In the anthropological fix12 we redesign people’s values, not their gizmos, to meet the challenges of feeding the future. Like the technological fix, this scenario has faith in “smartness” – but not of the brisk and snappy Gee Whiz variety. For guidance and inspiration it looks to traditional wisdom, not modernist bravura. Even its critique of the technological fix is phrased in somewhat antiquarian terms. Biotechnology is framed as hubris – a Promethean defiance of limits and laws that will lead to the
t h e f u t u r e o f f o o d 119 dystopian scenarios of science fiction classics such as Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), and The Island of Dr. Moreau (H. G. Wells). Titles like A Garden of Unearthly Delights (Mather 1996), Farmageddon (Kneen 1999), Lords of the Harvest (Charles 2001), Against the Grain (Lappé and Bailey 1998), Shattering (Fowler and Mooney 1990), and The Last Harvest (Raeburn 1995) suggest that modernist tinkering may bring divine retribution. On the other hand, the covers of books advocating more old-fashioned food production and distribution soothe us with time-tested pastoral images: Enduring Seeds (Nabhan 1989), Simple in Means, Rich in Ends (Devall 1988), A Continuous Harmony (Berry 1970), At Nature’s Pace (Logsdon 1994), and Meeting the Expectations of the Land (Jackson et al. 1984).
The anthropological fix follows the romantic resistance to the Industrial Revolu-tion. At about the same time as Mary Shelley was speculating about the dangers of scientific manipulation (in Frankenstein, 1818) her fellow romantics were advocat-ing, and sometimes even practicadvocat-ing, a simpler life rich in natural foods, and light in the animal foods, caffeinated stimulants, foreign (“Arabian”) spices, and “adult-erated” commercial products that were already being welcomed, in an early version of the nutrition transition, by contemporary urban consumers. Soon after Mary and her husband Percy declared their vegetarian rebellion, American food reformer Sylvester Graham put home-baked whole wheat bread, raw vegetables, and vigor-ous temperance at the center of full-scale rejection of modernist science and con-sumer culture. For Graham, “The simpler, plainer, and more natural the food . . . the more healthy, vigorous, and long lived the body” (Slotnick 2004: 574). Biographer Stephen Nissenbaum notes that Graham was particularly enamored of the image of the bread-baking agrarian mother, whom he idealized as the essence of restraint, care, and discipline – the very opposite of contemporary city life, which he saw as hedonistic, materialistic, and debilitating. The contrast was embodied in his rejection of commercially baked bread, which according to Nissenbaum “was only a metaphor of the Jacksonian marketplace – a place of fevered chaos, laden with products manufactured by invisible men and corrupted with invisible poisons.” To be sure, Graham’s agrarian/matriarchal nostalgia was not based on his family background, which was quite dysfunctional and unloving. “It is, therefore, a revealing irony that Sylvester Graham tried to romanticize the secure family life he had never known”
(Nissenbaum 1988: 17–19). In this, Graham anticipated our sentimentality about
“old-fashioned” home cooking and the purported decline of family meals.
And Graham himself was part of a much larger nineteenth-century back-to-nature movement that produced hundreds of utopian experiments in rural communal living. Like so many visionaries, including Marcelin Berthelot, these dreamers sought a new Eden, but through a scaling back of human ambitions, consumption, and impact, rather than through Berthelot’s “spiritual chemistry” of synthesis and
mechanization. From the agrarian utopias of William Morris in England and Bronson Alcott in Fruitlands, Massachusetts, it was a pretty straight leap, a hundred years later, to the hippy country communes of Findhorn, Scotland, and Morningstar Ranch, California. And these communities in turn nurtured the ideas and activists of the sustainable food movement, the leading edge of the anthropological fix (Belasco 2006b).
The primary components of this fix are ideological, as they require a consider-able downscaling of futuristic anticipation. Instead of the bright and shiny techno-logical utopia of much science fiction, the sustainable vision is more modest, even disappointing. In Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) Marge Piercy’s heroine Connie Ramos expresses this sense of letdown when she is transported to the countercult-ural hamlet of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, in the year 2137. Instead of the “rocket ships, skyscrapers . . . glass domes over everything” and “robots on the march” of pulp sci fi, she glimpses a “Podunk future” of “little no account buildings” made of “scavenged old wood, old bricks and stones . . . wildly decorated and overgrown with vines.” A tough New Yorker with distant Mexican roots, Connie feels like she is
“stuck back home on the farm. Peons again! Back on the same old dung-heap with ten chickens and a goat” (68–70). But like other visitors to such Ecotopian futures (Callenbach 1975; Starhawk 1993), Connie soon discovers that this is no “wetback”
slum but rather a deliberate outcome of the cost-accounting, multi-generational conscientious consumption expressed earlier in this chapter. Here the goal of “living lightly on the earth” guides every decision.
Thinking deliberately, carefully, responsibly about the consequences of current actions, the conscientious consumer will want to select products that are green for the environment, fair for workers and producers, and humane for animals. Production of such foods will likely entail fewer inputs of petrochemical energy, but considerably more of the human variety – attention, sweat, care. Mindful of the ecological costs of animal food production, this consumer will want to eat “lower down the food chain,” that is closer to the vegetable sources of calories and protein. This conscious rejection of the perquisites of progress, i.e., the nutrition transition, does not necessarily entail a completely vegetarian diet, however. Rejecting just the grain-fed products of CAFOs, and seeking out range-grain-fed animals will save considerable amounts of fuel, water, and soil. But here, too, consumers will need to redesign their expectations, for such products may take longer to cook, be tougher to chew, and will certainly be pricier. They may also be less convenient, for consumers will be more aware of the high external costs of well-packaged prepared foods. Eating
“lower down the food chain” entails more cooking “from scratch,” along with more scratch farming (Halweil 2004; Gussow 2001; Petrini 2001; Pollan 2006; Singer and Mason 2006).
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