Are you an "Agri-Intellectual" or a "Food Faddist?"

I finally got around to reading an article I’d been hearing about for the last week or so. Published in The American, a journal of the conservative think tank The American Enterprise Institute, the title gives away a lot about its tone and perspective – “The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals.”

Ahh, yeah. The big Michael Pollan smack down. The King of Foodies going head to head with a salt of the earth Missouri farmer. But instead of a rumble in the cornfield, I left with a feeling of “blah.” It seems that the author, Blake Hurst, is really just interested in driving a wedge between the current Food Movement (for lack of a better term, and capitalized for, well, no good reason) and farmers – a wedge that’s existed for so long it’s hard to imagine someone needing to drive it further.

Hurst’s argument is dulled by channeling that familiar American paradigm of “Us vs. Them” – the delineation that haunts us from the schoolyard to the statehouse. In particular the battle has been distilled here into one of its more famous subsets: “Those wealthy urbanites could never understand the way of life for us small time rural folks.”

That can be quite a true statement – most of us don’t know a farmer, and if we do it’s doubtful that they come from a farming background and have been doing this kind of work for generations. That fact speaks to the segmentation of American society – the urban vs. rural, the rich vs. poor, the suburbs vs. the downtowns. But after having long conversations with farmers and reading much of what the so-called “agri-intellectuals” have to say, my feeling is that the Food Movement has as its first priority a righting of the wrongs of our food system. And those wrongs are felt most palpably by the farmers themselves.

Think about this – we pay less for food than we ever have. We spend less than ten percent of our disposable income on food. That’s lower than any other country, perhaps in history. That’s great news, right? Not when you juxtapose that number with the average wage of a farmer. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average net cash farm business income for farm operator households in 2005 was $15,603. This figure doesn’t reflect government subsidies (a huge hidden cost that every one of us pays) or the fact that many, perhaps a majority, of farmers have off-farm business activities to supplement their paltry income. It's tough to figure out how to immediately rectify this wrong, but if nothing else, it should make you pause when you see Hardee’s selling $.69 biscuits.

Hurst does make some legitimate points – cheap food keeps people from starving and our industrial ag system produces on a scale that couldn’t be replicated (at least overnight) by turning to organic models. These are good points both acknowledged and addressed by many of the books Hurst wants to debunk. What Hurst seems to be missing is that those of us who want to change the food system think the entire thing is broken. It’s not just synthetic nitrogen or farm subsidies or disproportionate global food aide or the power of increasingly fewer corporations over our food system – it’s the whole damn thing! And the only way we’re going to fix any of it is if farmers and so-called “agri-intellectuals” can respect one another enough to sit down and talk.

One of the things that’s exciting to me about this Food Movement is that it encourages consumers to think critically about where their food comes from and to actually invest some time in meeting the people who grow the food. The reality of these meetings are another thing all together. Many farmers don’t have the time to spend hanging out with their customers, and those opportunities for interaction seem limited to the farmer’s market and other direct marketing opportunities. But nevertheless, this renewed focus on trying to listen and understand the farming community is pretty inspiring to me, and I think it's possible for each of us to learn a lot from a farmer. Not so for Blake Hurst. He seems to have become profoundly incensed that us pointy-headed types would even be willing to spend some time on a farm. I found this anecdote he wrote a few years back about being at a meeting of farmers, trying to warn them of the yuppies marching to take away their combines and backhoes:

Stacked up on the folding table next to me are a dozen books, all making the case that these overall-clad, church going family men and women are ruining the environment and abusing animals. Worst of all, the way we farmers raise and market food is causing alienation and anomie in the kind of people who go to a farmers market, spend a half of a day with the Sierra Club, and write books instructing farmers how to farm. . .The only thing all these folks have in common is a profound ignorance about growing things and an unwillingness to ask why we farmers do things the way we do. I'm trying to tell my farmer friends that farmers are in great danger of being blindsided by food faddists, organic theologians, and raging vegetarians...

So no matter what your stripes – be it an agri-intellectual or just a simple food faddist – prove Mr. Hurst wrong and listen to your farmers. I hope they'll think, like I do, that we're all in this mess together.

Comments

[Daniel]

Thought I'd stop by and share a couple of my thoughts on this Hurst guy and his article.

As you say, he makes some good points, but his fight shouldn't have centered around Michael Pollan per se. He has a legitimate beef (sorry), however, with armchair critics who have decided (after seeing Food, Inc. perhaps) they know the ag industry is evil and there's nothing more to say about it. There are plenty of people who feel this way--just read the tone of the comments below today's New York Times column that talks about Hurst's article.

I feel like his article adds to the discussion, but he probably would have spread his views more effectively by not picking at Pollan, who I'd call a "moderate" in this debate.

Then again, "The Omnivore's Delusion" is such an awesome title, maybe he had to go for it anyway. Oh, how I wish I'd thought of that one. :)

Dan
http://casualkitchen.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">Casual Kitchen

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