There are few professions accorded as
little credit in the world of academia and business as motherhood. Oh
certainly, people recognize and appreciate that you have “sacrificed
your career” for your children, that you have “given
selflessly” of yourself to
create that most enchanted and enduring period of childhood for your
own offspring. More often, motherhood and child-rearing are an onus
to be explained away and overcome, like a stint in jail or a period
of unemployability due to a highly contagious social disease. Rarely,
though, does anyone consider your time spent in child-rearing and
ask, “What have you learned?”
And the lessons
are many. I myself learned that while I am of relatively little use
in disciplining my children, I am a rather capable dog-trainer. I
learned to make a German sourdough with wild yeast. I learned to
plaster walls. I studied up on sustainable agriculture and organic
gardening, tested my soil, made compost, and raised a garden. I
learned about fruit tree diseases. I learned to grow enough to share
with the bugs, the raccoons, the deer, and the ducks. I learned about
frustration and triumph. And I learned the art of manuevering through
rapidly changing and partially-informed opinions, with a minimum of
tears and screaming—either my own or that of others.
Because tearing of
hair and condemnation seem to be the tone set for the argument
between “conventional” farming and “sustainable” farming. The
choices that we as omnivores face—collectively--seem to be bringing
out the infant on both sides, and frankly, I'd like to set both sides
in time out. I have no doubts about the truthfulness of the
statements made; both sides are correct on many counts. I absolutely
believe that both sides are heavily invested—both monetarily and
emotionally—in the argument; that's clear from the vitriole.
I come from a
family of arguers. My mother hated it; she would get sort of red and
shrill whenever the four of us kids began one of our legendary
arguments. Before long she would have composed a long list of outdoor
chores for us, the most dreadful ones she could supply: shoveling out
the barn, fixing fence, restacking the hay. She didn't realize that,
to us, an argument was amusing. Hell, we lived in the country; what
else did we have to do except argue with each other and have rotten
tomato fights and jump off the barn roof? Actually, she didn't know
about that last one. But it always began when one of us made an
inocuous statement of opinion; another would disagree, rather more
strongly, and in a few minutes, a raging debate had begun on, say,
the relative probability of being killed by my sister's rotten
clutchwork whilst driving us to school. As a mother, I can attest to
the wearisomeness of listening to this, but the adrenal rush of the
fray is not to be denied.
A better question,
though, might be: What's the cost of the argument? For every Tony
Bourdain there is a Steven Best, for every Michael Pollan a Blake
Hurst. For every one of my sister's protests that she is a “just
dandy stick-shift driver,” there is my own unflagging protest that
no, in fact, she is not. And the truth, as it often is, rests
somewhere in the middle, quietly going on with daily life, as it
often does, with some days being a little bit more progressive than
others. Michael Pollan proposes some rather radical ideas—let's be
completely honest. A corps of local meat inspectors? A strategic
grain reserve? I can get behind it, although I feel that the
regulation of such endeavors might stop them before they even get
started. Restructuring American public school lunches?? Now you're
really messing with tradition, friend. I can almost hear an entire
nation, voices lifted together as one, “If I had to eat that
god-dang tuna casserole, then my kids do too!” It isn't that school
lunches couldn't be better—because we all know they can't get a lot
worse—but it goes so far beyond lunches to changes in curriculum
and, even worse, a reallocation of budget. Again, governmental
regulation may ruin this otherwise good idea; school lunches are a
money-maker for public schools catering to children in poverty. This
needs to stop, but only if done in a way that actually benefits the
child, and not the school alone.
Blake
Hurst, however, doesn't have all the answers either. He claims that
technologically driven, fossil-fueled agriculture has kept food
prices low, something that Americans will not be willing to give up.
However, Darrin Qualman, in his chapter in Writing Off the
Rural West, talks about the
overall impacts of hog “megabarn” farming practices in Canada.
The book contains this chart:
The gray lines at
the bottom show the price of pigs per pound—or what the farmer is
paid when he sells the live pigs. The black dots at the top represent
the price of pork chops on average across Canada. The chart covers
1976 to 2000. Here we see just how illogical Hurst's argument is:
consumers are NOT paying less for food because of technological
improvements or vertical integration of farms; in fact, they're
paying more. And neither are farmers earning more—in some years,
they're earning even less. As Alan Guebert points out, Hurst is
farming because there is (at least some) money in it.
Hurst
continues on by calling Mathew Scully's denunciation of animal
cruelty a “move toward vegetarianism” (2). Quite simply, it
isn't. It is, in the end, a rejection of the idea that we can
distance ourselves from the inherent violence against animals that
eating meat entails. Scully advocates for animals to live natural
lives, to be unstressed and healthy, and for mindfulness. He writes,
“Whenever we are called to decide the fate of an animal, the
realism comes in at least facing up to the price of things whenever
man with all his powers enters the pictures. It requires discernment
and care and humility before Creation. It means understanding that
habits are not always needs, traditions are not eternal laws, and the
fur salon, kitchen table, or Churchill Room are not the center of the
moral universe” (45).
This
“facing up” is something that more and more of us are having to
do. Barbara Kingsolver writes of having to face up in her chapter
“You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day.” Hurst rationalizes: animals
want protection from predators, they like their barns, they're too
stupid to live; in fact, this argument was addressed directly by
Scully in Dominion.
Kingsolver, however, makes no such claims. Domesticated livestock
are, she realizes, as many of us realize, humanly constructed. We
have bred them to be as they are—and because of this, we must, for
our sake and theirs, harvest them when it is practical and best to do
so. Population dynamics—our own and that of the farmyard
populace—must be obeyed. However, Kingsolver and others like her –
Lierre Keith, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson—realize that domesticated
animals are a part of the farm life cycle, a human-scale
life-supporting ecosystem in which we care for the animals and
plants, the animals graze and fertilize the plants, the plants feed
us and the animals, and round and round we go, on contemporary
sunlight. The differences between these people and Hurst is one of
tone: Hurst hectors the reader with his rights to farm in any way he
wishes, with a minimum of toil to feed a hungry world; the others
concern themselves with a smaller scale, feeding themselves, their
families, their communities, knowing that with stewardship and
mindfulness, feeding the world will come in time.
The thing is, none
of these people are wrong. Blake Hurst is correct that some baby pigs
will die as a result of a ban on gestational crating. Mathew Scully
is right that gestational crates are cruel for the adult pigs. Steven
Best is right when he says that pigs are happier outside crates, free
to run and graze. Tony Bourdain is right when he says that pork is
delicious. Barbara Kingsolver is right when she says that butchering
day is difficult emotional and physical work. Lierre Keith is right
when she writes that, whether we are vegans or eat meat, our diets
are comprised of a thousand little killings, that things must die for
us to eat.
But they are also
wrong—all of them. Because there is not one system of agriculture,
not a one-size-fits-all diet. Wes Jackson said in a speech that so
many of our problems, from agriculture to obesity to fossil fuels,
stem from the fact that we are borne of poor people set down on a
continent of seemingly endless bounty. We think that we can farm
more, farm bigger, farm better, forever and ever, ah-men, when
perhaps, Kingsolver, et al suggest, the paradigmatic shift from
growth economy to developed eonomy is preferable in the long run. We
don't know, because we in America have not tried it. Can we learn to
grow our own food again? Can we know the provenance of our food (and
still eat it)? Are we willing to accept seasonality and regionality
and yes, maybe even scarcity, in our food? Will scarcity increase
value, and will value in food mean a return to a simpler time and
simpler pleasures: a family dinner? Establishment of local food
culture? Mindfulness? I think it can.
But first, we have
to learn to talk, exchange ideas on the nature of farming and the
myriad ways in which farming can transition from industrial to
sustainable. Blake Hurst has a good point: villainizing farmers will
not change the status quo. Similarly, however, demonizing hippie
“agri-intellectuals” won't change things either. Believe it or
not, you folks are not that far apart: you want to raise food—good,
healthful, nutritious, delicious, and affordable food; you care about
the land; you care about families, your own and others'; you care
about the animals; you care about the ethics of what you are doing.
But the way in which you each try to shout the other down—in the
interests of being right? In the interests of selling a book?--well,
it's just maddening. The confusion created for the public by such
varied opinions—because that's all they are—is detrimental to the
idea of effecting real agricultural change. So you lot, there . . .
you just hold your horses. I think I have some chores to keep you
busy.
Works Consulted
Berry, Wendell.
“Conservationist and Agrarian.”
“Best, Steven.”
Wikipedia entry.
Bourdain,
Anthony. Kitchen Confidential. New
York: Harper, 2001.
Guebert,
Alan. “Guebert: Farmers Aren't In It to Feed the World.”
Springfield News Sun.
August 2009.
Hurst,
Blake. “The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals.”
The American(July
2009).
Jackson,
Wes. Consulting the Genius of The Place.
Counterpoint, 2011.
Kingsolver,
Barbara. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. New
York: Harper, 2007.
Pollan, Michael.
“Farmer in Chief.”
Qualman,
Darrin. “Corporate Hog Farming: the View from the Family Farm.”
Writing Off the Rural West: Globalization, Governments, and
the Transformation of Rural Communities.
Roger Epp & Dave Whitson, eds. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2001,
21-38.
Scully,
Mathew. Dominion: the Power of Man, The Suffering of
Animals, and the Call to Mercy.
New York: St. Martin's, 2002.
