Empires of Food by Andrew Rimas

Author:Andrew Rimas
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781407060149
Publisher: Random House

A policy of decentralization ought to be adopted. We need, instead of mammoth flour mills, a multitude of smaller mills distributed through all the sections where grain is grown. Wherever it is possible, the section that produces the raw material ought to produce also the finished product. Grain should be ground to flour where it is grown. A hog-growing country should not export hogs, but pork, hams, and bacon.47

Again, that’s not to say that consolidation doesn’t have its benefits. To paraphrase Adam Smith, technology and specialization make everything cheaper, while forcing the inefficient producers to stop wasting everyone’s time and find other occupations. That’s the capitalist theory. Marxists, on the other hand, think that technology and specialization create a malicious cycle. Competing farmers race against one another for the slightest edge, so they borrow money to buy the latest version of Eggplant-Pulper 3.0, leaving the banks as the main beneficiaries. Even more pernicious, a cost-price squeeze of rising input costs and lowering commodity prices means that the workers suffer when their employers inevitably cut their wages.48 The only beneficiaries in this case are the folk musicians singing protest songs. And since the farmers are broke, they don’t want to pay to clean up the environment.

In the United States, late-twentieth-century specialization created a third food regime, supplanting the meat packers and fruit pickers of yore. This regime isn’t defined by mere industrialization, but by the creation of huge, unnatural monocultures—massive regions of the planet devoted to single strains of crops, kept alive only by the flowering toxicity of agrochemicals. Rural geographers call this “spatial homogeneity.”49 The natural order—rain that renews nitrogen, for example—is substituted for a can of E-Z-Grow and a contract to sell 3 million bushels of green beans to Japan.

The third food regime is grounded on a presumption that, when people buy a loaf of bread for $2.99, they’re not calculating the additional monetary cost in water contamination, deforestation, global warming, and social ruin. Naturally, most people don’t notch up these phantom dollars when they read their shopping bills. If the market worked as it’s supposed to, then it would transfer those costs to the consumer instead of tricking them into thinking that food is, in fact, cheap. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t. We just think we’re getting a free lunch.

Adam Smith believed that the price of a widget should reflect the toil that the widget maker invested in making it.50 But usually, as in the case of food, the price tag is very different from the actual cost. This gap between cost and price is what trade is all about, as it gives the middleman a slice of wealth. But the ways in which the gap is hidden is usually much less obvious than a simple markup. Sometimes, as in the case of grain grown on land that’s slowly degrading, the true costs may not be apparent for decades. We might ignore the costs for cultural reasons, as the Sumerians ignored their salty fields until it was too late.

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