No One Eats Alone

Food as a Social Enterprise

Michael S. Carolan

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781610918046
• eBook ISBN: 9781610918060
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

In today's fast-paced, fast food world, everyone seems to be eating alone, all the time—whether it's at their desks or in the car. Even those who find time for a family meal are cut off from the people who grew, harvested, distributed, marketed, and sold the foods on their table. Few ever break bread with anyone outside their own socioeconomic group. So why does Michael Carolan say that that no one eats alone? Because all of us are affected by the other people in our vast foodscape. We can no longer afford to ignore these human connections as we struggle with dire problems like hunger, obesity, toxic pesticides, antibiotic resistance, depressed rural economies, and low-wage labor.

Carolan argues that building community is the key to healthy, equitable, and sustainable food. While researching No One Eats Alone, he interviewed more than 250 individuals, from flavorists to Fortune 500 executives, politicians to feedlot managers, low-income families to crop scientists, who play a role in the life of food. Advertising consultants told him of efforts to distance eaters and producers—most food firms don't want their customers thinking about farm laborers or the people living downstream of processing plants. But he also found stories of people getting together to change their relationship to food and to each other.

There are community farms where suburban moms and immigrant families work side by side, reducing social distance as much as food miles. There are entrepreneurs with little capital or credit who are setting up online exchanges to share kitchen space, upending conventional notions of the economy of scale. There are parents and school board members who are working together to improve cafeteria food rather than relying on soda taxes to combat childhood obesity.

Carolan contends that real change only happens when we start acting like citizens first and consumers second. No One Eats Alone is a book about becoming better food citizens.

Chapter 1

Monocultures of the Mind and Body

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“You are what you eat.” We have all heard this saying, and no doubt each of us has used it on a few occasions. Yet food is not only a what, but also a when, a why, a how, and a with whom. In other words, we cannot understand food without understanding the social practices that go along with eating and producing it, as well as all those activities that lie in between. Those practices have changed dramatically over the last half century, becoming far more homogenized, as illustrated in figures 1.1 and 1.2. Figure 1.1 tracks the narrowing dietary profiles of dozens of countries from 1961 to 2009, which also implies a narrowing of culinary skills, preferences, and knowledge. Figure 1.2 shows the same trends, focusing specifically on seven commodities, three industrial and four traditional.

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

How have we created these monocultures? Why have farming and eating patterns changed so much in such a relatively short period of time? And once new habits have become ingrained, how might they be changed again? Nutritional literacy campaigners would have us believe it’s just as a matter of telling people what they ought to do and why. Easy-peasy. Next problem? But I’m afraid the roots of these monocultures run too deep for our current course to be reversed by well-designed educational campaigns. To eat is to be connected, in one way or another. To eat differently, then, requires a change in those connections—that social change I talked about in the introduction. It will require places where people can come together, where they can develop new habits and feelings not only about food, but about each other.

It is a cold, rainy afternoon in The Hague. In other words, it is a typical January day in the Netherlands. I am seated across from a slender gentleman in his late sixties, though his athletic frame and jet-black hair, save for a light sprinkling of snow in his beard, give the appearance of someone at least ten years younger. George used to work for the Kenyan government in their ministry of agriculture, livestock, and fisheries. I wanted to learn more about Kenya’s recent experiences with the global landgrab—companies and countries securing massive tracts of land in distant parts of the world for food and biofuel production. I had not expected us to get lost in a conversation about the Green Revolution. But after two hours and four coffees each, that was precisely what had happened.

The Green Revolution can be described as a series of research and technology transfer initiatives, with support from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, that began in earnest immediately after World War II and lasted into the 1970s. I am also comfortable with the following definition, though it is not nearly as neutral sounding: the Green Revolution was the exportation of American-style conventional agriculture to lower-income nations, predicated almost exclusively on productivity gains—on producing, in a word, more.¹ From an environmental standpoint, the Green Revolution was at best highly problematic. At worse, it was an unmitigated disaster. To use Rachel Carson’s metaphor, it single-handedly silenced spring around the globe, while making farmers and peasants dependent upon petrochemical inputs.

Take the case of wheat. New high-yielding dwarf varieties were bred short, hence the name. Varieties that are tall get easily flattened when subjected to high winds and significant rainfall. This, of course, is not a problem when the crop is harvested manually. When mechanically harvested, however, toppled wheat becomes fodder for field mice and rot, as the combine’s head—the business end that pulls the plant into the machine—cannot get to it. Dwarf varieties not only stand up better to the elements than their taller cousins, they also make more sense when breeding for yield. To put it simply, tall plants waste energy getting tall. Shorter varieties make more efficient use of energy, when efficiency is defined by a plant’s yield relative to the nutrients it absorbs. Yet paradoxically, this efficiency came at the expense of energy—a lot of it, once you factor in petrochemical use. Dwarf varieties were so short they could not compete for sunlight with native weeds that, it turned out, were quite tall; after all, they had coevolved alongside the native wheat varieties for centuries. As a result, yields of “miracle wheat” were pathetic without the use of large amounts of fertilizers and herbicides.

The Green Revolution also led to the global cultivation of just a handful of crops. When we’re looking to do things bigger and better, the tendency is to specialize—to take advantage of economies of scale. Trace the average Western diet back to the soil and you will find roughly ten plants.² Ten plants might not technically constitute a global monoculture but it is awfully close.

George and I talked about the magic-bullet mindset of the Green Revolution and both the arrogance and outright ignorance that it embodied. How could industrialization be the single answer to sustainably—and justly, healthily, etc.—feeding the world? As for those who suggest viewing the Green Revolution as a short-term solution, a bridge to ultimately more-sustainable practices: now that it has been more than sixty years, precisely how long is the bridge? When a set of practices are tied to massive profits for powerful actors whose power is derived from those profits, it is naïve to suppose that economic and political influence will ever be willingly abdicated.

Most of my time with George, however, was spent discussing the other monocultures the Green Revolution helped bring forth. As George recalled,

The 1960s were a magical time in my country. We were seeing per-acre maize yields increasing by more than 4 percent a year. I believe that surpassed what they were even seeing in the US at the time. It was also a period of great structural change. The entire farm sector was undergoing immense transformation, starting to look a lot like the US Corn Belt. But also, and this is why I used the term “magical” earlier, we were forgetting some things that, in hindsight, we shouldn’t have.³

Intrigued by his curious choice of words, I asked if he was implying that the Green Revolution was an act of collective forgetting.

“That’s precisely what it was,” he agreed. “We failed to appreciate, until after it was gone, the unique expert systems our ancestors had developed. I’m talking about knowledge that allowed them to grow food not only under remarkably adverse conditions, but to also do so sustainably, without the need of expensive nonrenewable resources, as in the case of fertilizers, or scare resources, if you’re talking about irrigated water.”

Later in the conversation he talked more specifically about how this social amnesia affects Kenyans today: “Looming threats from peak oil and water and from climate change make me wish we had done a better job saving that knowledge, because we’re going to need it. If not now then very soon. The Green Revolution robbed us of a very important aspect of our past.”

“Robbed of our past” might seem like a rhetorical flourish, but I caution against dismissing these words. For me, they immediately called to mind something that another George, George Orwell, expressed nearly seventy years ago. In his deeply unsettling and arguably prophetic dystopia, 1984, he wrote, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”⁴ Sociologist Paul Connerton essentially makes the same point in How Societies Remember, noting that: “All totalitarianisms behave in this way: the mental enslavement of the subjects of a totalitarian regime begins when their memories are taken away.” He continues by explaining, “What is horrifying about a totalitarian regime is not only the violation of human dignity but the fear that there may remain nobody who could ever again bear witness to the past.”⁵

I can guess what you are thinking. Totalitarianism? Orwellian dystopias? Is that not a bit over the top? How could those things ever be linked with the Green Revolution? After all, wasn’t Norman Borlaug, generally recognized as the father of the Green Revolution, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Honor, and the Padma Vibhushan, Indian’s second-highest civilian honor, for his work in developing high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties?⁶ True, but remember this: those awards were for what the Green Revolution allegedly gave the world, not for what it took away. Calculate those subtractions, and a case could be made that, on the whole and over the long run, more was lost as a result of this “revolution” than gained.

But how? How can entire societies be stripped of the ability to bear witness to the past? More to the point, how is the Green Revolution implicated as a source of amnesia? The how is nothing mysterious—it’s just the opposite, in fact. It’s routine. And I mean that in the most basic sense of the word.

Michael Polanyi, the brilliant twentieth-century polymath, famously proclaimed, while discussing what he called the “tacit dimension”: “We know more than we can tell.”⁷ Anecdotally, we all know this to be true. Ever try telling someone how to ride a bike? Or take that special dish your grandmother used to make for family occasions—for me that was the kolache. Asking her to write out the directions, with the addendum, “I want it to taste just like yours,” never seems to work. Why? Because the knowledge required cannot be reduced to words. A great deal of our understanding is of this “more than we can tell” variety. Such a realization may seem trivial when compared with the practical hard work being done by scientists, activists, and practitioners to build healthier foodscapes. But this insight holds immense practical consequence. Until we give tacit knowledge its proper due, our food system cannot be transformed. If reformers hope to mount a serious challenge to the status quo, they will need to appreciate those aspects of food that are felt, practiced, and performed. To know something, in many cases, we have to do it, literally.

Consider that the world’s biodiversity “hotspots,” regions with the planet’s richest collections of plants and animals, are also cultural and linguistic hotspots. An article published in the prestigious journal of the National Academy of Sciences reports that 70 percent of all languages left on the Earth are spoken in these biodiverse areas.⁸ Coincidence? Hardly.

Virginia Nazarea, professor of anthropology and director of the Ethnoecology and Biodiversity Lab at the University of Georgia, is perhaps the world’s foremost authority on the subject of biocultural diversity. Along with the late Dr. Robert Rhoades she helped pioneer research in this field. One of the many subjects she has studied in her illustrious career is sweet potato farming in the Philippines.⁹ I am particularly struck by one study involving two sites. On one, farmers were beginning the processes of commercializing production for the market, while the other remained firmly at the level of subsistence agriculture to feed local households. As was expected, she witnessed a narrowing of genetic diversity on the site moving toward commercial production. Yet that was not all. There was also a large disparity between the two sites in terms of the number of varieties known or remembered, compared with the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Changing the Foodscape
• Chapter 1. Monocultures of the Mind and Body
• Chapter 2. Knowing Quality
• Chapter 3. Shaping Values
• Chapter 4. Spatial Distance versus Social Distance
• Chapter 5. One Health
• Chapter 6. From Slow Food to Connectivity
• Chapter 7. Buying Behaviors versus Building Community
• Chapter 8. Getting Big versus Getting Together
• Chapter 9. Becoming Citizens
• Notes
• Index