This afternoon I attended an outstanding student presentation of a Community Food Guide they had developed and produced. In the past couple years in the rural area of Georgia where I live there is now a farmers’ market, a community garden, a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture), and a soup kitchen. Our Kroger is quadrupling the space dedicated to organics, and even Walmart now supports local farmers.
Great victories all. Real progress; real achievements. These are some of the tangible successes of the food movements that have risen up spontaneously and against great odds in the wake of the byproducts of industrial food production: food-borne illness, childhood obesity, early-onset type 2 diabetes, animal cruelty, farm-worker abuse, environmental damage, and resource depletion to name a few.
The Kroger rep on today’s panel encouraged us all to vote with our wallets. That’s something all of us can do every day. What an attractive means to bring about change. But it’s also true that we can only choose among the options presented. And our choices are influenced by the billions spent on advertising and proximity and placement and policy and the myriad of other factors over which we have little say.
And so I was reminded today of something Eric Schlosser said in his keynote speech, “The True Cost of Cheapness,” for the Fall 2006 Food, Ethics and the Environment Conference at Princeton. Taking action on a personal level is good. It’s important. It’s essential. But it’s just not enough:
[from the podcast at 01:02:18] [T]his whole idea that every purchase that you make is a vote, and that every purchase that you make has a ripple effect, and that we all must be responsible and ethical consumers… Well, I agree with that, but at the same time there is a pressure on all of us to be pure, to be morally pure, to think that we’re really going to change the world by what we buy and…it gets really hard to be pure. It’s complicated. Well, should I be buying organic or local or should I… What should I do?
The pressure is on us and I think that what we buy can make a difference and that we are responsible and that we do have an obligation. But I think that changing the world by what you buy is only going to go so far. And it only works to a point. And after that point I think it is delusion that as consumers we are going to change that system fundamentally or we are going to change the world.
Missing from the discourse, missing from the dialog over the last twenty-five years have been a couple of other phrases. One of them is “corporate responsibility” and the other one is “collective responsibility.” And I stand here honestly saying that I’m not pure, my purchases are not ideal, and maybe some of you in this room are pure but it’s hard to be pure in this country in the year 2006. But ultimately the problems that…I’ve tried to outline are not due to individual faults. They’re really not. They have been caused by big systems. Systems of belief, systems of production, systems of making a profit. And without looking at them from a systemic approach there is no possibility of meaningful change…what we do as consumers isn’t going to make a profound difference. And I think we cannot allow this movement surrounding ethical eating to focus only on our personal responsibility and on consumer power.
Emphasis mine.
I have compared the Gulf Oil disaster to the financial crisis and blamed both on the deregulation mania that began with Ronald Reagan and remained dominant in the decades since. That old-time market religion tells us that whatever the outcome, it’s right because the market says so. Even as we resist we succumb. Just buy the right things in the supermarket and change happens.
Not so.
I try to make ethical decisions when it comes to the food I eat. I would encourage you and my friends and my neighbors and my countrymen to also make ethical personal decisions regarding the food they choose to eat. But the challenges we face in changing the industrial food system are deeply systemic. And those ethical decisions are just nibbling at the edges.
Our food is cheap because of farm subsidies. Those subsidies help the giant agribusiness companies even as they keep individual farmers poor. Those giant agribusiness companies are not stigmatized; the record 40 million Americans now on food stamps are. We could get rid of that stigma and supercharge our wallet votes if instead of giving farm subsidies to Big Agribusiness we gave the money in Food Stamps to all Americans to buy better food.
Not realistic. But then neither is changing the industrial food system with our wallets alone.
RELATED: The students showed clips from the documentary, Food, Inc. which is now available on Netflix streaming or in your local video store. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Review round-up here.
You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.