In Meat We Trust (36 page)

Those gatherings pointed toward an inescapable conclusion: sustainable agriculturalists had to diversify their primarily rural agenda and link it to a broader community. In 1994, they launched the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, a loose-knit collection of reformers whose interests ranged from immigrant farm workers to minority farmers to consumer protection. But two years later, the movement took a great leap forward when it formally allied itself with activists engaged in building urban food systems. The new Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) linked farm to city and city to farm. Over the next fifteen years, the CFSC would inspire the “eat local” campaign; turn farmers’ markets into a minor industry; and force the NOSB to establish organic standards, especially for beef, poultry, and pork.

The urban activists who partnered with the sustainable agriculture advocates came out of the “food security” movement. The working definition of
food security
can be summed briefly: every person, every community, every nation is secure when food supplies are available, accessible, and adequate. The idea was a byproduct of World War II. As the war came to an end, world leaders organized the FAO (now housed at the United Nations) to monitor global food supplies and address a tragic paradox: people in some parts of the world suffered malnutrition and starvation even as farmers in other regions collapsed into bankruptcy thanks to overproduction of foodstuffs. The FAO wanted to organize the distribution and sale of surpluses in a way that would guarantee food security for everyone. During the 1970s, food security provided the conceptual framework for managing the global food crisis that scarred that decade. The FAO, which hosted a conference to address the famine and coordinate the response to it, urged global leaders to construct a “systematic world
food security policy.”

The food security of the United States loomed large in that effort because so much of the world’s population depended on American agriculture. Scholars, politicians, and activists pondered the nation’s food security at conferences and congressional hearings, and most arrived at a surprising conclusion: despite an abundance of cheap food and a hyperefficient production and distribution system, the United States was food insecure. Most people lived in cities and relied on food supplies trucked in from other parts of the country, and an average supermarket held only about two days’ worth of food for the people it regularly served. A powerful storm, a railroad strike, or a military-related event could wipe shelves clean. Environmentalists argued that, in addition, U.S. food insecurity was systemic because farmers relied on petroleum-based inputs; agriculture as practiced was unsustainable and therefore food supplies were anything but secure. Others contended that Americans would enjoy food security only when they replaced big food manufacturers with what the Naderist Exploratory Project for Economic Alternatives called “a decentralized, safe,
and ecologically sound food production and marketing system.” According to this view, Americans needed fewer factory farms and giant food processors, and more “localized, small-scale production
of fruits and vegetables.”

The desire for a more food-secure America inspired grass-roots projects as well as federal legislation that linked farmers directly to local consumers. In 1976, Congress passed the Farmer-to-Consumer Direct Marketing Act, which authorized $1.5 million for projects that would forge connections “between the urban consumer
and the small farmer.” To name one example,
New Yorkers used some of the money to establish greenmarkets where area farmers could (and still do) sell their produce to city residents who otherwise relied on foods grown and manufactured elsewhere. The most influential and long-lived
of these 1970s projects unfolded in Hartford, Connecticut. That city was as food insecure as most, dependent as it was on supplies transported long distances. But Hartford’s poorest neighborhoods were particularly insecure. As was true in other big cities, grocery chains had deserted Hartford’s inner city, forcing impoverished urbanites to pay higher-than-average prices for whatever food they could find at convenience stores. Using federal funds, Hartford officials commissioned the Public Resource Center, another Naderist nonprofit, to develop a food security strategy based on urban gardens, food clubs, cooperatives, and farmers’ markets stocked with locally grown produce. Hartford was not alone, and in 1979, the Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies published a nearly three-hundred-page compendium that described dozens of food security projects and organizations around the country. Although some, like the Hartford endeavor, focused on low-income neighborhoods, what linked all the ventures was their emphasis on fostering community self-reliance. No one expected towns and cities to become 100 percent food self-sufficient; that was both impossible and unnecessary. But they could become more self-reliant so that in case of an extended emergency, they need not wait for trains or trucks to bring food.

Once the crisis-riddled seventies ended, enthusiasm for self-reliant communities and local food production might have gone the way of lower thermostat settings, but food security advocates got an unexpected boost in the 1980s thanks to the election of Ronald Reagan as president. As part of the Reagan agenda to reduce government, Congress slashed $12 billion from federal food stamp and child nutrition programs; almost overnight, demands for food overwhelmed taxpayer-funded and private relief organizations. In 1982, for example, the number of Cleveland residents seeking food assistance rose more than 100 percent. In Denver, food distribution to the needy doubled during that year, and over a hundred food banks scrambled to keep pace. A national network of emergency operations—two hundred food banks, twenty-three thousand food pantries, more than three thousand soup kitchens—struggled to keep up with demand, and Detroit mayor Coleman A. Young pronounced hunger the “most prevalent and most insidious”
problem in American cities.

That long moment of anguish taught a valuable lesson to food activists, nutritionists, and policymakers: managing hunger on an emergency-to-emergency basis was exhausting, often futile, and at best a bandage rather than a cure. By the end of the decade, anti-hunger activists had reframed the problem of urban hunger as one of community food insecurity. The distinction was more than semantic. As two analysts
with the Urban Institute explained, individuals suffered hunger, but communities experienced food insecurity. Rather than treat hunger as a short-term, person-by-person emergency, it made more sense to reframe it as a community problem. That shift in focus necessitated a change in strategy: rather than race from one food emergency to the next, activists turned their energy to building long-term, stable food supplies with projects like the one in Hartford with its mixture of gardens, food clubs, and farmers’ markets.

Thus was born the coalition forged by alt-agriculturalists and food security advocates. Each had something the other wanted: small, independent farmers needed outlets for their crops; food security activists needed stable sources of local food. Merging their agendas wasn’t easy. Over the years, significant “tension”
had developed between the alt-agriculturalists and anti-hunger activists, one observer said, a situation she blamed on agribusiness-generated “myths” that sustainable foods were priced out of reach of the urban poor. That tension had “prevented a dialogue between” the two groups, and when both trooped to Capitol Hill in 1990 to engage in negotiations over that year’s farm bill, they were, in the words of one participant, “like two trains
passing in the night.” By the mid-1990s, however, the trains were on the same track and had added more passengers by wooing another group that initially rejected pleas to join the new alliance: environmentalists had long supported sustainable agriculture but couldn’t see how food security benefited their eco-agenda. CFSC members reminded them of a point food security proponents had raised back in the 1970s: the distance that foodstuffs traveled from farm to plate, some 1,400 miles on average. Food systems based on local products, usually grown by ecologically minded farmers, were more sustainable and thus more environmentally sound.

But there was more to the new alliance’s agenda than supporting farmers and feeding the urban poor. These activists adhered to a grand American tradition: like crusaders for other causes in earlier generations—think Prohibition and Abolition as well as the religious awakenings of the early nineteenth century—those engaged in building an alternative food system hoped to reform and renew the nation’s soul. In their minds, food was a lens through which Americans would learn to view town and country as parts of a whole and themselves as citizens of a unified environmental, economic, and social community. Three scholars—and university faculty played key roles in building the new coalition—outlined this mission in a 1996 essay. Because Americans relied on food that came “from a global everywhere” and thus from “nowhere . . . in particular,”
they wrote, most had no idea “how and by whom what they consume is produced, processed, and transported.” Americans were disconnected “from each other and from the land” and consequently “less responsible to each other and to the land.” “Where do we go from here? How can we come home again?” The way home, they contended, lay in “withdrawing from” the global and national food economy and building an alternative food system rooted in regional and local food sheds that linked town and country, city dweller and farmer. Only then would Americans “reassemble” their “fragmented identities, reestablish community, and become native not only to a place but to each other.” All of that sounds hopelessly utopian. But that was precisely the point of placing food at the center of this project. Food linked everyone, regardless of class, geography, race, or income. Making food production and delivery more visible—whether through urban gardens, family farms, or farmers’ markets—would encourage Americans to shoulder greater responsibility for their air, water, soil, and neighbors. Legislation could go only so far in addressing environmental degradation and economic injustice, but both could be alleviated, and spiritual awakening nurtured, one farmer, one garden, one market, and one meal at a time.

This utopian project reaped real-world rewards. In 1995 and 1996, the alliance persuaded the House and Senate to add a “Community Food Projects” agenda to the farm bill, a victory that expanded the USDA resources committed to alternative food and farming. New Internet-based technology and the World Wide Web fertilized the food security crusade by enabling organizers to communicate quickly and to attract new adherents. A public demonstration of the alliance’s clout came in 1997 when the NOSB finally proposed a set of organic standards and the USDA prepared to accept them. By that time, many people involved in agriculture had become enamored of biotechnology, and the proposed standards would have allowed organic foodstuffs to include or be raised with genetically modified organisms and permitted the use of irradiation and fertilizers manufactured from sewage sludge. The food security alliance urged supporters to submit comments, the method by which the USDA gathered input from the public. Well over a quarter-million people and organizations did just that, bombarding the department with objections to what opponents dubbed the “Big Three”
(presumably because they believed those three items were the brainchildren of Big Ag and Big Food). The USDA backed down, dumped the proposed standards, and told the NOSB to try again.

The food security coalition transformed the nation’s culinary landscape. From 1990 on, sales of organic foods rose about 20 percent a year, and by the early twenty-first century, Americans were spending $8 billion a year on “alternative” foods, buying about half of it in conventional retail outlets such as health food stores and chain supermarkets; 73 percent of all of the latter carried organic foods of some kind, even if only frozen pizza. The translation of utopian ideal into practical reality inadvertently obscured the alliance’s original missions of fostering social justice and food security. Two sociologists who studied the movement (and participated in it as well) reported that farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture projects, and country food stands had proliferated “like robins
in spring”; farmers’ markets increased by more than 60 percent in the late 1990s alone. Customers for them, alas, had not. Alternative food systems, it appeared, required as much marketing and public relations as Mel Coleman’s natural beef. Thus began the “buy local” campaign that captured the attention of the middle class. That tactic originated in 1999 when a Massachusetts group, Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, launched a sophisticated public relations drive aimed at wooing shoppers. Stickers, pamphlets, and advertisements urged area residents to be “Local Heroes” and buy food from local farmers. Other communities and organizations quickly latched on to the idea. (Presumably no one anticipated the heated debate over “local miles” that erupted several years later.)

A cycle developed: the more chic that alternative foods became—and the role that status and cachet played in fueling the growth of this niche cannot be denied—the higher the premiums those foods commanded (and not always because demand outstripped supplies), the more likely farmers were to switch to organic production in order to nab those premiums, and the less interested they were in serving the needs of poor urbanites. The fetishization of alternative foods—celebrity chefs and farmers, menus detailing the ecologically correct origins of every ingredient in a dish, farmers’ market as hipster carnival—lured more consumers eager to spend food dollars in order to experience the niche. Surely no one was surprised when in 2006, Wal-Mart announced plans to expand its offerings of organic foods.

Alternative livestock and meat production,
however, lagged behind that of alt-staples like arugula and organic boxed macaroni and cheese; in 2000, meats constituted just 3 percent of the organic sector. Part of the problem was logistical: every year more farmers shifted more land into organic production, but most of that was devoted to raising vegetables and fruits. Relatively few people were interested in growing organic corn for livestock feed or in devoting acres to grazing rather than crop production, especially because meats made up such a small piece of the organic pie. The smaller the sector, of course, the less inclined farmers were to raise feed. That was the first Catch-22. Another was that so few farmers, and especially livestock producers, controlled their agricultural destinies. Broiler growers, to name the obvious example, were contractors. But by the turn of the century, the number of independent cattle feeders had dwindled, and contract hog farming had gained traction among small farmers struggling to make ends meet. Put another way, there weren’t that many livestock producers left to go organic. That explains why, statistically, a large proportion of the people producing organic meats came to the industry with no prior farming experience.