Much of the film was revealing for him, who had seen it a few days earlier at a childhood obesity prevention conference. Hardly any of it was new information for me, having grown up in an agricultural small town in Kansas, with a father who managed an agricultural coop and a mother who worked in a nursing home kitchen. We were not hippie people, but we had a big garden and raised & butchered chickens every year - along with the occasional lambs and pigs, which we drove (in our '54 Chevy pickup) to the slaughterhouse. My mom refused to buy supermarket meats because they just didn't taste good. I was too young to remember the Farm Crisis of the 80s, but financial ruin always hovered on the edge of most people's vision. Talking about the weather wasn't small talk because the economy depended on the weather system that provided good crops or bad. I remember my dad shaking his head over the idea of farm subsidies that paid us per acre NOT to plant. I remember when I realized that good crops didn't necessarily mean good money because more crops flooding the market translated into lower price per bushel. I remember countless times when my mom worried about the overspray from the fields drifting into our garden. We learned to read labels because my dad was allergic to corn - and almost everything had corn syrup in it.
Living in California, I hear more and more from my mom about this or that person with cancer. Young people with brain tumors. Mothers with pancreatic cancer. Breast Cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer. When my Grammy died, I angrily asked why no one draws the connection between pesticides and cancer that disfigured her face so her glasses didn't sit right when she was lying there in the casket. No on has an answer because we all depend on those chemicals.
Frankly, the industrial food system is much worse now than then. Visiting my dad in Iowa, I asked why farmers used genetically modified crops and a pesticide that killed EVERYTHING but the seed containing a certain gene. Didn't that scare them? He drove me past fields of even, perfectly green rows, and then fields that were uneven (signaling less yield when harvesting) and weeds here and there. That's all the argument you need, he said, even in Central and South American countries that outlaw GMOs - because the farmers see neighboring countries with perfect fields, and the illegal market grows.
Growing up, I didn't make the connections between that and foreign policy, or with the e.coli outbreaks at fast food restaurants (where we rarely ate anyway, because it was unhealthy, and not really that tasty compared to home cooking).
I learned more about this in college. I saw the commodities market in the Midwest (and, for example, among coffee farmers in Ethiopia) where equality among producers meant exploitation on the part of the buyers.
I'm also reading a book about the violence of a belief system that sees one's own nation as "God's chosen people" over all others. I read about false capitalism based on large corporations that can leverage their assets to put small ones out of business (remember, the free market depends on equality or small distinctions between companies). I read about structural adjustment programs in industrializing countries, in which aid money is tied to "helpful" economic policies that put the countries further into debt (ie, forcing farmers to grow commodity crops like corn, tobacco, and coffee, instead of food crops that feed the region). In the film, they talked about how farmers in Mexico, encouraged to grow corn for the international market, went out of business because small farmers everywhere tried to sell their corn, ensuring lots of corn for low prices. These farmers then come north to work at industrial food factories, where they are picked off and deported by immigration enforcement. Attention: these farmers are punished, but the corporations that hire them run smoothly, neither threatened by the immigration enforcement officers nor by work stoppage due to worker deportation. Odd.
And by the way: cheap food, usually manufactured with nutrient-low ingredients, adjusts people's palates to salt and fat instead of flavor. There's also a piece about economic markets in low-income areas (West Oakland, for example) where there are plenty of liquor stores and fast food joints - but astonishingly few grocery stores that sell fresh produce. Thus people with less income (often due to economic policies that exploit their labor and pay low wages) get diabetes, obesity, and poor health. Considering that, don't forget the racist dynamics of how that happens.
Anyway, this film is worth seeing - and worth weighing your values around the environment, fair worker policies, and the food system. It's not always possible to live perfectly, but it's always possible to live better and make better choices. In college, one of my best friends Sam and I used to talk about the knee-jerk anti-corporate mentality. He points out that corporations have the money to pay good wages, set labor standards, pay good health benefits, and a host of other really helpful things. The key is not to dismantle them, but to reinforce human values in their actions. I like the cooperative system where small entities can organize to leverage their power and negotiate on a slightly better playing field with multinational buyers. But it's complicated.
I think I've written enough here for today. Check out the movie and learn a little more from places like The People's Grocery in West Oakland.
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