New York Times Opinion | May 11,
2008
Op-Ed Contributor: Change We Can Stomach
By DAN BARBER
Farming has the potential to go through the greatest
upheaval since the Green Revolution, bringing harvests that
are more healthful, sustainable and flavorful.
TARRYTOWN, N.Y.
COOKING, like farming, for all its down-home community
spirit, is essentially a solitary craft. But lately it’s
feeling more like a lonely burden. Finding guilt-free food
for our menus — food that’s clean, green and humane — is
about as easy as securing a housing loan. And we’re suddenly
paying more — 75 percent more in the last six years — to
stock our pantries. Around the world, from Cairo to
Port-au-Prince, increases in food prices have governments
facing riots born of shortages and hunger. It’s enough to
make you want to toss in the toque.
But here’s the good news: if you’re a chef, or an eater who
cares about where your food comes from (and there are a lot
of you out there), we can have a hand in making food for the
future downright delicious.
Farming has the potential to go through the greatest
upheaval since the Green Revolution, bringing harvests that
are more healthful, sustainable and, yes, even more
flavorful. The change is being pushed along by market forces
that influence how our farmers farm.
Until now, food production has been controlled by Big
Agriculture, with its macho fixation on “average tonnage”
and “record harvests.” But there’s a cost to its
breadbasket-to-the-world bragging rights. Like those big
Industrial Age factories that once billowed black smoke,
American agriculture is mired in a mind-set that relies on
capital, chemistry and machines. Food production is
dependent on oil, in the form of fertilizers and pesticides,
in the distances produce travels from farm to plate and in
the energy it takes to process it.
For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have
claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But
industrial agriculture has simply responded that if we’re
feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how
terrible can our food system be?
Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of
oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for
most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting
farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting
food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as
reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and
less pesticide and fertilizer.
In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A
four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400
per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have
long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity.
But their economies of scale come from mass distribution,
and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many
locations, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500
miles from where it’s grown.
The high cost of oil alone will not be enough to reform
American agriculture, however. As long as agricultural
companies exploit the poor and extract labor from them at
slave wages, and as long as they aren’t required to pay the
price for the pollution they so brazenly produce, their
system will stay afloat. If financially pinched Americans
opt for the cheapest (and the least healthful) foods rather
than cook their own, the food industry will continue to
reach for the lowest common denominator.
But it is possible to nudge the revolution along — for
instance, by changing how we measure the value of food. If
we stop calculating the cost per quantity and begin
considering the cost per nutrient value, the demand for
higher-quality food would rise.
Organic fruits and vegetables contain 40 percent more
nutrients than their chemical-fed counterparts. And animals
raised on pasture provide us with meat and dairy products
containing more beta carotene and at least three times as
much C.L.A. (conjugated linoleic acid, shown in animal
studies to reduce the risk of cancer) than those raised on
grain.
Where good nutrition goes, flavor tends to follow. Chefs are
the first to admit that an impossibly sweet, flavor-filled
carrot has nothing to do with our work. It has to do with
growing the right seed in healthy, nutrient-rich soil.
Increasingly we can see the wisdom of diversified farming
operations, where there are built-in relationships among
plants and animals. A dairy farm can provide manure for a
neighboring potato farm, for example, which can in turn
offer potato scraps as extra feed for the herd. When crops
and livestock are judiciously mixed, agriculture wisely
mimics nature.
To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a
nostalgic bid to revert to the agrarian ways of our
ancestors. It is to look toward the future, leapfrogging
past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms that
take advantage of the sun’s free energy and use the waste of
one species as food for another.
Chefs can help move our food system into the future by
continuing to demand the most flavorful food. Our support of
the local food movement is an important example of this
approach, but it’s not enough. As demand for fresh, local
food rises, we cannot continue to rely entirely on farmers’
markets. Asking every farmer to plant, harvest, drive his
pickup truck to a market and sell his goods there is like
asking me to cook, take reservations, serve and wash the
dishes.
We now need to support a system of well-coordinated regional
farm networks, each suited to the food it can best grow.
Farmers organized into marketing networks that can promote
their common brands (like the Organic Valley Family of Farms
in the Midwest) can ease the economic and ecological burden
of food production and transportation. They can also
distribute their products to new markets, including poor
communities that have relied mainly on food from convenience
stores.
Similar networks could also operate in the countries that
are now experiencing food shortages. For years, the United
States has flooded the world with food exports, displacing
small farmers and disrupting domestic markets. As escalating
food prices threaten an additional 100 million people with
hunger, a new concept of humanitarian aid is required. Local
farming efforts focused on conserving natural resources and
biodiversity are essential to improving food security in
developing countries, as a report just published by the
International Assessment of Agriculture Science and
Technology for Development has concluded. We must build on
these tenets, providing financial and technical assistance
to small farmers across the world.
But regional systems will work only if there is enough
small-scale farming going on to make them viable. With a
less energy-intensive food system in place, we will need
more muscle power devoted to food production, and more
people on the farm. (The need is especially urgent when you
consider that the average age of today’s American farmer is
over 55.) In order to move gracefully into a post-industrial
agriculture economy, we also need to rethink how we educate
the people who will grow our food. Land-grant universities
and agricultural schools, dependent on financing from
agribusiness, focus on maximum extraction from the land —
take more, sell more, waste more.
Leave our agricultural future to chefs and anyone who takes
food and cooking seriously. We never bought into the “bigger
is better” mantra, not because it left us too dependent on
oil, but because it never produced anything really good to
eat. Truly great cooking — not faddish 1.5-pound rib-eye
steaks with butter sauce, but food that has evolved from the
world’s thriving peasant cuisines — is based on the
correspondence of good farming to a healthy environment and
good nutrition. It’s never been any other way, and we should
be grateful. The future belongs to the gourmet.
Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue
Hill at Stone Barns. |