I think Wendell Berry said it, what
did he say,
“cheap at any price.” And
that’s what we have. |
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The other side of the paradox is, so then how could this
same thing cause obesity? And I believe very strongly that
our overproduction of cheap grain in general and corn in [particular]
has a lot to do with the fact that three-fifths of Americans
are now overweight, and that many demographers believe that
this is the first generation in America whose life span may
be shorter than their parents. And the reason for that is
obesity, essentially; all the health problems related to obesity
and specifically diabetes.
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So how do I explain that? Well, the obesity crisis is complicated
in one way, but it’s very simple in another way. Basically,
if you go back to the ’70s, we’re eating 200 more
calories a day per American on average. That’ll do it.
If you don’t get that much more exercise, you’re
going to get a lot fatter. Where do those calories come from?
Well, where do all calories come from, except for seafood? They
come from the farm. So you’ve got to go back and look
at the farm, and what you find on the farm is that we are producing,
since the mid to late ’70s, 500 extra calories of food
a day per American. That’s a hell of a lot of additional
food. And we’re managing to pack away 200 of them, which
is pretty heroic on our part—40 percent. I don’t
know exactly what’s happening to the rest of it, but a
lot of the rest of it is being dumped overseas, or wasted, or
burned in our cars. And that’s really how we’re
trying to get rid of it now, as ethanol.
So overproduction, sooner or later, leads to overconsumption,
it’s very, very simple; and we’ve been there before.
The last giant public health crisis like this in American
happened in the 1820s. There was a binge of alcoholism—drinking
in America in the 1810s and ’20s—and what happened,
there’s a wonderful book about it called The Alcoholic
Republic, and in fact somebody here turned me onto. The greatest
drinking binge in history—we were drinking up to five
gallons of hard liquor a person per year. Now to give you
an idea, the average now is under one, okay? That’s
a lot. How did this happen? Well, I hate to blame corn again,
but you had this tremendous overproduction of corn. As the
settlers got over the Appalachians, they went into all this
new wonderful virgin land, they started planting corn, they
had very big crops, there weren’t enough eaters around
to eat it. And it didn’t pay economically to ship it
either by boat or over the mountains, so what did they do?
They turned it into a value-added commodity that would be
durable and portable. And in those days there were two such
commodities. You could do it with pigs and make hams, but
even better you could ferment it, you could distill it, and
make alcohol. And that became the cheap, the portable, durable,
value-added commodity that you did with the overproduction,
and they flooded the market in the East with alcohol, and
you could buy a pint of corn liquor for two pence. And so…
people drank like crazy. And it was…a tremendous problem.
So now what do we do with the overproduction? Well, our
chief value-added, portable commodity is corn sweetener. That’s
the big one—high fructose corn syrup. But also corn-fed
meat, corn-fed chicken, even corn-fed salmon. They’re
teaching salmon how to eat corn now, because there’s
so much cheap corn. Yeah.
And that is the logic of processing, okay? It’s a powerful
industrial logic. You take your cheap commodity, and you add
value to it. And what we also found with corn, it’s
this big fat starch packet that you can break down and reassemble.
You can break it down into any kind of basic starch/carbon
molecule you want and you can make sweeteners, and you can
make…if you look at a chicken nugget’s list of
ingredients, there are like 37 ingredients, and something
like 30 of them are actually made from corn, directly or indirectly.
So it’s an incredibly powerful thing. You can use this
industrial system to break it down and then build it back
up together into all these kinds of food products.
The building blocks of the Fast Food Nation are kernels of
corn. That entire meal at McDonald’s is all corn. Now
the cheapness of corn allows you…the same as happened
with the alcohol…you needed to get this consumed and
so you put it into this commodity. Now how do you get people
to eat a lot of it? Well, that took the ingenuity of American
marketing. And I’ll just give you one example, and that
is super-sizing. When I was a kid, Coke came in these [holds
up classic Coca Cola bottle]…8-ounce containers. This
20-ounce container [hold up modern Coca Cola bottle] is now
the standard size for soda. The idea that you can sell soda
that way was an invention, and it has a history, and you can
find the individual responsible. There’s a man named
David Wallerstein, who actually invented the idea of super-sizing.
And this is his contribution to American history. He was managing
a chain of movie theaters in Texas and his job—all movie
theaters make their money on the popcorn and the soda—his
job was to kind of goose the sales of popcorn and soda. And
he tried…everything you could think of. He tried 2-for-1
sales, he tried matinee specials, and he simply couldn’t
get people to buy more than one popcorn and one soda. And
then he hit on this idea: They really wanted more, but they
felt like pigs coming back for seconds. So he just expanded
the portion size, and people were willing to eat a lot more
if you put a lot more in front of them. …There’s
a genetic reason for this we now understand, it’s called
the “thrifty gene.”
But basically the more food you put in [front of] people
the more they will eat. We are not good judges of our appetite.
In fact, people who have no memories, you know they work with
these patients who’ve absolutely lost their short-term
memories, and if you feed them lunch, take them away, tell
them it’s lunchtime, they’ll eat lunch again.
And all of us have had that experience at a buffet table.
But, in general, if you put more food in front of us we will
eat 30 percent more than we would otherwise. So portion is
very important, and David Wallerstein, who then got a job
at McDonald’s, was the guy who figured all this out.
When he got to McDonald’s…it was still the days
of the tiny little bag of French fries and the little sodas,
and he went to [company founder] Ray Kroc one day and he said,
“You know you could sell a lot more of this if you’d
make bigger portions,” and Ray Krok said, “If
people want seconds, they’ll come back for seconds.
They’ll buy another bag of them.” And he says,
“No, they don’t want to do that.” And Krok
didn’t believe him, so he set up this video surveillance
in a McDonald’s in Chicago and he got tape of people
with their little bags of French fries, and they’re
digging down for the little bits of burnt French fry and salt,
and he said, “See they want more.” And that’s
when McDonald’s moved to these huge portions of soda.
So that’s how they got us to eat the 200 extra calories.
* * *
Now before you go out
and sue McDonald’s or Kraft for the size of your waistline,
consider the though that this overproduction of cheap corn
is government policy.
Now before you go out and sue McDonald’s or Kraft for
the size of your waistline, consider the though that this
overproduction of cheap corn is government policy. It’s
done in the name of our government with our taxpayer dollars.
This is heavily subsidized. We write a check for every bushel
of industrial corn produced in this country to the tune of
$4 billion a year; $19 billion for all direct payments to
farmers. But before you blame subsidies for all these problems—and
they do deserve part of the blame—keep in mind that
agricultural overproduction is an ancient problem. It predates
subsidies. All of you or many of you are familiar with the
phenomenon, when the price of the commodity you’re growing
falls, in any other business the smart thing to do would be
to curtail production until demand raises prices. Farmers
don’t do that because they’re too many of them
and they’re all operating individually. What farmers
do is expand production so they have the same amount of cash
flow every year. So this is a disastrous and self-fulfilling
phenomenon.
We use to have government support for farmers that took corn
off the market. And that kept prices high. And these were
loans instead of direct payments. And I don’t have time
to explain the system, but it worked pretty well up until
the 1970s, when, during the Nixon administration…there
was hyperinflation of food prices for a lot of reasons having
to do with the grain deal to Russia, and the cost of energy,
and suddenly the price of a hamburger, the price of steak,
butter, went sky high, and people were in the street protesting
in 1973, the high price of food. Nixon puts Earl Butz to work
driving down the price of food, and he does this by several
things: trying to get farmers to plant fence row to fence
row and also to change the subsidy system, so instead of taking
food off the market to keep prices high and loaning farmers
money so they could keep their corn off the market, he just
cut ’em a check, which encouraged them to produce more
and more and more. And lo and behold, it worked. The obesity
crisis dates to that policy. So, the rules of this game are
set by the government and there could be other rules that
would create a very different kind of game. So this has resulted,
since these changes in the ’70s, in an increase in the
American corn harvest from 4 billion to 10 billion bushels
a year. So that’s not all technology. That’s farmers
acting to stay even by planting more, and that’s agricultural
policy. And we’re struggling heroically to get rid of
all that corn.
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Now I don’t have time to go into all the places I’ve
followed it, but one of the places I’ve followed it, and
perhaps the most obscene and absurd creation of this system
is the American feedlot. And those of you, I don’t know
if you’ve read my piece on my steer, #534, but if you
follow the corn to a feedlot, you really see what’s wrong
with this whole system because cows did not evolve to eat corn,
but we feed them corn because it’s so cheap, we need to
get rid of it, it makes them grow quickly, but it has all these
other unintended affects. And I stood in a feedlot with this
steer I bought, #534, at the Pokey Feeders Feedlot in Garden
City, Kansas, and I stood ankle deep in his manure, or that
of his colleagues, the hundred that were in this field, and
there they were lowering their huge heads down into this feed
bunk, eating this mixture of corn and urea and tallow from other
cows, and hormones and antibiotics, and they were miserable
animals in every way. They were depressed, they had indigestion,
but they were growing.
| ...they were lowering their huge heads
down into this feed bunk, eating this mixture of corn
and urea and tallow from other cows, and hormones and
antibiotics, and they were miserable animals in every
way. |
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And I thought about that food chain, and you can follow that
food chain all the way back to the farm and to grow that beef,
that beef that’s in that hamburger, you know what’s
going on in Iowa, you are overfertilizing those farms, and the
nitrogen from those farms is going down into the Raccoon River
and it’s the reason that women in des Moines, there are
blue baby alerts, where you can’t give tap water to your
babies in the spring when the runoff is [at its worst]. And
it goes down the Mississippi and it ends up in the Gulf of Mexico
and is creating this dead zone the size of the state of New
Jersey. That’s one place it’s going, but you can
go even further. You can go all the way to the Persian Gulf
and connect that corn to that feedlot because to grow all that
corn we use fossil fuel, right? Chemical fertilizer. Chemical
pesticides. Almost a fifth of our imports of fossil fuels go
to agriculture, industrial agriculture, but not only industrial
agriculture. So that’s what I mean by the high cost of
cheap food: these are costs, too, that dead zone, that war,
these are costs of maintaining that system. And you can follow
the corn in the other direction, because it’s making the
animals sick. So you’ve got to give the animals antibiotics,
so the antibiotics don’t work when my son has an ear infection.
So that’s another cost of cheap food.
And you can follow
it to the food poisoning that Eric Schlosser so brilliantly
documented in Fast Food Nation (Perennial, 2002). What he
didn’t say though is why that industrial beef is so
much more likely to have E. coli in it, E. coli, 157H7. Well,
because the corn has acidified the rumen of those animals
and made it a good environment for a toxin that then can infect
us. Grass-fed livestock, the pH in the rumen is different
so any microbes in there get shocked and killed by our acidic
guts. So there’s another cost of cheap food.
And there are many others. I mean, the hormones that are in
the water, the…atrizine that’s affecting the animals,
I mean it just goes on and on.
So this is what I mean by the high cost of cheap food. We’re
charging an enormous cost to the environment, to our health
care system, to the military budget, and to our standing in
the developed world.
And that should be the motto of our food system, I think
Wendell Berry said it, what did he say, “cheap at any
price.” And that’s what we have.
* * *
I think if we think ahead
25 years our dreams should be more than making all that
corn belt organic corn belt.
…This is the cautionary tale part. Now it’s very
easy for those of us who practice or support alternative agriculture
to pat ourselves on the back, to think that the corn economy
is only a problem of the industrial food system. But in fact
the seductive powers of corn are now, I think, a problem in
[organic] production as well. It’s true that organic
corn does not pollute the Gulf of Mexico, does not burn as
much fossil fuel—although in its transportation it certainly
does—but the temptation of grain, its convenience, its
energy density, and industrial logic are leading us down a
path to organic feedlots, to milk such as this store-brand
milk [holds up container] that’s…produced by cows
in Colorado, I believe, who are subsisting on a diet of grain.
It’s leading us toward highly processed food made from
the same breakdown products of corn and soybeans. A highly
processed, high-added fat-and-sugar fast food based on corn
and soy that happens to be organic, you just have to ask yourself
is this what you got into this for? I don’t know about
you, but I don’t regard the advent of organic high-fructose
corn syrup—which by the way has been quietly approved
by the NOP—I don’t regard that as significant
progress. And the problem of course is coming together in
beef production and milk production, where…I think we’re
facing a real conflict about whether grass is an important
part of a cow’s entitlement.
You know, we talk about sustainability, but as sustainable
as an organic field of grain is, it’s nowhere near as
sustainable as a well-managed pasture, organic or not.
No erosion, no fertilizer, it actually builds soil
when managed properly and produces food that’s much
healthier for us and more humane than the food produced in
an animal factory whether or not that animal factory calls
itself organic. So I think that these are some of the issues
that we need to start attacking. I think the whole issue of
grass and animals is something that the organic rules really
missed, because this is one area where you can make a very
strong case that there’s a difference in the food quality,
a scientific case. So beware the temptations of commodity
corn, that sort of product, which is to say beware the temptations
of succumbing to the industrial logic.
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These are the rules of the game that
we’re all playing in whether we’re industrial
farmers or organic farmers, whether we’re eating
industrial or not. So we really have to get in there and
fight. |
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So how do we change the system? …I think if we think ahead
25 years our dreams should be more than making all that corn
belt organic corn belt. Our dream should be turning that into
perennial polyculture, into pasture, because 70 percent of it
already is going to feed ruminants. Why not
put the ruminants back on it? Nothing would do more for the
animals’ health, for our health, and for the health of
the land. So how do we get there?...There are two ways. We have
to really pay attention to the Farm Bill. And so many people
don’t realize the stake they have in it. If it were called
the Food Bill, I think we would all pay a lot more attention
to it, but most people in the cities assume it’s a parochial
concern of farm state’s senators and congressmen and it’s
not. These are the rules of the game that we’re all playing
in whether we’re industrial farmers or organic farmers,
whether we’re eating industrial or not. So we really have
to get in there and fight.
And the other thing is to, you know, be good consumers. I’ve
always hated that word; I’ve always hated identifying
myself as a consumer. It sounds like you’re kind of
using up the world. But I was in Terra Madre and Carlo Petrini
offered a wonderful redefinition of consumer; he called a
consumer a co-creator, and I think it’s a very sweet
and accurate idea. And the organic movement saw that, how
a consumer could be a co-creator, so we have to create a larger
and larger army of co-creators to help us.
I want to thank you very much and just tell you keep up the
good work.
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