I just saw the new film by Robert Kenner Food, Inc. It is, not surprisingly, a very sobering film. You can watch the trailer here. Essentially it chronicles the massive flaws and abuses in our food industry. The film called my attention to (among other things) the different violences that are inherent in the way our food industry is currently working.
It is expensive to buy healthy (meaning not injected with all kinds of growth hormones and crawling with E coli) food, but, it is hard for poor people to afford it. They are violated by the high prices of healthy food. Not because of the high prices themselves but of the effect that the high food prices have. It forces them to buy fast food, food that makes them diabetic over sustained periods of consumption or kills them quickly if it is infected with e coli. The fast food, is less healthy and it's cheaper. It is a violation of their health that they must buy fast food. But it is a violation of other aspects of their life to buy healthy food, because it is more expensive. If buying fast food allows that person to be able to buy books to send their kids to school, or to buy medicine to stay alive they may do it to avoid the violence of non-education, or of death from a contagious disease. For them to contradict the system is a form of violence they do to themselves.
Yet, at the same time, the industry that is producing the fast food is doing violence as well. The industry is plunging the farmers that work for them into massive debt, it is abusing animals, and paying for laws to be passed (or that have been passed) in Congress that violate our freedom of speech.
It appears we face the individual eating fast food to avoid the abuse of not being able to have other basic things in life, or the more widely abusive food industry. I realize that this is a kind of a false dilemma. I had the vague notion that the violation of the farmer was a subjective violence, and the violating that the industry does was an objective violence. The good news is it's not. Because the violence the industry does is not the discourse through which we come to understand the violence that is done to the person who must buy the fast food. They are both subjective violences, the latter is just ironic.
This means that there is hope in the message of the film. What we have to do is change the system so that healthy food is cheaper. No small task right? Especially considering the way we will get the food industry to change is if all consumers start to buy healthier food (thereby increasing demand and reducing price). But, it will initially be expensive. And, there are also bigger forces at work, like all of the subsidies the federal government gives the corn industry, which is part of what makes the fast food so inexpensive. Even so, there is a possibility for both described violences to be ended, because the distinction between objective and subjective violences actually exists between the suffering of the consumer and the suffering of the industry. And that is another story.
It's a fascinating film.
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I've only seen clips of the film so I'm not sure if it constrains its discussion of healthy food to organic food, which your review seems to indicate. Even if it does not, there is still a premium that must be paid for fresh, healthy, non-organic food over nutrient-poor fast food.
ReplyDeleteOrganically, or as the ESPM department might prefer to exclude the corporate co-option of the organic foods movement, agroecologically, grown food as the advantage of being grown in an environmentally sustainable manner.
In either case, it the least it is ambiguous, and at worst it is false that increased demand for healthier food will actually reduce price.
First, there will have to be a large shift from monocultures of corn, soy, etc. to polycultures. While polycultures might allow costs to be reduced beyond what future monoculture costs will be once we get far enough down the "pesticide treadmill," the economies of scale that farmers enjoy today will be lost. Even if polycultures are not introduced, the millions of acres dedicated to corn and soy will have to be diversified, and economies of scale will still be lost.
Second, there are physical limits to the amount of arable land in the world. Prices may face supply side pressures that wash out the demand side pressures. Amartya Sen argues that famine isn't caused by lack of capacity in poor countries, but rather by failure of distribution mechanisms, such as markets, and poor governance. Some people fallaciously assume that capacity then does not matter at all. But poor distribution mechanisms don't release a fixed amount of food onto the market. The amount of food available is a function of a number of variables, including both the distribution and the total capacity for production.
Michael Pollan suggests that we need to simply give food the important that it deserves and be willing to allocate a larger part of our budget to it. Americans already spend a very low percentage of our incomes on food compared to Europeans.
Additionally, we can try to take food production into our own hands and start community gardens and co-operatives. I'm sure some of you have seen the Victory Garden in front of Evans and I'm pretty sure that is something of this sort.
We don't have to be caught in a dilemma between subjective and objective violences. Its a politically blunder to reify the "food industry" into being some kind of democratic agency that exists to serve the people. It is a collection of private interests that have captured government power. Instead, it is on those concerned to create a new food industry. Entering the national food market seems to be quite a formidable task due to monopoly corporate farms and government capture, so the best bet seems to be in creating local food systems.