeless area has grown to the size of several small New England states. Spring runoff from the Mississippi River, loaded with nitrogen-based fertilizers from Corn Belt farms, fuels massive algae blooms that later suck the oxygen out of the water as the algae decomposes. Meanwhile in climate research stations at the extremes of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, alarmed scientists monitor glaciers melting three times faster than computer models had projected, linking the earth’s warming to twentieth-century industrial activities, including “green revolution” agriculture.

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Somewhere in America's Future

It is not that difficult to imagine a time in America’s future when the sun rises over vastly different agricultural landscapes. Out of vision, and out of necessity, citizens will begin to see and value food and farm policy as part of a much larger orbit of social, economic, and environmental concerns. Government support for food and agriculture may remain significantly high, (and may even exceed current levels), but spending programs will pass rigorous tests for costs and benefits. Of course, imagining is the easy part. Getting there may require moving mountains.

In such a future, citizens, consumers, and food producers will understand they are bound by similar fates. The nutrition of the body reflects the health of the land. American farmers and ranchers will produce an abundance of some of the finest crops and livestock in the world, but they will be more fairly rewarded for their efforts. And the farms, ranches, and forests that cover nearly two-thirds of the contiguous United States will supply far more than food. With incentives for proper management, they will also provide clean air and water, renewable energy, wildlife habitat, diverse forests, and open space.

Healthy, locally produced foods will form the basis of a modern national health care prevention strategy. With ever-escalating fuel prices and other concerns, the need for relative autonomy in food production will become an organizing principle in nearly every region of the country. In public schools, children will have direct contact with numerous farms that provide their cafeterias with grass-fed milk and meat, eggs, organically raised fruits, vegetables, and grains. A similar transformation will sweep hospitals and universities, corporate campuses, and government agencies. Obesity rates will eventually begin to decline, while the costs of Medicare, Medicaid, and public health fall. Worker productivity will rebound.

Traveling through the countryside, one will see that a new vision has taken hold. Monoculture fields that once blanketed entire counties and regions instead include large areas of perennial grasses, restored prairies, and cover crops. Wooded field margins and vibrant creek banks transect row crop and orchard operations. Large set aside areas of protected wildlands and natural habitats serve as buffer zones against extreme storm events. Organic agriculture, a preferred farming method in many regions, requires more people than strategies used in agriculture at the turn of the twenty-first century, but also reduces energy inputs and harmful air emissions and raises the nutritional content of foods. Greenhouses extend growing seasons for fresh produce categories that can withstand cooler temperatures, such as salad greens and root crops.

No single reform will more dramatically transform the landscape than the large-scale conversion from confinement animal feedlot operations to diversified farms that include grass-pastured livestock. Under a national grassland recovery campaign, grass farmers will become emblematic of a new family farm movement. On-farm generated incomes will also begin to rise. Soil erosion will significantly stabilize while agricultural runoff and farm-related water pollution decreases. Grassland bird species will become common as nesting habitats return. Herds of bison even return to vast areas of the Great Plains that for decades were fragmented by artificially green crop circles. Formerly threatened species such as the sage grouse and prairie chicken revive because of collaborative stewardship efforts.

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Notes - Somewhere in America's Heartland
¹ There are 56 pounds in a bushel; the United States produces 10 billion bushels of corn per year, up from 4 billion in 1970, Michael Pollan, TheOmnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Penguin Press, 2006, p. 62.
² The United States and Mexico share a 1952 mile border that spans 4 states. In 2006, the U.S. employed approximately 10,000 border patrol agents.
³ An estimated 1.2 million corn farmers and 400,000 sugar producers have been driven from the land since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement due to U.S. dumping of corn and high-fructose corn syrup. See Christine Ahn with Melissa Moore and Nick Parker, “Migrant Farmworkers: America’s New Plantation Workers,” Backgrounder Newsletter, Spring 2004, web version, http://www.foodfirst.org/node/45. According to Tom Philpott, “There’s a saying in Mexico that for every bushel of corn you dump on us, we’ll send you ten workers,” cited in Daily Grist, “Toward a green agenda on immigration,” April 12, 2006.
⁴ Cellulosic ethanol entails fermentation and distillation from the cellulose of plant fibers rather than the processed sugars, resulting in positive net energy balances. This will be addressed in a later chapter.
⁵ Mad-cow disease is also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE.
⁶ According to Michael Pollan, atrazine is a powerful herbicide applied to 70 percent of the nation’s corn crop. Concentrations as low as 0.1 part per billion are frequently found in waterways and wells, enough to “chemically emasculate a male frog, causing its gonads to produce eggs.” (Pollan, “Mass Natural,” New York Times, June 4, 2006.)
⁷ Food miles are an account of the total distance a food item’s ingredients travel from farm to table.

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