[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.

Quick background for non-British Columbians: We BCers, though no longer hewers of wood and wrestlers of bears, still love the outdoors for the most part, and the noble salmon—especially the delicious sockeye—are a keystone in [...]]]> Lots more in the papers today on what the Globe calls “the near total collapse of the Fraser River sockeye run.”

Quick background for non-British Columbians: We BCers, though no longer hewers of wood and wrestlers of bears, still love the outdoors for the most part, and the noble salmon—especially the delicious sockeye—are a keystone in the natural archway of our wilderness. (We have salmon art, for God’s sake. Do you have fish art where you live? Probably not.) There used to be countless millions of salmon swimming up the Fraser River alone in spawning season. It’s a big river, and you could practically walk across their backs to the other shore there were so many. The bigness of the river also means that the tributaries of the Fraser extend deep into the hinterland, formerly providing plenty of fishy food not only to wildlife on the coast, but in the interior as well. It was an almost Edenic food supply: free, abundant, fairly easy to collect, and self-renewing. Salmon, or “river chicken,” as it is sometimes lovingly called by local yokels, isn’t just something we toss on the barbecue; it’s part of our culture and heritage.

So now, after decades of declining numbers, comes the news that this government-managed fishery has catastrophically collapsed. 1.7 million sockeye will return this year instead of the predicted 10.6 to 13 million. And no one knows why. There are theories, but, you know, it’s a big ocean. It isn’t easy to count and follow fish.

Environmentalists, government bureaucrats, and various interested groups such as salmon farmers and fishermen, have been squabbling over conservation/exploitation issues for years. The usual response given by opponents of the environmentalists has been that their concerns are “alarmist.” It’s a familiar, paternalistic refrain: serious people, they seem to be saving, who have to deal with serious, practical issues, needn’t take these environmentalists seriously.

Well, now the alarm bells are ringing about as loudly as they possibly could be. It’s a regular Seussian band of bells, clangers, clappers and cymbals—enough to wake the dead, or the merely bureaucratic. The question is, what will change, if anything, now that opponents of a truly conservative conservation strategy no longer have the “alarmist” card to play?