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Some Ethical and Environmental Questions

In document Food (Page 74-78)

Is this product “safe” to eat? Is it “good for me”?

Could you sleep at night if you were responsible for growing, processing, or selling this food?

Is this product sustainable? In other words, does eating this product now hurt our grandchildren later?

Are there better ways to get this food, or should we just give it up?

These are challenging questions. Where can inexperienced, unfunded researchers go for answers? While company websites are by design slanted and self-interested, there are numerous other sources that can be accessed from any library portal, or even one’s home computer. To be sure, such sources must be examined with the same skepticism and rigor as any interview, document, or statistic, but at the very

least they point investigators toward issues of health, equity, and power that might never have occurred to them given their everyday distance from much of the food chain. Universities, consumer groups, environmental activists, government agencies, think tanks, and international non-governmental organizations maintain informative sites that track pesticides, rural development, farm and factory labor, alternative agriculture, food advertising, nutrition, “food miles,” corporate consolidation, and so on. The US Department of Agriculture alone maintains dozens of encyclopedic sites open to all, as does every state college of agriculture, nutrition, human ecology, natural resources business, and public health. To suit growing consumer interest in

“green” (environmentally friendly) goods, many sites rate products not only on their environmental impact but also on how they treat workers and home communities.

Students can learn much from the work of best-selling investigative journalists patrolling the food chain (for example, Pollan 2006, Schlosser 2001, Ettlinger 2007). Reading the footnotes in such books can offer a powerful jump-start to the project. It is also possible to piggyback the research of students at other universities.

At St Cloud State University in Minnesota, students in Sociology and the Politics of Food have posted enlightening “fact and action” sheets on a wide variety of common products, including shrimp, tobacco, tomatoes, eggs, peanut butter, and beer. These handy briefing papers offer background information on the growth of the industry, news on labor conditions, “Ten things every consumer should know,” “Five things you can do,” and links to other information resources.18 And while the industry itself tends to be quite opaque and defensive when it comes to discussing environmental, health, and labor questions, it is much more open in discussing what its customers seem to want (and don’t want); such market research can offer invaluable insights into consumer behavior and values. This data can be supplemented by other consumption information gleaned from websites devoted to the anthropology and history of food, personal culinary blogs, and, of course, recipes.

In the final, long version of their study my own students also address two related ethical questions. First, could they sleep at night working for the companies that sell this product? Second, is the product sustainable, and if not is there a better way to get it? (That is, given all that is involved in raising this food and getting it to the table, can we keep producing and consuming it without robbing future generations of resources and opportunities?) Sometimes the answers to both can be very disquieting. After an investigation of seemingly innocuous oatmeal, Sutton Stokes suggested that, behind the benign image of the trademark Quaker stood a company whose pursuit of the cheapest supply of oats threatened the health of rural communities and supported the growth of Cargill, a major force behind “the race to the bottom: . . . greater consolidation of farms with a tendency toward unsustainable monoculture, reductions in protections for workers and the environment, and so

c o n v e n i e n c e : t h e g l o b a l f o o d c h a i n 65 on.” Weighing the product’s environmental and social costs against its rather modest nutritional benefits, he concluded that Quaker’s extravagant health claims might be taken with the same “dash of salt” recommended on the product’s packaging (Stokes 2005: 88–91). Similarly, Mary Potorti found that behind the apparently wholesome – or at least relatively harmless – façade of Jell-O, “Bill Cosby’s favorite dessert,” lurks a controversial record of deceptive advertising, labor conflict, and environmental pollution, the last mainly due to the nasty processes by which animal byproducts are rendered into gelatin. “While many proudly tout the merits of capitalism as a fundamental aspect of Americanism,” Potorti concluded, “the corporate climate that has emerged in today’s age of media and consolidation has diminished the integrity of many mass-produced products . . . Perhaps then Jell-O is the All-American food, for it is generally no better or worse than the system that produces it. In truth Kraft [maker of Jell-O] and others are far smarter than many are willing to acknowledge, for they know the secret that keeps the processed foods industry profitable: Americans will eat just about anything. That is, of course, as long as they don’t know what it is” (Potorti 2006: 27). And even the so-called “green” capitalists Ben & Jerry offered little solace for Emily Hunter, who found that the premium ice cream company’s sale to multinational conglomerate Unilever signaled that “It is perhaps American to sell out, to put profits first, to use social issues to market to a niche consumer base.

In a capitalist society, we know where business values lie, and Ben & Jerry’s – despite all their purported hippy ethics – are no exception” (Hunter 2006: 32).

In his classic work on sugar, Sweetness and Power, anthropologist Sidney Mintz 1986: 151–158) writes of two very different types of “meaning”: the view from inside and the view from outside. The inside view entails looking at what a product means to the people who produce and consume it. How do they use, justify, and think about what they are doing? In his own case Mintz explored the meal practices, beliefs, artistic expression, and iconography that accompanied the expanding use of sugar after the fifteenth century. Examples include the new popularity of wedding cakes, sweetened tea, and the new dependence of the working classes on toast with jam for cheap calories. The outside meaning involves a greater distance, as it asks what it all signifies from the standpoint of long-term political and social systems of power. For Mintz this entailed looking at how sugar production affected the growth of European empires, furthered the unequal distribution of global wealth, and fueled the rise of industrial capitalism.

In my own course, the question about sustainability is basically an outside question: How does this all add up for humanity, both present and future? What does the industrial food chain “mean” for global warming, the state of public health, the distribution of resources, the fate of our grandchildren? We will address that question more fully in the following two chapters. But the first question – “Can

you sleep at night?” – is an inside question, as it puts the observer in the subjective position of being a participant in the food chain. How do food producers and marketers see their roles, and what do consumers think about the foods they buy?

There are various ways to get inside the heads of food industry players. Given the populist/agrarian longings of postmodern culture, agricultural workers probably get the most attention. The literature and filmography on slaves, migrant workers, peasants, and yeomen farmers is vast. For insights into the experiences of new-convert organic farmers there are countless memoirs of the “I tried living on the land for a while and then wrote a book about it” variety. People actually making a living in the business rarely have time to write books, however. For their story, we can turn to academic rural sociologists and agricultural historians, who do focus on the plight and challenges facing conventional farmers, but their works are not always access-ible to students or general readers.19 For starters, here again investigative journalists may be helpful, especially if they can win the trust of the people they are observing and keep their own opinions to themselves. In Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf (2002) Peter Lovenheim apprentices himself to a New York dairy farm for a year.

Suspending judgment and qualms, Lovenheim comes to sympathize with these hard-working dairymen who sincerely love their animals even as they send them to slaughter, which is the fate not only of “useless” male calves but of their aging mothers as well.20 The ambivalence and compassion of Lovenheim’s “portrait” may be more believable and compelling for students than Eric Schlosser’s muckraking Fast Food Nation (2001), which takes a much blunter, outsider approach to the animal industry. While Schlosser’s sense of outrage (itself a word connoting an outsider’s distance) is merited when exposing the industry’s safety problems, his most moving chapters may be those that attempt to see the economic dilemmas faced from the inside perspective of beleaguered ranchers and meat workers. Students facing the competing pressures of work and study, careerism and enlightenment, family and freedom, are well equipped to appreciate the stories of people who “do what they have to do.” The master of such storytelling may well be John McPhee, who skillfully and poetically enters a very wide range of heads – from orange growers, fishermen, produce farmers at New York City’s Greenmarket, and Scottish crofters (peasant farmers), to geologists, land developers, river barge operators, and a Nevada cattle brand inspector.21

Compassion tends to diminish as one moves up the corporate food chain.

Migrant workers and hardscrabble farmers receive the most sensitive attention.

Frontline chefs –especially those working in high-end gourmet restaurants – are the subject of numerous memoirs, films, TV shows, and even an entire cable network, though their portrayal is often more sensationalistic than compassionate. But the people who staff the offices of agri-food suppliers, processors, and major retailers

c o n v e n i e n c e : t h e g l o b a l f o o d c h a i n 67 remain largely anonymous, if not serving as stock villains in anti-business melo-dramas. One notable exception is Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (2001), in which reporter Daniel Charles does an excellent job of revealing the idealistic aspirations, bureaucratic constraints, public prejudices, and laboratory disappointments shaping the high-pressured experiences of genetic engineers working for Monsanto. Unlike some outside depictions of Monsanto’s workers as mad scientists in the Frankenstein mode, Charles’s subjects come across as flesh and blood professionals who hope to do good and well – that is, to feed humanity while also making a respectable living. Their internal conflicts between the dictates of pure science and profit-driven expediency are the stuff of modern corporate tragedy. Somewhat similarly, but with much thicker theoretical complexity, anthropologist Theodore Bestor’s Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (2004) offers a rich insight into the mindset, traditions, contradictions, and dilemmas of Japanese wholesalers working in the world’s largest seafood market.

In document Food (Page 74-78)