Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (5 page)

Maybe this is another reason that farming is moving out of the countryside and into the cities. To be an independent-minded farmer, you really need to move off the radar of Big Ag. Maybe you need to be too small to matter, and maybe it helps to hide in plain sight—right in the city.

I
NDUSTRIAL
E
ATERS
I: H
UMANS

T
he Fernandezes of Texas have two preteen children: a boy and a girl. Grandma lives with the family. Their weekly groceries and takeout food purchases fan out in front of them on the kitchen table. They include, among other items, breaded fish sticks, extra-lean ground beef, luncheon meat, avocados, tomatoes, bananas, donuts, apples, a head of iceberg lettuce, homemade tortillas, and takeout pizzas. The family's food purchases cost $242.48 that week.
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The Revises are from North Carolina. Mom and Dad stand behind the table laden with their week's groceries: bags of potato chips, sodas, a gallon-jug of milk, pork chops, smoked turkey slices, bunches of grapes, and bagged vegetables. The two teenage sons sit with enormous pizza boxes on their laps, and there are other fast-food containers with the rest of the week's worth of food eaten on the go. The Revis family spent $341.98 on food that week.
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The Cavens live in California. Dad holds a young boy, no older than four, while his sister cheekily mugs for the camera with her hand under her chin and her head to one side. Mom smiles next to the dad and toddler. Their groceries contain a lot of bread products but also frozen corndogs, frozen peas, and boxes of breakfast cereal. There's also a package of ground beef, some eggs, broccoli, bananas, apples, and tangerines. Their grocery bill for that week is a mere $159.18.
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I didn't actually go into the homes of these families and follow them around for a week. They appear, along with their food purchases for the week, in Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio's
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.
In their award-winning 2005 book, the authors photographed thirty families in twenty-four regions across the world for a pictorial look at household diets. On the pages of the families from countries including the United States, Canada, Germany, Kuwait, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, and Mexico, the book captures the diet of industrial eaters.

In industrialized nations, we consume lots of meat and lots of refined carbohydrates, as well as foods that are high in fat, salt, and sugar but low in fiber and nutrients. We tend toward lots of processed dairy yet very few whole foods like fruits, vegetables, seeds, and whole grains. More importantly, we eat too much of everything, usually in a hurry or in front of the television or in the car. Whole grains, fresh fruit, and seasonal vegetables get pushed out of the diet as the cheap, empty calories of processed food take over.

This is what was originally termed the “Western diet” because it used to be associated with the all-American expanding waistline. We now understand that it's a nutritional transition that occurs in most countries as they industrialize. So, what was once considered a uniquely culturally American or Western European diet is now an increasingly Chinese and Indian diet. Given that these two countries make up one-third of the global population, the impact of even small shifts in these countries’ eating patterns will be huge shifts in the food ecosystem. Is it
any wonder that Walmart is cutting deals to open stores in the notoriously protectionist Indian retail market, as is the UK grocery giant Tesco, and France's Carrefour? Walmart's supercenters in China have already proved to be an extremely lucrative international experiment for the world's largest retailer. The big-box revolution that we experienced in the 1990s in North America and the United Kingdom is going global.

F
OOD
M
ILES
, F
UEL, AND
F
REEWAYS

The 1990s was the decade when the supermarket took an evolutionary leap in size. It grew hand in hand with increasing global trade and the cheapening of food. Supermarkets became superstores, and big-box grocery stores (even larger than superstores) chased urban sprawl farther and farther out. There seemed to be no limit as to how big our grocery stores could be and how much food from far, far away could be found inside.

Snap peas and garlic from China. Apples from New Zealand. Asparagus and grapes from South America. Strawberries and artichokes from California. Global summertime was in full swing in the grocery store. But it was an apocalypse down on the family farm. Our domestic small- and medium-sized (that is, family) farmers were told that they had to scale up to compete on the global market or get out. Most got out, by way of bankruptcy at the rate of fifty thousand farms per year.
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Trade liberalization of food crops in the 1990s flooded the global market with ever-cheaper commodity crops, so much so that the cost of seed, fertilizer, and machinery outstripped the price a farmer could get for his crop, even in a good year.

This mass extinction of the last of the family farms in the United States (and in Canada) allowed corporate agriculture to buy up farmland and aggregate immense landholdings. This enabled large operations to maximize the use of economies of scale, which were working only at the commercial farm level anyway. As a result, cheap food
became even cheaper. Suddenly we could afford strawberries in January no matter where we lived.

The 1990s was the decade where our food started to travel really long distances. It was the beginning of the global food swap.

The 1,500-Mile Diet

In June 2001, the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University released a watershed report on the production, transportation, and distribution of food in the US food system. “Food, Fuel, and Freeways” began with the statement that “most consumers do not understand today's highly complex global food system. Much of the food production and processing occurs far away from where they live and buy groceries.”
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Most people, the authors posited, weren't even aware of, let alone concerned about, the drastic increase in the fossil fuel use that the global food system was responsible for. And all but a few were equating Chilean table grapes with climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. The report compiled the research, did the math, and gave the local food movement some significant talking points that are still in use today. It also brought to light the fact that the average grocery store item was traveling absurdly long distances from the field where it was grown to our plates. The center's report also drew the line between these increased “food miles” and the “[e]xternal environmental and community costs related to the production, processing, storage, and transportation” that was seldom accounted for in the food's retail price.
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At thirty-seven pages, the report covers an astonishing amount of past research and contemporary concerns about the conventional food system. It was a groundbreaking report in that it took the average grocery store item, something universally understood by every eater in the United States, and laid out the realities of its complex, or at least lengthy, journey from field to plate. It published research on energy use in the food system, with emphasis on the transportation and distribution sector. It compared
the distance that food traveled from farm to point of sale in a conventional “integrated retail/wholesale system,” that is, the supermarket model, with distances in a local system, that is, local farm co-ops producing for local retailers, as well as farmers who sell directly to consumers via Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs and farmers’ markets. It used fresh produce to compare miles traveled, fossil fuels used, and carbon dioxide emissions created in the transportation of several food systems. And, finally, it made recommendations for actions to document these “hidden costs” in the conventional food system and provided an argument in favor of local and regional food systems. Perhaps, most astonishingly, it established the most iconic sound bite of our current modern, industrial food item: that the average grocery store item travels over 1,500 miles from farm to consumer.

The fact that this report came out of Iowa is not insignificant. Iowa is an agricultural state, with thirty-three million acres of farmland specializing in the commodity crops of corn, soybeans, hogs, and cattle. By the time “Food, Fuel, and Freeways” was released, these agricultural commodities were almost entirely for export. “With the possible exception of livestock for meat production, most Iowa farms no longer produce food to supply Iowa consumers directly,” the report said.
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Instead, the food produced on the land leaves the state as raw commodities, which then are re-imported into the state once processors have “added value” and, therefore, cost to the food.

There was a time, the authors noted, when Iowa thrived on a regional, diversified agricultural loop. In the 1920s, US Agricultural Census records showed Iowa producing thirty-four different commodities on at least 1 percent of its farms, and ten different commodities on over 50 percent of its farms. Iowa farms produced apples, potatoes, cherries, plums, grapes, raspberries, strawberries, sweet corn, and pears, for example. By 1997, monocrop swathes of corn and soybeans were grown on over 50 percent of Iowa's farms. And with the diminishing diversity of foods, the diversity of local processors vanished. In 1924, Iowa had
fifty-eight canning factories in thirty-six counties just to process sweet corn alone. By 1998, there were a total of two canning factories left in Iowa. This once highly agricultural state needed to import 90 percent of its produce.
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Food in Iowa, as it does elsewhere, comes and goes largely by heavy trucks burning diesel and spewing carbon dioxide emissions. Between agricultural production, processing, and transportation, the report said that the food system accounted for 16 to 17 percent of total US energy consumption, transportation alone accounting for 11 percent of energy used within the food system.
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Clearly, reducing the fossil fuels used in our food system would have a significant impact on overall environmental concerns.

The report is the source of the much-used figure of 1,518 miles (usually rounded down to 1,500 miles) that the average item of fresh produce travels from point of production to point of sale on a current calculation of average food miles of food items consumed in the United States.
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Moreover, the report's authors noted that this type of calculation was something that was getting increasingly more difficult to conduct because government-operated food terminals were vanishing as major food retailers consolidated their operations. Whereas even the chains once bought their produce and fresh meats through these government-owned and operated terminal-food wholesale markets, they have now chosen to create their own distribution systems as they became more concerned with efficiencies and vertical integration. As the food terminals went away, independent grocers lost a vital wholesale supply line. And as the report states, the figure was estimated from production and shipping records for various fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, and other foods that passed through the Chicago food terminal system in 1998. It was much more complicated to calculate the food miles for multi-ingredient processed products.
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And because so much of the food supply passes through these privately owned systems, it is virtually impossible to get accurate statistics on food miles nowadays.

I
NDUSTRIAL
E
ATERS
II: A
NIMALS

We're not the only industrialized eaters in this food chain. We've turned the livestock and the fish we eat into industrial eaters as well. Livestock are no longer a few cows happily munching grass in a field, or pigs wallowing in mud and rooting around in the farmyard. Cows, naturally herbivores, now live in close-quarter pens and are fed soybeans and grain. Swine, whose wild cousins are natural foragers with highly varied diets, are fed monochromatic diets of more soybean and wheat pellets, with a few essential vitamins mixed in. Larger fish no longer chase and eat smaller fish in the aquaculture food chain. Instead, they are fed pellets of fishmeal, cereals, and vegetables.

Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFOs) are now the overwhelming norm of meat production in our food system. And they are just as their name suggests: factory farms with a minimum of a thousand head of cattle being fed high-calorie diets to put on weight as quickly as possible in as small a space as possible. Poultry CAFOs have anywhere from ten thousand fryers to one hundred thousand laying hens. Battery hens, also known as laying hens, are kept in wire cages that are so small the hens can't fully turn around. Their beaks are removed by cauterization, because otherwise they'd peck each other to death. Pig CAFOs house upward of 2,500 swine, usually more like 5,000. The largest slaughterhouse in the world is in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Its Smithfield hog-processing plant kills 32,000 hogs a day.
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Routine (over)use of antibiotics in CAFOs is part of the reality of industrial meat production because the cramped, stressful conditions that these animals endure leaves their immune systems weakened and prone to disease. In 2009, the first-ever report on the use of antibiotics in the livestock industry was compiled by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In this report, released in 2010, it was revealed that the FDA's best-guess estimate is that 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States are in CAFOs for animals, not humans.
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So
while the medical community struggles with new strains of antibiotic-resistant superbugs in hospitals, there's rampant and indiscriminate use of these lifesaving drugs in agriculture simply because it's more cost-effective to grow animals in a space smaller than what allows them to even turn around.