HOW THE INDUSTRIALIZED FOOD COMPLEX CONTRIBUTES TO AMERICA'S DYSFUNCTIONAL FOOD CULTURE

How the Industrialized Food Complex Contributes To America's Dysfunctional Food Culture



How the Industrialized Food Complex Contributes To America's Dysfunctional Food Culture

Introduction

As Wendell Berry once wrote, “how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”1 In this deceptively simple statement, the doyen of neo-agrarianism neatly summarized why we should all take a keen interest in and responsibility for the way we produce, distribute, and consume our food. On one level, of course, the reasons for doing so are obvious (Altekruse, 1997). As “foodie” journalists and high-profile academics frequently remind us, careless eating invites a variety of negative physiological repercussions, ranging from obesity and heart disease to food poisoning, endocrine disruption, and cancer. Yet public concerns over the effects of careless eating reach well beyond health issues.

Discussion

Berry and other advocates of sustainable agriculture maintain that careless eating has played a key role in the relentless industrialization of our food system by creating a sustained and frequently unwitting demand for highly processed foods, factor y-farmed meats, genetically modified crops, and blemish-free produce shipped year round over immense distances (Campbell, 1998). In turn, sustainable agriculturalists argue, the industrial system that has allowed these foods to become a central part of the American diet has incurred a whole array of ecological, social, economic, geopolitical, cultural, moral, and aesthetic costs.

As these costs—especially those associated with food-borne illness and the profligate use of fossil fuel—have become increasingly apparent in the last few years, we have seen a spike in demand not only for organic food, but for local food as well.3 In fact, “locally grown” has begun to compete with “organically grown” as the label of choice among environmentally and socially conscious consumers, particularly now that so much organic food is grown in industrial-scaled monocultures far from the places it is consumed(Prier, 2000).Proponents of local food argue that eating locally allows access to a greater variety of fresher and more nutritious food, enhances the ecological and aesthetic integrity of local landscapes, strengthens regional economies, reduces fossil-fuel consumption, and allows consumers to see firsthand how their food is produced. Personal inspections of this sort are particularly important, they argue, in light of the federal regulatory system's recurring failure to ensure the quality and safety of our food supply (Cliver, 2000). The logic of local food, which links ethical responsibility to geographical proximity, has gained national attention in recent years, helped along by extensive media attention and a host of new “locavore” organizations touting the virtues of “100-mile diets” and other strategies for minimizing “food miles” and maximizing awareness of our respective “food sheds.”

While the recent surge of interest in eating locally may seem like just another short-lived food fad, those familiar with the history of the modern sustainable agriculture movement know that local food is hardly a new cause (Groth, 2001). Indeed, localism has been a defining goal of sustainable agriculture since the movement's inception in the ...