My interview with historian James McWilliams, who has won this year's $50,000 Hiett Prize in the Humanities, has just been published on the Dallasnews.com site. I strongly urge any of my readers interested in food and food culture to read what Jimmy has to say. He's an agrarian who opposes industrial agriculture, but who says many food reformers are too dogmatic. Here's an excerpt:
RD: You forcefully attack some of the core beliefs of your fellow travelers in the movement. For example, many organic farming devotees are strongly against mucking around with the genetic code of fruits and vegetables. You think genetically modified food could actually be a boon to the environment. Explain.JM: We've been "mucking around" with vegetables for 10,000 years. If we didn't selectively alter the genetic makeup of wild plants we'd have no such thing as agriculture. That said, there is certainly a difference between crossing genes within species and, as is the case with GM crops, crossing genes between species, in order to achieve a desirable trait. Over 2 billion acres of land have been planted worldwide with GM crops since 1997. While there are, as with any technology, a number of potential problems that could occur, we've yet to see any of them systematically appear.
Given this cautious endorsement, I should note that the major problem with GM technology is that it's monopolized by a handful of corporations who use it to grow three monocultural crops: corn, soy and cotton. What I'd like to see is the technology broadly dispersed, made more affordable and adopted to foster the goal of environmental sustainability. It's currently possible to produce blight-resistant rice, drought-resistant cassava, high-yielding sorghum and grass that, when fed to cows, eliminates the emission of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. None of these products are on the market, however, because the corporate players don't see a big enough market to justify production and the NGOs and nonprofits are ideologically opposed to plant biotechnology. All I can say is that it's a good thing we don't treat GM pharmaceuticals the same way, as a lot of insulin and vaccines are produced through GM technology.
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Not impressed, sorry. He may be a nifty fellow and a fine companion, but nothing I read suggests he is much of an agrarian... perhaps a skeptical Liberal foodie... but agrarian, no.
"We live in age in which — thanks to activists like Rachel Carson and Al Gore — environmental impacts matter."
- Heh, thanks?
"That said, there is certainly a difference between crossing genes within species and, as is the case with GM crops, crossing genes between species"
- Yes, a difference indeed. Won't we be chagrinned if the mysterious Pig/Avian/Human virus is somehow related to gene experimentation (not saying it is, or that anyone would admit it, but the uncertainty is rather the crux of the argment, no?)
"As for cows, grass-fed cows require up to 10 acres of land per cow. And the cows emit four times the methane of conventional cows. It’s not sustainable."
- This is simply false, not a little false, but a whopper of a lie. Managed Intensive Grazing (MIG) and Mob grazing is radically reducing the amount of land needed for grass finishing of beef. 10 Acres was not even correct for any area not already a desert or scrub land.
Rod, there is nothing of "fellow" traveller in this lad; he is a conventional environmentalist and judges all aspects of the Local Food/Agrarian movement through petro-chemical greenhouse gas lenses.
You know, anyone who might be into sustainable agriculture, including me, wouldn't have the energy to write long comments on websites after a real day's labor growing food.
McWilliams isn't much of a "contrarian" when it comes to the standard bromide of "more whole grains, fruits, legumes, and vegetables" (i.e. Standard Vegan 101.) As Erin and I and others mentioned in an earlier "foodie" thread, some people genetically don't deal well with carbs, even whole-grain ones.
For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who lived mostly on meat, whatever they could scrabble off the land *in the summer,* and lived in *very* small populations. This isn't how we live now - and factory farming reflects that reality. I'm more with the Weston Price people; that many people are at their healthiest when they are eating closest to the paleolithic. Factory farming reflects that, in a distorted and not completely nutritionally good way.
I would like McWilliams to extend the same analysis to fruits and vegetables for all of us who live in growing zone 5 or 6, and lower (i.e. colder.) Fruits and vegetables are enormously "expensive" to produce, with the intensive cultivation required, the amounts of water needed, etc. They are also highly seasonal if you are going to eat them in Zone 6 or less. (Try getting fresh lettuce on a mass basis in the Great Plains in the winter.) Otherwise, you're transporting them in air-conditioned trucks and rail cars from California.
Were we really to see "peak oil" (or some similar breakdown), fresh fruits and vegetables would be among the first to go, at least for a few years, until people got their home gardens established. Orchards would take more years than that. And again, you wouldn't see much fresh stuff in the winter - only what you could pull out of greenhouses or cold frames (expensive.)
People in the 18th and 19th centuries had low life spans for *good reasons.* I hate to defend industrial farming, but I don't see the "local/organic" alternatives filling in the gap, not at our present population levels, and not given US climate patterns.
McWilliams is a refreshing, iconoclastic voice in the debate over food and agriculture in the U.S. I'm sure he will be attacked as a schill for "big ag" for expressing the fact that the global future of food may require the modification of genes in order to avoid mass starvation.
This fact never seems to bother organic purists, who avoid the topic like the plague. Michael Pollan, for all of his many virtues, does not have an answer to the question of how to feed a world without the assistance of multinational seed, food, and biotech companies.
It's not his fault: There is no answer. Organic advocates need to shed the "War on Terror"-style rhetoric against large agricultural conglomorates, and start working to change them through democratic, grassroots means. The Humane Society (an organization for which I have little patience) is posting some remarkable successes with large slaughterhouses and processers through public information campaigns, internal organizational pressue, and ballot initiatives.
After winning a few battles, groups like these can negotiate with large companies from a position of strength. Organic folks could take a page from their book.
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