Good Food

Grounded Practical Theology

Jennifer R. Ayres

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781481300940
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Christians in the United States are on a quest for good food. And yet, at every turn, they confront brokenness in the food system. Access to healthy food is not secure. Farmers and laborers struggle to find meaningful agricultural work that pays a livable wage. Animals and the land are abused. At the public policy level, legislation has increasingly favored mass-produced products in order to provide the largest amount of food to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible prices—regardless of the consequences. Unable to trace the sources of their food, and perhaps even the ingredients, consumers are vulnerable to a deep and abiding alienation. Still, many religions, including the Christian tradition, orient themselves around the table, a site for connection and nourishment.

Good Food is a practical theology grounded in a rich ethnographic study of the food practices of diverse faith communities and populations. In the midst of the wounded food system's woundedness and harm, they are hopeful but not naïve, and in their imaginative work, the seeds for a thriving food system are taking root. Grounded in unflinching analysis and encompassing both theological and moral implications, Ayres examines actual religious practices of food justice, discovering in the process a grounded theology for food. Ayres challenges Christians to participate in communal initiatives that will make a real difference—to support local farmers, grow their own food, and advocate for fair food policies. Good Food equips readers with the theological and practical tools needed to safeguard that which sustains us: food.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

Primer on the Global Food System
People, Places, Planet

In October 2008, just before the presidential election, Michael Pollan published an open letter to the soon-to-be president elect in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. The letter, cleverly entitled “Farmer in Chief,” issued this simple charge: “Food is about to demand your attention.”¹ Pollan argued that the food system in the United States touched most of the core issues in that year’s presidential campaign: climate change, energy independence, healthcare. To that list, one might add economic, trade, and labor policy. The ways in which food is produced, distributed, and consumed in the United States add up to a massive and complex system that has global implications. Of course the next president would need to attend to these realities. Indeed, food demands our attention.

Attention to the complexities of the food system is not, however, a simple matter: a cacophony of voices are vying to frame the issues affecting the production, distribution, and consumption of food in the United States and around the world. Michael Pollan is very popular these days: between The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, as well as his appearances in films like Food, Inc., Pollan has been a key figure in a new national conversation about the global food system. But of course, he is not alone. A constellation of popular culture purveyors, celebrity chefs, and policy wonks have entered the fray—including the ABC television show Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Alice Waters and the Slow Food Movement, Michelle Obama’s campaign to eradicate childhood obesity, policy think tanks like the Institute for Food and Development Policy and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and the quickly multiplying shelves in bookstores across the country that are dedicated to the emerging field of “food studies”—and they all testify to the cultural, political, and economic weight of the conversation. It seems as if everyone has an opinion about food.

The global food system is dizzyingly complex, and prone to evoke paralysis or even despair in even the most committed religious “foodies.”² A grounded practical theology of food requires at least a sketch of some of the major contours of the global food system, including the economics of food production and distribution; the relationship between class and access to fresh, “real” food; trade and labor issues in the global food system; animal welfare; food policy; and the environmental implications of current patterns of production, distribution, and consumption. At every point in this cycle, communities, vulnerable populations, and ecosystems are at risk. Furthermore, policies both exacerbate and ameliorate the effects of the global food system. One might sort these multivalent concerns and many others into four very broad categories—people, places, planet, and policies—in order to describe the developments in and effects of the broad sweep of the global food system. This chapter takes up issues facing persons, communities, and the ecological context, while the next chapter examines the political dimensions of the system.

Of course, these concerns are neither discrete nor easily divided into such categories, but examining each facet of the system, while keeping in view the complex whole, provides the clearest analysis of the system. The task is aided by examining its consequences for individuals and families, for the economic and sociocultural lives of communities, for the ecosystem, and for common political life. From the most intimate of family meals to the around 170 billion dollars U.S. Americans spend on fast food per year, the food system touches every aspect of human life.³

PEOPLE

Human life around the world is bound up in the global food system. Clearly, other forms of life—other animals, plants, earth, and air—are also implicated in the complex web that is the food system. Human beings, however, are uniquely implicated and affected at every point in the production, distribution, and consumption of food: from farmers and laborers to shareholders and consumers.

Farmers

The documentary The Real Dirt on Farmer John depicts young farmer John Peterson as he watches his family farm auctioned off, one tool at a time, in the early 1980s.⁴ He is consumed by a deep and devastating depression, tormented by his sense of shame and failure. But he was not alone. Many middle-income farmers lost farms that had been in their families for generations, accruing massive debts and living the reality of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’ motto, “Get big or get out.”⁵ This philosophy has deeply influenced agriculture policy and practice for the last forty years, emphasizing efficiency, consolidation, and commodification. As a result, over the past half-century, small-scale farmers have struggled to thrive independently; they may have joined up with large-scale operations and begun to grow just one or two crops—like corn and soybeans—not for local sale and consumption, but as “cash crops.”⁶ Furthermore, even as farmers have turned to income-producing crops, the demands of keeping up with technological advances are quite costly.

In 2010 testimony before the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack expressed his concern about the future of farmers in the United States. In particular, he lamented the exodus from rural communities and the decreasing number of young adults entering the farming vocation. Arguing that farmers are as central to our society as teachers and police officers, he asked, “Why not set as a goal for the 2012 Farm Bill the ability to add at least 100,000 additional farmers in the area of the small farming and commercial operations? Why not establish local advisory councils in communities across the country to identify, recruit, encourage, and assist young people to consider a life of farming? . . . [We need] young farmers. The sad reality is that the farming community is aging.”⁷ It has become increasingly difficult for farmers to make a living pursuing this vocation, and even those who farm cash crops for large-scale corporations find that their debt-to-income ratio quickly becomes unmanageable.

Workers

As much as small-scale farmers are suffering in the United States, migrant workers here—as well as farmers in other countries—suffer even more. In fact, many migrants in high-risk, low-wage, and low-security agriculture jobs here in the United States are in those jobs because they were no longer able to farm their own land in their home countries as a result of unregulated economic globalization.⁸

In any case, the laborers in the processes of production and distribution of food are perhaps the most vulnerable of all persons in the global food system: agricultural workers who do backbreaking work in the heat of summer for substandard wages, workers in packing and processing plants who experience some of the most unsafe labor conditions since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and workers in the fast-food industry—particularly workers of color—who rarely see wage increases or promotions. In all of these types of work, one finds a large number of migrant workers, many of whom are reluctant to advocate for better wages or conditions for fear of being discovered as undocumented workers.

Agriculture in the United States has always relied on the work of migrant labor. In Edward R. Murrow’s historic 1960 news report Harvest of Shame, U.S. viewers were confronted with the stories of rural white families from Appalachia and African American families in the mid-twentieth century migrating north as the harvesting season progressed, working the fields in abysmal conditions.⁹ On the other side of the country, the agricultural sector in California relied on East Asian and then Mexican immigrants.¹⁰ In 1942 the United States established the formal Bracero Program, sponsoring nearly 4.5 million guest workers from Mexico to support U.S. agriculture. Not quite legal, not quite undocumented, the farmworkers who entered the United States under this program were exceedingly vulnerable: “Braceros were used when needed, were under federal authority (but saw only limited intervention by the government regarding conditions on the ground), and were fearful of complaining, given the real possibility of deportation.”¹¹ Now, in the early part of the twenty-first century, U.S. agriculture still relies on largely undocumented migrant farmworkers (about one-third of all agricultural workers), who work under much the same conditions: withheld wages, no breaks, sexual harassment, child labor, and prison-like housing conditions.¹²

It is tragically ironic, furthermore, that agricultural workers are also more than twice as likely as the national average to face food insecurity,¹³ a condition in which families report reduced quality, variety, or desirability in their diets and/or disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.¹⁴ Due to the necessity of relying on cheap, processed foods, they also report high rates of obesity and diet-related illnesses.¹⁵

Agricultural workers in our fields are not alone in their vulnerability, however. They are joined by the laborers in food processing and distribution. The documentation of oppressive and unsafe labor conditions in food processing plants is substantial,¹⁶ as is the prevalence of low and sometimes withheld wages in the food service industry.¹⁷ Persons of color, and particularly immigrants, are drastically overrepresented in these high-risk, low-paying jobs.¹⁸

Shareholders and Corporations

The food system clearly depends on farmers and laborers. As it is currently structured, it also depends upon very large corporations, corporations whose primary accountability is to their shareholders. The effects of the patterns of consolidation, whereby sometimes diffuse components of the food system are integrated and managed by large corporations, in United States agriculture are significant, and can be historically traced to the agricultural and economic developments of the mid-twentieth century.

In 1956 Harvard Business School professor (and former assistant agriculture secretary to President Dwight D. Eisenhower) John H. Davis argued that the clearest way to support farmers and correct food markets and “income anemia” for farmers was to phase out government support of agriculture and strengthen a then-burgeoning sector: agribusiness.¹⁹ Agribusiness, he explained, is “the sum of all farming operations, plus the manufacture and distribution of all farm production supplies, plus the total of all operations performed in connection with the handling, storage, processing, and distribution of farm commodities.”²⁰ Embracing the principles of agribusiness would allow for a more seamless “vertical integration” of the industry, whereby a more integrated relationship between farm production and the mechanisms of processing and distribution, for example, would allow for more efficiencies in the process.²¹ Davis’ admonitions would prove prescient.

Vertical integration in agribusiness, sometimes to the point of consolidation, is described as having an “hourglass effect” on the food system: a very large number of contract farms produce food that is processed and distributed by a very small number of companies to a very large number of consumers.²² In August of 2011, for example, Cargill (one of the largest meat processors in the United States) recalled thirty-six million pounds of ground turkey after a major Salmonella outbreak.²³ In a food system in which so many aspects of the food-production process are controlled by a very small number of corporations, a serious outbreak of food-borne illness in just one processing plant can quickly create a very serious and broad public health crisis. Human health, as well as the economic livelihood of millions of farmers and laborers, is deeply bound to this structure.

Although it may be difficult to imagine a corporation as a “person” participating in the global food system, one can make two very important arguments about the personhood of corporations in the global system of food production, distribution, and consumption. First, as reaffirmed (and expanded) by the Supreme Court in 2010, corporations are in fact treated as persons under law.²⁴ It behooves people of conscience, then, to examine what motivations, norms, and outcomes guide the corporation’s participation in the food system. Second, corporations are accountable to a specific set of persons—shareholders. In the context of corporate capitalism, food becomes a product for sale in the marketplace, and the profits from the sale benefit not just the farmer, but the shareholders in the corporations responsible for gathering, processing, and distributing the food.²⁵ This creates a dilemma for stakeholders in the food system, when market success frequently conflicts with economically and environmentally sustainable agriculture, on one hand, and nutritional and health outcomes, on the other.²⁶ For example, the Institute of Medicine has been studying the effects of food marketing on children and youth for the past several years. The 2005 study, requested by Congress and sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, found that “current food and beverage marketing practices put children’s long-term health at risk,” and made many recommendations across diverse sectors of society to address the problem.²⁷ In 2011 a progress report indicated that very little progress has been made on these recommendations. This is no surprise: “Food companies cannot stop marketing junk foods to kids because the foods are profitable and their job as publicly traded companies is to grow profits every quarter.”²⁸

Farmers, laborers, and consumers are disadvantaged by corporations’ singular focus on profits. In res...