[If you missed Part 1, go here.]

The Organic Movement

Most people are vaguely familiar with the counterculture roots of the organic movement. It’s a success story (perhaps too much of one for those who believe that small is beautiful). A couple of decades ago, the organic section of the average grocery store consisted of a bin [...]]]>

[If you missed Part 1, go here.]

The Organic Movement

Most people are vaguely familiar with the counterculture roots of the organic movement. It’s a success story (perhaps too much of one for those who believe that small is beautiful). A couple of decades ago, the organic section of the average grocery store consisted of a bin of small, knobbly, expensive apples at the very back. Since then the “organic” brand has become a multinational hit. Many little mom-and-pop food processing and retailing businesses, launched by people who were motivated more by ethics than cash, have long since been acquired by giant food companies who recognized the value of this new label.

There was a time when going organic meant making a deep commitment to an alternative way of farming and living. It was about much more than pesticide-free food. An organic farm was one which certainly avoided the use of industrial pesticides and fertilizers, but which was also dedicated to soil conservation, small-scale polyculture, good treatment of workers and relentless innovation.

The advent of industrial organic farming and the marketing practices of food processors (and even shampoo makers) has destroyed the once broad semantic domain of the term “organic.” Organics have sadly become an upsell opportunity as much as an ethical alternative. Label the shampoo organic and, presto, the price goes up 30% and people are still willing to pay. I like to think the broader food movement is at least partially a reaction to the usurpation of organics by salespeople. Marketers may have cut off the hydra head of the organic food movement, but a dozen other movements have sprung up in its place.

The Local Food Movement

Originating with The 100-Mile Diet by fellow Adbusters alumnus, James MacKinnon, the locavore craze is stronger than ever. Why local? In two words: climate change. Environmentalist David Suzuki has indicated that given a choice between organic food and locally grown food, he’d choose the local stuff. All those food miles racked up by your imported dinner in our globalized economy arguably have more of an impact on carbon emissions than the fossil fuel inputs going into your non-organic dinner. Amazingly, you will still find apples from New Zealand in the bins of major grocery stores in North America in September. That is pretty crazy when you think about it.

Locavorism has other dimensions too, such as making and benefiting from a deeper commitment to neighborly provender. Going to that new farmers’ market in your neighborhood and meeting the farmer who grew your tomatoes or peaches or garlic, is not only fun, it often results in better value. So much of what passes down the industrial food supply system these days is insipidly mediocre. The locavore trend also includes a renewed interest in urban vegetable gardening and, of course, the whole backyard chicken thing.

The Sustainable Food Movement

This is a vague, catch-all term, synonymous with the “good food” or “real food” movement or just plain old “food movement.” (Some people in the agricultural community don’t like terms like “real food” because of the inference that large-scale biotech crops result in something like “fake food.”) Sustainability is a concept that gets so much play that it starts to lose meaning after a while, but in the context of agriculture it often means, “not dependent on oil.” It’s closely associated with organics because the mass production of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in industrial agriculture is very much dependent on using lots of fossil fuel.

#ProFood

If ever a man has used social media to pick himself up by the bootstraps and create something out of nothing, that someone is Rob Smart, or, as he’s better known, @jambutter of the twittersphere. I should know, because I had a front row seat from the beginning. Almost a year ago, before Twitter hit the headlines as the next big thing, a web developer friend convinced a very reluctant me to pay attention to Twitter. “It’ll be huge,” he said. I lifted a skeptical eyebrow in response. But I joined anyway and looked around for food tweeps, one of whom was Rob.

Rob was an amazingly active twitterer and he had a plan. He engaged both the food activists and the mid-western cattle ranchers in fierce, often entertaining debate. Rob worked hard and put in long hours. Six months later he had carved out a hashtag principality of his own: #ProFood.

ProFood has its own special niche in the food movement: finding entrepreneurial solutions to the serious problems facing America’s food system. But it has also served as a meeting place and organizational tool for a diverse group of twittering foodies. The success of ProFood has shown that the food movement is still young and opportunity abounds.

The Whole Is Greater Than…

I’ve described a few of the components. So what the heck is the food movement en masse then? Admittedly, it’s partly epicurean. Opponents love to exploit this angle as a vulnerability, to dismiss the food movement as the playground of brandy-sniffing, souffle-nibbling elitists. But the pleasure principle is actually one of its strengths. Learning about food leads very quickly to a more pleasurable, healthier life, regardless of your means. A little education results in more discrimination in the grocery store, which leads to better value for your grocery dollar. The fast and universal payoff of an interest in food politics is one of its most potent engines for growth. Broadly speaking, the food movement is a consumer movement.

Shoulder to shoulder with the consumers you have political activists, entrepreneurs, farmers, environmentalists, journalists, chefs, designers, and philosophers, all taking a mutual interest in the future of food. The movement is emanating from America, because the land of junk food and all-powerful lobbyists needs it the most, but it’s global in reach. It is fundamentally progressive and interlinked with the trend towards more sustainable forms of manufacturing, transportation, and energy production. Although food is a universal concern, the movement’s attention to government policy and criticism of industrial agriculture has the potential to change the way business is done and profoundly affect paychecks and pocketbooks, and so the movement is attracting its share of conservative opposition. So it goes.

The pursuit of change has already borne fruit. Farmers’ markets are popping up all over North America. Michelle Obama has become the First Lady of food reform. Campaigners are taking on the obesity epidemic, and making explicit the doubtful role of big business in it. The lost art of cookery is reacquiring a little of the old respect. Entrepreneurs are busy finding ways to satisfy the growing demand for alternatives. And perhaps most importantly, awareness that there is such a thing as a “food movement” increases every day.

If you’re looking for ways to get on board, you’re faced with an embarrassment of opportunity. It would probably be harder to avoid getting involved at this point. If you’re truly a novice, just start with the basics. Start reading one of Michael Pollan’s books. Wipe the dust off the pots and pans. Head to the farmers’ markets next spring, and take a moment to rethink every purchase you habitually make at the supermarket.

Proponents of the food movement have the easiest sales pitch of all: learn more about what you’re putting in your body and you will live longer, more happily, and get better value for your money. Guaranteed.

If you haven’t read about Norman Borlaug you can get quickly caught up here and here and here. I’ll extract a key bit from the article in The Age:

”Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the Earth, but many of them are elitists,” [Borlaug] told the [...]]]>

Norman Borlaug

If you haven’t read about Norman Borlaug you can get quickly caught up here and here and here. I’ll extract a key bit from the article in The Age:

”Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the Earth, but many of them are elitists,” [Borlaug] told the Atlantic Monthly magazine.

”They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertiliser and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Sound familiar? Sure. This is the typical refrain you hear from the folks at Monsanto, etcetera, when they are wiffle-batting criticisms of biotech back at “environmentalists.”

So an obit of a man who died at the age of 95 has very modern political relevance in the food world. And, hey, who wouldn’t want a Nobel Peace Prize winner backing up his side of the argument? But it would be a mistake for those advocating sustainable agriculture to react defensively to references to elitists, or to deny Prof Borlaug his due.

Things have changed in the decades since Prof Borlaug struggled to save millions from starvation as the world population exploded. His Nobel Prize, it’s worth remembering, was awarded in 1970. Population growth is still an issue, but now so too is climate change.  A modern Borlaug, striving to feed the world’s poor in the coming century, certainly could not and would not dismiss the “environmental lobby” as elitist.

Sustainable agriculture is modern, hi-tech agriculture, even (and perhaps especially) when it is critical of chemical inputs and the use of genetic engineering for profit rather than for people. Almost all organic farmers these days, for example, are innovators, entrepreneurs and developers—nothing like the caricature of a back-to-the-land, hippie Luddite. It is safe for progressives to acknowledge Borlaug’s legacy while continuing to reflect on the defects of the “Green Revolution” and without worrying too much about the way his words and experience may be taken out of context by some people to push product.

The air was warm and stagnant. Flies bounced lazily off the windowpanes. Attorneys wiped sweat from their brow. Canada farmer Percy Schmeizer stood nervously as the judge entered the courtroom and prepared to deliver the verdict.

Okay, that’s not what actually happened. I wasn’t there. That’s just how I imagine it. In 2004 the Supreme Court [...]]]>

The air was warm and stagnant. Flies bounced lazily off the windowpanes. Attorneys wiped sweat from their brow. Canada farmer Percy Schmeizer stood nervously as the judge entered the courtroom and prepared to deliver the verdict.

Okay, that’s not what actually happened. I wasn’t there. That’s just how I imagine it. In 2004 the Supreme Court of Canada passed judgment in the famous case of Percy Schmeizer vs Monsanto. No doubt it all went down boringly in air-conditioned comfort, but there ought to have been a little drama. For on that day the justices ruled in a 5-4 split decision to uphold a biotech corporation’s patented control of a living thing.

It wasn’t inevitable. In the early days of biotech, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that the legal and regulatory bodies of the United States and Canada would accept patents of genes. But they did. The argument was that engineered genes were a kind of intellectual property like books, music, and pharmaceuticals. Biotech was a promising field and companies like Monsanto needed patent protection to justify investing significant amounts of money in research and development. If any of the decision makers felt uncomfortable about extending intellectual property rights to DNA, to the code of life itself, they must have decided the benefits outweighed the risks.

Decades later the debate is still raging. In North America, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are now as common as canned goods. There’s a good chance you’ve eaten something today that came from a genetically modified plant. Although anti-GMO activists in Europe have succeeded in convincing governments to ban many GM crops outright, here in North America they haven’t even managed to make much progress towards labeling.

Opposition to the biotech giants usually begins with a visceral objection to direct tampering with the stuff of life, especially when the tampering extends to a mixing of genes belonging not merely to different species or families, but to different kingdoms. A bacterial gene, for example, has been inserted into Monsanto’s patented 810 maize, causing the modified plant to produce a pesticide within it’s own cells. Opponents call this Frankenfood. To a lot of people it just doesn’t feel right.

But the argument from repugnance tends to be the weakest. Genetic engineering might result in the creation of harmful organisms, but not necessarily. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) it’s not possible to make general statements about the safety of all GM foods. As with the powerful knowledge of the inner workings of the atom, the good and the evil lies in the application. Are you making PET scanners or atomic bombs?  Some genetic modifications could have harmful effects on human health and others won’t. The challenge becomes one of honest and adequate testing of each new GMO.

Simple toxins aren’t the only concern. The WHO has identified three more big ones:

1. Allerginicity. GMOs have the potential to provoke serious allergic reactions. GMOs that are going to market are supposed to be properly tested for this.

2. Gene Transfer. A weird, almost sci-fi scenario: It is possible, although unlikely, that genes from GMOs consumed by humans might be transferred to cells in the body or to bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract. For this reason the WHO has recommended that genes with antibiotic resistant properties not be used in GMOs. It is, however, a rare occurrence.

3. Outcrossing. A worrying problem for ecologists and environmentalists. Genes from genetically engineered plants have the potential to move to conventional plants and even wild plants with unknown results. It’s a public health issue as well, since genes from GMOs approved only for use on livestock have mysteriously found their way into food for human consumption. This is the classic Jurassic Park, you-can’t-keep-the-genie-in-the-bottle argument, and it has serious weight.

I would add a fourth reason to explore labeling and bans on GMOs: what I’m going to call “irresponsible use.”

My perspective is very much that of a consumer. I’m not a biotech expert; I’m a person who wants to learn more about where the food I eat comes from. And I’ve noticed in the course of my research that many of these genetically modified crops have been created not for the benefit of poor third-world farmers or even first-world consumers, but for the benefit of biotech companies and agribusinesspeople.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

Take Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” GM corn, for example. This corn has been engineered with a bacterial gene that makes it resistant to Monsanto’s proprietary Roundup herbicide. The benefit is that farmer’s can now dump more herbicide on their fields without killing the crop. For the agribusinessman that makes industrial farming a little bit easier and operational yields potentially higher. For Monsanto it means they sell lots of GM seeds (which produce plants with sterile seeds are licensed for one year, so farmers have to buy them every year.) Also, of course, it means that they sell more herbicide. This kind of biotech is a bonanza for agribusinessmen and shareholders.

But what does the consumer get out of this, other than crops that have been doused with extra helpings of chemicals? Monsanto would like you to believe that higher yields mean lower prices to the consumer. The economics, however, are complex. Maybe in a perfectly competitive environment you’d get lower prices, but the biotech-agricultural industry is very far from perfectly competitive. Monsanto has huge market share and few, if any, real rivals. On the farmers’ side of things there’s a Byzantine system of government subsidies and strangled distribution that pretty much ensures the proceeds of these higher yields are going to everyone but you. And there’s no earthly reason why you, as a consumer/voter, should support the use of a potentially harmful and environmentally destructive new technology merely for someone else’s private gain, especially when alternatives exist.

There are signs that biotech companies are becoming aware of this challenge and adapting their strategies accordingly. Speaking at the International Wheat Quality conference recently, Meinolf Lindhauer of Germany’s Max Rubner Federal Research Institute of Nutrition and Food suggested that winning acceptance of genetically modified wheat may require GMOs that provide a direct benefit to the public  (for example, a gluten-free GM wheat for people with celiac disease).

“If the consumer perceives that the benefit is just for the producer or worse still, just for some big company that’s making a profit out of it, why would they want to adopt it?” said Lindauer.

Irresponsible use might also encompass attempts to apply the magic bullet of genetic engineering to developing-world agriculture. Recently in India thousands of farmers committed suicide after going into debt to buy expensive GM seeds. The crops from such seeds are infertile, so when the crops failed, the farmers were left with no income and an inescapable debt. Prince Charles made headlines in 2008 by referring to ‘the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India, stemming…from the failure of many GM crop varieties’. According to the National Crime Records Bureau of India, 16,625 farmers killed themselves in 2007 alone. There were 182,936 farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2007.

Observers have reason to be skeptical when they hear that Monsanto is involved in a new project to develop drought-resistant GM wheat for African farmers. Sounds like a good thing. Could be. It’s funded by the Gates Foundation and the Buffet Foundation. I felt a little less warm and fuzzy about that when I learned that the Gates Foundation’s project leader, Rob Horsch, is a former VP of Monsanto. But still, cronyism aside, you can hope that these new seeds, which are to be sold to farmers “royalty free” are more about helping people than opening new markets. Certainly, the skeptics have lots of well-documented material to work with.

Percy Schmeiser

The more you dig, the more it seems that the economics of GMOs are as worrisome as the GMOs themselves. Price trends, in particular, are not encouraging, especially for farmers in developing countries. According to the Center for Food Safety, “GM seeds cost from two to over four times as much as conventional, non-GM seeds, and the price disparity is increasing. From 80% to over 90% of the soybean, corn and cotton seeds planted in the U.S. are GM varieties. Thanks to GM trait fee increases, average U.S. seed prices for these crops have risen by over 50% in just the past two to three years.”

If you’re a large biotech, advancing capital-intensive, patented crops which can’t reproduce makes great business sense. The question is, will simpler, better, more natural solutions get left behind in the scramble for dollars?

In his long expensive legal battle with Monsanto, perhaps Percy Schmeiser was never on the right side of the letter of the law, but just maybe, as four Supreme Court judges evidently agreed, he was on the right side of what the law should be. The analogy between genes and forms of intellectual property like books and pharmaceuticals isn’t a very good one.

Consumers are right to be skeptical of the claims of biotech companies. At the same time, there are some casual critics of genetic engineering who need to tread carefully in order to avoid stumbling onto the wrong side of science in a creationists-vs-evolutionists style of debate. After reading as much as I possibly could on the subject in a few weeks’ time, I find I don’t fear the technology, but I do question the uses to which it will be put and the motives of those who are promoting it. How has my attitude changed? Well, I feel more relaxed about where things are at right now. Yes, we’re seeing more and more genetically engineered crops in North America, but the food movement is strong and growing stronger all the time. If you’re generally opposed to GMOs, something tells me you have reason to be optimistic about the direction the wind is blowing.