Our Planet, Our Selves
by Justin Rogers-Cooper
The End of Food by Paul Roberts. Houghton Mifflin (2008)
Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture by Thom Hartmann. Viking Press (2009)
As we move closer to the tipping point of climate change, where we’ll lose control of our ability to influence atmospheric conditions on Earth, it’s probably time to reevaluate h
ow everyday habits got us here. As a polemic, it might be instructive to see those habits as different kinds of addiction. Until a few years ago, the idea t
hat we might measure our diet and consumption of consumer goods through the lens of addiction would have been laughable. After all, drugs like tobacco and alcohol were the obvious public enemies to most Americans health throughout the 20th century. It wasn’t until medical and public policy rest
ricted the enormously toxic epidemic of nicotine addiction to acceptable levels, for instance, that public health advocates, social scientists, and intellectual crusaders could turn their resources to other public illness industries that privileged shareholder wealth over common health. By specifically trying to harm human beings, these companies will become common targets that those seeking to reform the current capitalist system might focus on. This reform is necessary for the health of human beings specifically, not to mention the biosphere more broadly.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most recent group of industries to feel the spotlight from this network of activists and advocates has been the food industry. As Paul Roberts narrates in his fluid and indispensable book The End of Food, this turn toward food represents a far larger and far more ambitious campaign than the one mounted against the tobacco industry in the 1990s or the alcohol industry during the Prohibition era in the 1920s. A number of factors will influence any successful reform of the food industry, which is intricately interlinked with global trade markets and crucially supported by fantastic sums of federal spending, mostly in the form of farm subsidies. But more importantly, this urgent and widespread turn toward such a basic part of our daily life raises profound and disturbing questions about the role our everyday life plays in our health and our happiness. Eventually, these questions will conflict with our freedom to pursue the tasks that human beings have enjoyed since we began to store grain, create cities, manipulate symbols, and reinvent the chemical codes found in the biosphere in order to better suit our needs — and perhaps most perilously, better fit our desires. Our daily cravings for “tasty” f
ood — whether cheap protein, luscious fat, or year-round organic produce — have become habits responsible for helping to create, in the words of Kenyan palaeoanthropoligst Richard E. Leaky, the sixth planetary mass-extinction in the history of the Earth. To first understand and then possibly moderate these desir
es requires us to navigate their complex intersections with our culture, our economy, and our neurobiology — in short, we must restyle, reconfigure, and re-imagine every part of how we live. And we will not do this bec
ause of lifestyle choices, such as “going green.” We will do this because our very lives are at stake; the existential crisis of the species has arrived.
Thom Hartman’s Threshold also informs readers that the habits degrading life everywhere on Earth reflect horrific shortcomings in the stories we tell ourselves to justify our biocultures, or what we might call our cultures of living. The word bioculture calls attention to the way the common economic
and ideological patterns of global culture reflect the similar reproductive agendas stored in the evolution of the human brain. Even more specifically, it serves to contextualize the bodily practices of eating, sex, and laboring within the larger ecologies of chemicals and biomass that make all life possible. There have been vast transformations in human biocultures in the last 10,000 years, of course, but no transformation really sets a precedent for the purposeful evolution of the human relationship to the planetary ecosystem that’s now necessary, and necessary primarily because of attitudes that have basically served to reproduce the species for a thousand millennia.
In his attempt to narrate the biocultural patterns that produced our potential extinction, Thom Hartman first travels to what he calls a biological “edge” in the Darfur region of southern Sudan. He believes that in Darfur we can encounter a “threshold” that provides us a glimpse into the future of human conflict. In Darfur, the genocidal violence frames a constellation of “macro” issues that can serve as a microcosm of larger global stresses: peak oil, low water resources, excessive human population, and hot atmospheric conditions. This combination of resource scarcity, extreme temperature, and genocidal violence presages the conditions that will appear with more frequency and on greater scales as politically managed resources collapse under the weight of planetary ecocides. Along with the great loss of human life decaying in the desert, Hartman is also adamant about confronting the substantial loss of human knowledge deteriorating along with it in the sand. He likens the disappearance of indigenous knowledge in places like Darfur to the great rape of cultural memory that vanished during European colonization and within American slave economies. More than half of all the drugs we use in hospitals, Hartman reminds us, came from indigenous knowledge of plants.
Also like Roberts, Hartman is quick to frame the current industrial food regime as one of the most consequential experiments in all human history. Whereas Roberts so engagingly traces the interconnected agents that comprise that industry, Hartman makes his point by summarizing the effects of it. When Europeans first arrived in North America, the average depth of the topsoil was twenty-one inches. Today it’s six. In 1948, there was 158 milligrams of iron in the average 100 grams of spinach; when they stopped measuring it in 1973, that figure had dropped to 2.2 milligrams. He cites a recent article from Science on the oceanic collapse of fish ecosystems in order to explain that 29 percent of all fish species are in collapse — a term used when describing a species that has fell to 10 percent of its original population, and from which scientists do not usually observe a recovery. Of the sixty-four largest marine ecosystems across the planet, most were nearing collapse. Endangered commercial fish species alone include sea bass, Atlantic cod, king crab, Atlantic flounder, grouper, haddock, and halibut. He quotes president of the World Resources Institute Jonathan Lash, who in 2006 said, “in a single generation, we have essentially exhausted the wealth of the seas.”
He’s also very good on waste. Although he begins a chapter with an unexpectedly informative anecdote about German toilets and a short history of poop-worms, he’s even better on the pollution of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change. Since he summarizes the intersecting contributors to the planetary emergency quite well, let me give him ample space here to make his case:
We have four colliding ‘linear’ systems, all pushing against the ‘circle’ of our blue marble floating through space, planet Earth: human population exploding; increasing levels of fossilized carbon being consumed, with its waste (mostly CO2) put in our atmosphere; increasing numbers of food animals for all us humans producing unsustainable levels of waste that is also altering the environment; and an atmosphere absorbing all of this about to trip over into an unstable state, which could render life on the planet uninhabitable for us and most other complex life forms.
While his prose here seems somewhat unremarkable, no other writer I’ve come across better compresses and connects the separate lines of crisis into the tangled strand of our biocultural DNA better than Hartman.
Just as readers of The End of Food are certain to rethink any steady diet of beef and chicken, Hartman offers a lot of cultural explanations and solutions for the climate crisis. For one, he reports that if Americans cut their consumption of meat and dairy products by a fifth it would “have more impact on global warming than if every jet plane and car in the world were to fall silent forever.” Going further, however, Hartman places a significant amount of blame on the economic and religious ideologies underpinning messianic beliefs in both the human dominance of the biosphere and the righteously privileged place of ‘free-market’ capitalism within it. He traces the degradation of government by the free market economy back to the American Revolution, and in particular President John Adams’ belief in the power of a small ruling elite where wealth and power can be concentrated. He follows the power of this political idea into the post-war Chicago school of capitalist economics that influenced former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s neoliberal faith in the perfection of unregulated economic markets. As he levels now-familiar numbers about the control of resources in the United States, where the top 1 percent of families hold 49 percent of the wealth, he alleges that acolytes of neoliberalism have staged a successful “coup” over the will of the American people, and it’s one that most Americans “don’t even know happened.”
Hartman is very good at locating the contemporary philosophical source of this coup in its free market mythology. The resurgence of this myth comes from the shared popularity between fiction readers and economic elites with the radically libertarian and objectivist ideas of Ayn Rand, who advocated the “virtues of selfishness” and with whom Alan Greenspan was a close friend. Anyone interested in neoliberalism, Glen Beck, and the Republican Party would be advised to read this chapter. Hartman challenges this myth by being blunt about the role of the federal government’s historic and contemporary subsidies, through the taxpayers, to authoritarian corporations. “When the corporate oligarchy reaches out to take over and merge itself with the powers and institutions of government,” he writes, “it becomes the very definition of Mussolini’s ‘fascism’: the merger of corporate and state interests.” This fascism is the force that preserves the strength of those institutions that organize our biocultural war against the biosphere, even as it claims only to be servicing life’s “growth.” Hartman sees this force as explicitly connected to older biocultures of religious patriarchy, and he believes the evolution of our global biocultures as necessitating a new planetary ethics of gender and human
reproduction.
Indeed, the transition from Threshold to The End of Food occurs at the nexus of fascist government, human reproduction, and oil consumption. Each of these systems are predicated on infinite growth, and each depends on the other to achieve it. The fascism of an infinitely expanding capitalism has replaced religiously mandated reproduction as the primary ideology justifying human dominance of the world, and has in turn constructed a food production system that has successfully supplied enough calories for ever more reproducing humans. A golden billion of these humans materially benefit from that fascism, even where it directly degrades life for the bottom two or three billion. Still, the exponential conversion of the planet’s inorganic and organic matter into edible plants and flesh has already become perhaps the single largest event on Earth since the meteor that killed the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago. The system that makes this possible isn’t bigger than us; it is us. “The biggest driver of all these processes that are tearing our planet apart and putting all life at risk,” he writes, “is the increase in human biomass. There is roughly one trillion pounds of human flesh on the planet right now.” Hartman recruits a familiar graph of population numbers to illustrate where this trillion pounds came from, but he uses it with far more insight than most by linking it to our shrinking era of cheap oil. The growth in human population was a result of cheap oil, cheap fertilizer, cheap pesticides, and a food distribution system that “lets a person in Iowa have a lunch of Tilapia fish grown in ponds in China, lettuce and tomatoes grown in Mexico, wine imported from France, and a fruit cup of berries imported from Chile and strawberries from Nicaragua.” Since the human population relies so much on oil, he parenthetically points out that, “indirectly, most of us are actually eating oil.” Similarly, Michael Polan argues in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that we are always also eating corn; Roberts would argue that oil helps us to grow a lot of that corn.
And since most of the profits from this oil consumption-human reproduction nexus goes to elite private corporations, Hartman sees the best possible movement to regain control of the situation as one that radically renews our commitment to democracy. In this new democracy, the primary function of government would be to protect “the commons,” or what Hartman calls “the stuff we all share,” including the air, public places, and public institutions. In order to accomplish this, he pragmatically suggests that government revoke a law granting “corporate personhood,” which legitimized the legal right of corporations to shift control of common resources to privately held wealth. Corporate personhood stems from an 1886 US Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara v. Union Pacific Railroad. In that decision, court reporter and former railroad president J.C. Bancroft Davis added a note to the case claiming that Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite had said “corporations are persons,” and thus should be granted human rights under the Fourteenth Amendment — the one that, of all things, promised equal protection and due process under the law after slavery. For Hartman, the first legal step toward a real democratic system might begin by inserting the word “natural” before the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment.
Given this logic, the key to understanding fascism in the United States isn’t to study the government, but to study the economy; and if one studies the economy, one must turn to the production of “superabundance” through the modern food system. The success and health of this system is the key to understanding the popularity of fascism in the United States. If you are what you eat, then eating in this system is a significant lever one pulls for either fascism or democracy, even though, quite perversely, the less choice one has about what one eats the more likely one is eating in a system built on a fascism of cheap oil. This is the case because, in effect, the cheaper one’s food the more likely the food is the product of authoritarian corporations that have used cheap methods of “just-in-time” production to get that cheap food to one’s home. This food comes from cheap oil, cheap labor, and cheap animal life. Furthermore, it has “externalized” the costs of waste like carbon dioxide out of the price one pays at the store. The price of this carbon pollution comes in addition to other forms of pollution: toxic water, increased mutations in human-animal diseases and viruses, and the destruction of vast ecosystems for the monoculture fields of corn, soybeans, and cattle. Consumers don’t pay for these costs in the price of a Coke, but they pay a price by breathing fouler air, by destroying diverse forms of life, and by paying higher medical costs for any number of visits and treatments for one’s bodily degradation from the consumption of the cheap food, or from the cancers that appear as human biofeedback within the toxic ecosystem.
This whole strange tangle of superabundance, corporate politics, and biosphere pollution is the brilliant story told by Paul Roberts in The End of Food. Roberts tells the story by identifying the agents that made the transportation, infrastructure, and the chemical and genetic redesign of fascist food possible. This “rationalized agriculture” developed at the end of the 19th century and arguably culminated in the last third of the 20th century. Instead of the comparatively inefficient small farms that drove human food consumption for most of our history, by the end of World War II “a vast network of commodity buyers and processors had arisen to convert grains, animals, and other farm products into inputs for the food industry.” By 1957, the Harvard economist Ray Goldberg was calling it “agribusiness.” Today it has become one of more powerful corporate sectors of economy; arguably, it’s as powerful as the oil and pharmaceutical companies. Food manufacturers generate $3.1 trillion in revenue a year. They do this by cutting costs at every step of the food production process. Wal-Mart accounts for 21 cents of every food dollar spent in the United States. Retailers like Wal-Mart subsidize the low cost of food by under-pricing its actual cost because they can make up that money through non-food items sold at its stores. Since 1985 Wal-Mart alone has drive down the price of food in the United States by 9.1 percent (it’s driven down wages 2.2 percent in the same period). Suppliers to those retailers like Wal-Mart ask for more value from farmers. Farmers respond by planting more profitable crops, cutting labor costs, and investing in new technology and fertilizers. This has the cyclical effect of producing ever more quantities of food at even cheaper cost, which causes small farms to fold against larger agribusiness farms. This consolidates the food industry even more into corporate hands, who must now market ever more food to ever more populations for ever cheaper costs. As agribusiness developed more efficient ways to produce calories, the amount available for an American to eat increased to about 4,000 calories by the year 2000. “For all the staggering output and perpetual oversupply,” Roberts explains, by the turn of the century “there were troubling signs that our capacity for such superabundance was limited.”
This superabundance was limited, in part, because the main drivers of food consumption and production weren’t necessarily “food” in conventional terms. Converting “real” food into more expensive food “products” requires adding “value” to make it more profitable. Companies must also market those cheap calories for consumption. In the United States, and ever more frequently in the developed world, this means literally getting people to eat more food products. US breakfast cereal companies alone spend $800 million a year in advertising.. Nestle has a research center in Lausanne, Switzerland where scientists “pore [sic] over sensory maps, sift through sales data, and dissemble competitors’ products.” Companies engineer food tastes according to demographics. They thicken and repair foods damaged during “manufacturing” through all kinds of flavors, and also by using techniques like hydrogenation, where they can “thicken and preserve vegetable oils by injecting them with hydrogen atoms.” Demand for grape flavor for sodas, gum, and candy “now exceeds the quantity of grape flavor produced naturally…by a factor of ten.” These techniques also changed meat production. After the explosive success of chicken nuggets in the 1980s, demand for chicken overall rose dramatically. American preference for white meat meant companies like Tyson and Perdue had to design bigger birds with bigger breasts. They also had to find cheap ways to generate and handle more birds. In 1980, poultry processing plants handled sixteen million birds a year. Today they handle two million birds a week. US chicken output has tripled to thirty-seven billion pounds a year.
Ninety percent of the grain Americans consume goes to feed cows and chickens. The grain to feed all those chickens — not to mention cows and other livestock — is a product of intensive farming and the critical application of chemicals, particularly nitrogen, into the soil. This has led to soil erosion and groundwater pollution. As oil becomes more expensive, so does nitrogen, which requires oil for its production. In the context of rising populations, it’s becoming unclear how even this current food system can continue, even without a catastrophic emergency like a food-borne illness outbreak. Roberts gives numerous examples of the ways these pressures fit together, and how they pose questions about “the sustainability of current food systems and practices, and, more specifically, about whether dramatic improvements in diet — and the spectacular rise in meat consumption in particular — that occurred during the last century can be maintained during the next.”
As companies expand into new food markets, like China and India, they are converting eaters there into those with tastes similar to those in the west. This contradicts how many the planet can really feed, particularly in terms of meat. According to the Earth Policy Institute, the average consumer can sustainably eat only twelve pounds of meat a year — not the 217 pounds consumed by the average American. The current global grain supplies would not otherwise be able to feed the 9.5 billion people projected to soon be on the planet. And today’s grain output is by no means assured. The World Bank claims that global erosion is so great that by 2050 the world may be trying to feed twice as many people with half as much soil. What’s worse is nitrogen: since 40 percent of the world’s population eats the calories produced by synthetic nitrogen, any disruption in the ability of oil markets to continually produce more nitrogen will lead to vast famines. Should countries begin making more nitrogen by using natural gas, those countries will turn to the two nations with the largest natural gas supplies: Russia and Iran. Meanwhile, the oil that allows the cheap production of, say, a can of Coke necessitates 2,200 calories of hydrocarbon energy from fossil fuels to make just 200 “real” calories of the stuff. The carbon emissions from that energy have already increased to 370 parts per million, and are on track to hit 550 ppm by 2050. Furthermore, every ton of grain we grow requires a thousand tons of water, and agriculture now accounts for three-quarters of all freshwater use. Unless there is a “silver bullet” breakthrough in the system, then the coming decade or two will revolve around unprecedented disruptions in the ability of the industry to feed the human population of earth.
For many viewers, one of the lasting impressions from Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 film Super Size Me was the surprising spotlight it placed on the way the human brain is hardwired for sugars and fats. In The End of Food, Roberts writes about how the food industry succeeds in getting eaters to eat more because they have exploited both the brain’s desire for sweets and fats and because they relentlessly market food according to all kinds of human desires. It can’t be a coincidence, Roberts writes, that “food companies create…opportunities in environments specifically chosen for proconsumption demographics — in malls, in airports, and in poor neighborhoods.” They advertise snacks everywhere. They market food products as “me-time” indulgences. They put fast food in public schools. The human brain lacks the same chemistry for feeling “full” that it has for feeling hunger. As in Spurlock’s film, the brain craves the chemicals food releases for biological reasons, and these reasons have nothing to do with current bioculture.
What matters about this perspective is that it means we participate in the fascism of the corporate food industry against our best intentions because “rationalizing” agribusiness means attuning it to the irrationality, if you will, of our desires. Moreover, the production of an economy that values shareholder wealth above public health is successful both because the corporate manipulation of the political system is so effective, but also because it feels so good to eat this way in the short run. This means that in order to deal with the problem of food, as well as the problem of our entire bioculture, we have to deal with our brains and our habits. We are hardwired for addiction, and we are currently in denial about the larger effects of our addiction to eating.. The answer really can’t just be one of radical democracy, or changing the constitution, or going organic. We may have to use our biotechnological breakthroughs not on new crops or methods of production, but on ourselves. We may need to rewire our brains, because in order to deal with the consequences of our addictions, we can’t seem to quit on our own. Rather than have the planet shut itself down to stop us, let’s shut ourselves down first. We can do this not by killing ourselves, but by changing our bioculture: we need to fight the hardwire that made us fascists. We can do it by engineering ourselves for democracy and compassion, but we must also develop healthy bodies and healthy habits to match
our values.
- Play the Food Force game and learn about global hunger and ways to prevent it!
- Tell your friends about hunger.
- Ironman New Orleans 2010
