Food and Everyday Life by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Cultivating Localization through Commodity De-Fetishism

Contours of Authenticity and the Pursuit of Transparency in the Local Organic Agrarian Food Market

Zach Schrank

Brief History of American Agriculture

Modern corporate agriculture is the story of technological domination, monocultural specialization, and market consolidation. Like most industries, its history is one driven by goals of efficiency, specialization, and expanded output. Early in the twentieth century, nearly 40 percent of the population in the United States worked as farmers. This number has declined drastically throughout the years to the point where now farmers comprise less than only 2 percent of the total population (Gardner 2002). Inversely, the size of farms by acreage has grown substantially. Farms have grown by 67 percent in size since 1900 while the number of farms have declined by 63 percent (Dimitri et al. 2005, 2). Such transformations have brought qualitative changes in the type of agriculture practiced on a typical farm. What was once largely a small family enterprise based on crop and livestock diversification has now become a landscape of narrow and intense specialization (Berry 1973; Pollan 2007). As a result, agriculture in the United States has made massive gains in production output of commodity crops.

These agricultural transformations in America have been driven largely by three key developments: technological improvement, changing consumer influence and spending power, and a true commodity chain for trade in global food markets (Gardner 2002; Dimitri et al. 2005, 6). Perhaps most noteworthy, new synthetic chemical inputs for soil fertilization and pesticides combined with mechanized farming practices yielded tremendous gains in output. Because of these two factors, between 1948 and 1999, agricultural output in the United States grew on average by 1.9 percent annually (Dimitri et al. 2005, 6). During this same measure of time, consumers in America found themselves making more money than any other point in history. Wages were increasing rapidly and new disposable income led to the development of a truly domestic consumer oriented national economy. As more consumers made their income outside of agricultural settings, new urban food demands began to take shape. The industry responded with more vertically oriented production in agriculture. Thus began a steady increased reliance on commodity crops grown in the United States to be used for the mass production and distribution of specialized and processed foods. Corporate agri-business is now well positioned and truly dominates food markets from cultivation to consumption.

Local Organic and Agrarian Movement

Agrarianism argues that attention and responsible action can occur most readily as we directly/practically see and feel our connections with each other and the land. For this reason, agrarians stress the importance of living as much as we can within local economies, economies that keep the loop between production and consumption as small as possible. Close communal contact and sustained commitment to a local, natural context increase the likelihood that our sight, feeling, and action are honest, non-evasive, and informed. If we can see how our living practices directly affect air and water quality, soil retention and heath, species contentment and diversity,

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