Does the thought of eating cloned pork turn your stomach?Do you find yourself steering clear of “farmed” salmon?Is “organic” an ever-more appealing adjective?
You’re not alone. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, a reliable barometer of matters political and cultural, catches the mood: in an age when “storybook children who used to visit grandparents on their farms now visit them at golf course condos,” she writes, “freedom from the farm is starting to feel like disconnection. … We’ve gone from raising crops to worrying about them.”
It’s a worry that seems altogether rational. “Industrial fishing practices have decimated every one of the world’s biggest and most economically important species of fish,” reports the Washington Post‘s Rick Weiss. The Scripps Howard News Service warns that due to the heavy use of pesticides consumers should “thoroughly wash produce” and “peel fruits and vegetables like cucumbers and apples whenever possible.” Earlier this year, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report warning about the dangers of genetically modified organisms and calling for more effective “bioconfinement strategies.” A study issued in February by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that crops of maize, soybeans, and canola have been “pervasively contaminated with DNA sequences from GM [genetically modified] varieties.” A U.S. Department of Agriculture study discovered that “60 percent of the 35 major beef slaughtering and processing plants fail to meet federal standards for preventing E. coli,” leading annually to an estimated 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths. Speaking of beef, how many Mad Cows are being “processed” at this moment?
To be sure, in terms of food production the 20th century figures as the most remarkable in history, when the triune juggernaut of science, government, and commerce carried agronomic expertise and abundant grain to hungry people everywhere. Experts judge that world famine was averted due to these efforts, and if so, we should marvel, humbly, at this feat. But the economic and technological trajectory of that century continues, and where it is taking us is by no means certain. Many seeming agricultural gains are now netting losses, or at best breaking even, and the emerging record of agribusiness is revealing error, flaw, and corruption in all arenas—scientific, economic, political. Nonetheless, the juggernaut rolls on. To where? That’s where the controversy begins.
Mark Winston wants to put us at ease. in Travels in the Genetically Modified Zone, Winston, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, takes on issue after issue in a moderating, judicious key. Along the way his frequent references to “communal comfort zones” and “potential middle grounds” tip us off that he’s leading us carefully through a minefield.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick’s rhetorical blast at the European Union exemplifies the sort of thing Winston is up against. “European antiscientific policies,” Zoellick thundered in January 2003, “are spreading to other corners of the world.” Zoellick, it turns out, was referring to the EU’s longstanding ban on genetically modified food, which, the Bush administration claims, is influencing impoverished African nations to reject the importation of American crops, despite the threat of starvation.
Is GM food—or, as the Brits have dubbed it, “Frankenfood”—the serious threat so many Europeans believe it to be? Winston thinks not; if anything, transgenic technology for him is part of the solution to a problem far more ominous: the reliance of industrial agriculture on the heavy use of pesticides, which, unlike GM foods, are already known to be hazardous to humans. Ever since scientists in the 1980s succeeded in inserting virus- and vermin-destroying genes into the DNA of corn, soybeans, and other staples, the hope of pesticide-free corporate agriculture became a possibility, and North American farmers have been voting with their plows ever since: between 1996 and 2001, GM crops in the U.S. increased from four million acres to 125 million acres, 68 percent of the worldwide total of GM crops.
Critics of this shift have not been silent, and to his credit Winston treats them with more than a veneer of respect. He acknowledges that “science as a discipline has not responded well to moral objections,” including the notion that “genetic engineering is the sole province of the deity.” In the end, though, his political and epistemic home is the university laboratory; he is convinced that what that perch enables him to see is sufficient to make moral and political judgments on these matters. When he announces that “Today we are selectively, deliberately, and surgically reinventing the plant world,” and when he revels in the emergence of “an even more complex, multinational, and corporate way of doing farming,” we get the picture. Yes, he’ll concede, some problems remain for experts to solve, but for the most part we have every reason to remain hopeful. The biggest challenge of all, by Winston’s lights, may simply be persuading the masses to respect Science and the world it has made.
Richard Manning’s vision of the cultural and political landscape differs markedly from Winston’s, even if their conclusions on genetic engineering are in some ways parallel. In Food’s Frontier, Manning—a journalist whose work centers on environmental concerns—recounts the McKnight Foundation’s recent efforts to bolster agricultural efforts through its funding of nine projects around the world. The foundation teamed up scientists from nations as diverse as China and Chile with scientists based in American universities in order to work on regional problems that, if solved, would substantially improve the food circumstance of each particular place.
With quiet sympathy Manning etches the dance between culture and agriculture that is our fate as a species, showing through story after story that to disrespect the latter is to endanger the former. The “Green Revolution,” the mid-20th-century agricultural boom that staunched famine throughout the world through industrial farming, has run out of gas, he contends: its productivity has been leveling off as its methods are proving to be, in the telling euphemism, “nonsustainable.” Meanwhile, the world’s population continues to soar; some predict that the demand for food will double by the year 2020.
Needless to say, the pressure is on to provide solutions, and organizations like the McKnight Foundation are responding. Manning for the most part likes what he sees. The “second green revolution,” he hopes, will center on genetic modification made possible through the collaboration of researchers and farmers in discrete locales, rather than in distant laboratories. “The Green Revolution at its most fundamental level treated all the world the same,” he writes, “but the lessons being learned in agriculture now are all local.” His own writing delightfully reflects that conviction, as when he travels up to Mexico’s Sierra Norte de Puebla and finds local markets so rich and meals so tasty that he ends up reexamining his understanding of “poverty.” He discovers, in this region deemed unuseful by the broader national and global market, people who cultivate 250 species of edible plants and 300 more that have medicinal uses. What, on second or third thought, makes one “wealthy”?
So Manning embraces the local, and especially the rural, but not to indulge romantic fantasies of pastoral bliss. Rather, it’s the sight of Mexico City’s millions living in squalor that turns him away from the city for hope. Instead of going the route of “development,” he urges those devoted to ameliorating the crisis of global poverty to embrace a rural, decentralizing vision, in which networks of organizations serve needy people around the world through practices that nurture particular peoples and their habitats. While skeptical of the wonder-working power of genetic engineering, he recognizes that, as he puts it, the “genie is already out of the bottle, way out”; best now to seek to harness it with exceeding care, always making the health of the local the measure of the technology’s worth.
For now, Manning’s vision of a global network of voluntary nongovernmental organizations helping to nurture local agriculture is but a hope. The world we live in, whether it be western India or western Pennsylvania, is dominated by multinational corporations with huge stakes in the global food industry—and huge stakes in preserving their place in it. They are committed to going wherever humans need food. Which is, of course, everywhere.
The tenacity with which these corporations have pursued this grand prize of controlling the global food supply is revealed with revolting clarity in Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food, by Daniel Charles, and Marion Nestle’s Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. You’ll finish these books with one big question: Why are we trusting these people with our food, of all things?
Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, flatly states that “nutrition becomes a factor in corporate thinking only when it can help sell food.” After years of working in the academic, corporate, and political spheres, she has all the evidence she needs to proclaim “a national scandal,” featuring food companies that “routinely place the needs of stockholders over considerations of public health”—not at all unlike the recently disgraced tobacco companies.
Since the leading causes of death in the United States now find their common source in what she describes as “chronic diseases associated with excessive (or unbalanced) intake of food and nutrition,” one would hope that federal and state governments would step up to provide leadership, a clarifying voice, even, for confused citizens. But Nestle tells a different story, in alarming detail, of federal officials and government agencies succumbing to corporate influence, and of corporations that make it their explicit aim to co-opt nutrition experts into supporting the products the market (allegedly) demands.
The examples she provides astound: she quotes from a corporate manual that instructs its reader that “the experts themselves must not recognize that they have lost their objectivity and freedom of action.” She notes that in 1998, the UC Berkeley Department of Plant and Microbial Biology sought and obtained an exclusive partnership with an industry partner, Novartis, in order to secure steady and deep funding; the agreement gave Novartis the right not only to select participating faculty but also to review the faculty’s research results prior to publication! The question Nestle leaves us with is this: If neither the government nor the academy nor the corporate world is taking responsibility to foster public health, who is?
Daniel Charles corroborates Nestle’s tale. At the heart of Lords of the Harvest lies Monsanto, a massive, domineering multinational chemical and biotech company. Even as it promised in the 1980s to create “a bright, clean, hopeful new world,” insiders knew Monsanto as a “tumultuous place that chewed up talent and tossed it aside,” Charles writes. “They promised to transform a world they barely understood.”
Monsanto was among the pioneering companies that created and marketed the first genetically modified plants. Along the way it fought hard and dirty against any observers, activists, and critics who voiced seemingly sane concerns about, in Charles’ troubling term, “the growing corporate domination of plant life.” One former Monsanto CEO went so far as to admit that while the company was developing the GM crops with which it was intending to change the world, “There wasn’t even one discussion of the social implications. I never thought of it.” The only harm Monsanto was consistently concerned about was the harm done to its bottom line. This is how we change the world?
Both Nestle and Charles deliver devastating perspectives on the recklessness with which the exorbitantly financed, do-or-die world of global capitalism has approached the most basic task of provisioning. Both authors rightly despise key aspects of that world while resigning themselves to working within its limits. But is there another path? Is making the world safe for industrial capitalism all that’s left? Or might Christian faith call for a more excellent way?
The mammoth organizations to which we’ve outsourced our provisioning “love control, efficiency, and predictability,” Charles observes—loves that may well be the source of their (and our) eventual demise. But Charles goes on to draw a contrast more illuminating than he perhaps knows: agriculture, he notes, “is a holdover from an earlier era; it’s dirty, messy, and unpredictable.”
Agriculture, that is, is of a piece with other forms of local life: families, neighborhoods, towns, marriages. In every arena of local life, to avoid the mess is to avoid the thing itself—tempting, for certain, but surely not satisfying of our truest ends, and so not truly satisfying to us.
A simple question: Might it be that when a people seeks to evade the everyday practices of agriculture, they end up evading life itself? Put differently, might it be that what theologians call the “cultural mandate” of Genesis 1-2 is doomed to fail apart from the foundation of a faithful, collective enacting of the agricultural mandate the Lord first gave Adam: to tend and care for the earth in discrete, local places?
The Indian physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, despite her religious differences with Christians, would affirm the moral necessity of a carefully calibrated symbiosis between culture and agriculture, region by region, place by place. In her book Water Wars, she looks at her own country and suggests that “The nonsustainable, nonrenewable, and polluting plastic culture is at war with civilizations based on soil and mud and the cultures of renewal and rejuvenation.” Indeed, Shiva sees the interplay between culture and agriculture as fundamentally a religious issue, as does the writer Barbara Kingsolver, whose pursuit of this same renewal and rejuvenation has led her family to try to grow much of its own food. In an arresting confession, Kingsolver explains in Small Wonder: “I’m not up for a guilt trip, just an adventure in bearable lightness. I approach our efforts at simplicity as a novice approaches her order, aspiring to a lifetime of deepening understanding, discipline, serenity, and joy.”
It’s a confession we all might consider making—a deeply human confession, one that promises to take us into unpredictable places, where gardens grow and neighbors dwell. Perhaps even places where a Maker walks with his creatures, and where the hungry find food. Good food.
Eric Miller is assistant professor of American history and director of the humanities program at Geneva College.
Books discussed in this essay:Mark Winston, Travels in the Genetically Modified Zone (Harvard Univ. Press, 2002). Richard Manning, Food’s Frontier: The Next Green Revolution (North Point, 2000). Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Univ. of California Press, 2002). Daniel Charles, Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (Perseus, 2001). Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (South End, 2002). Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder: Essays (HarperCollins, 2002). |
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