ALLEN HANCE - Northeast-Midwest Institute
Joy and the Politics of Eating

Advocates for change in the food system face a paradox. Most people don’t want to know the many uncomfortable truths about the food system. To feel the sting of conscience while eating– recalling those who are hungry, thinking about the harsh working conditions that brought the food from the fields, dwelling on the inhumane conditions in the factory farm– is, quite literally, to loose one’s appetite.

There are those hyper-conscientious few who urge a thoroughgoing moral confrontation with each and every food choice. Finding little on the grocery shelves that meets their high standards, some of them even choose a form of alimentary asceticism. But the exercise of that kind of moral purism, at least as it relates to food, is a luxury not available to most. People need to eat. This kind of stance is also corrosive of some of the basic relations of care, especially those that extend to family and friends. To know and say too much about the food system imposes hardships on oneself and those one cares most about; it brings bitterness to even the most modest tables of fellowship and communal sharing; and it infuses the most basic acts of intimacy and devotion (cooking, serving, blessing, and savoring) with an unseemly and parsimonious moralism.

On the other hand, to know that the food on one’s table was raised by a farmer who is a steward of her land and was procured through a supply chain– from farm to processor to distributor to market and consumer– that embodied values of social justice, environmental responsibility, economic fairness– this would be a true feast and would move significantly in the direction of (re)sacralizing the meals we eat and share.

What we face instead, in a food system that is increasingly globalized, concentrated, and vertically integrated, is a homogenization of food. The dominant supply chain structures and business models are ones that, by and large, strip the food we eat (and the fiber we wear) of all attributes and marks of its origins. Food comes from nowhere, bearing no traces of soil, varietal difference, or labor. It is often all but devoid of taste.

Certainly the resurgence of local agriculture and direct marketing– farmers’ markets, farm stands, community supported agriculture– has something to do with a desire to restore a sense of place to what one eats, to trim the hundreds or even thousands of ‘food miles’ that compromise freshness and taste, to feel that a more sustainable system of farming is supplying the food at one’s table, and ultimately to experience greater joy in eating.

Fresh, local, and community-based food systems will, I hope, continue to flourish. But there are serious limits to the local foods movement. It is certainly not going to be the salvation of all– even most– farmers. Nor does it have the potential, for reasons bound up with climate and geography, consumer taste and preference, and economic efficiency, to satisfy more than a relatively small share of the total demand for food. The bigger challenge for food system reform advocates lies in the transformation of the longer and more complex supply chains that move agricultural goods from farm fields, through processing systems and distribution networks, and out to the wholesale and retail markets that serve consumers.

The core drivers of a more sustainable food system, whether at the local, regional, national, or international scale, will be incremental changes in public and private sector policies that increase transparency, traceability, and accountability in the supply chain.

This is a job for government, the not-for-profit sector, and the business community. In the not-for-profit community, projects ranging from the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative (www.agribusinessaccountability.org) to the Environmental Working Group’s farm subsidy database (www.ewg.org) are critical to shedding light on the inequitable distribution of federal farm payments and the market distortions generated by corporate consolidation in the food sector. In federal farm and food policy, organic and other labeling and standards efforts as well as conservation compliance and ‘green payments’ programs have in important role to play in increasing transparency, traceability, and accountability. One of the greatest challenges will be to create new business models that enable the identities of sustainably produced agricultural products to be preserved through the supply chain and that allow for the more equitable distribution of profits to the full range of partners in this chain (to learn more, see www.agofthemiddle.org).

But none of this will happen without the engaged citizen and educated consumer who can taste– and advocate for– the joys of a food system that restores meaning, place, and value to the food we need and cherish.

Allen Hance is Senior Policy Analyst at the Northeast-Midwest Institute in Washington D.C. Visit www.nemw.org.


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This article was published in the Winter 2005 issue of Catholic Rural Life©. No portion of this article may be reproduced without written permission from The National Catholic Rural Life Conference. To purchase the Winter 2005 issue of Catholic Rural Life, please contact The National Catholic Rural Life Conference office at 4625 Beaver Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa 50310-2199, call (515) 270-2634, or e-mail ncrlc@mchsi.com. The cost is $2.50 an issue plus postage and handling.