“Animal, Vegetable, Junk” by Mark Bittman, 2022
Bittman is a famous chef who decided to write what he calls
a serious book about food. And it
is! He tracks the development of food
from Neolithic hunger-gatherers to our present globalized industrial food
system. He, like Jared Diamond, wonders
if the development of agriculture was all it was cracked up to be. He’s focused on how certain kinds of
agriculture deplete the quality of the soil. He’s hard on animal products,
saturated fat, sugar and over-salting as a part of a diet. He’s against factory farming and supermarket
merchandising. He’s especially opposed to processed and ‘ultra-processed food’ lacking
in nutrients and toxic to human health. He seems to agree with Michael Pollan
in support of real food as opposed to the shit-food / junk-food / restaurant capitalist mainstream.
Bittman’s materialist analysis, though not Marxist, is
this: “Food drives history and soil
drives food.” In this context he supports leaving land fallow, green
fertilization, crop rotation, multiple cropping and cover crops, organics,
growing crops for humans - not for animals or cars. He opposes food exporting and ‘cash crops’
that leave countries without food of their own.
He tracks how the Sumerians, the Maya and early Chinese empires
collapsed because of lack of food due to soil depletion and over-population. No doubt he could add the civilization around
Ankor Wat in Cambodia, the Greenlanders and others, as Diamond did. He mentions the importance of food to warfare
– noting shortages in Germany during WWI helped defeat them. As Napoleon said, “An army travels on its
stomach” – and the U.S. army in WWII traveled the best of any. Bittman shows
how famines are related to colonial / capitalist commodification of food – in India,
Ireland, China, Niger and Gabon – or were used as political weapons in Ukraine,
Kazakhstan and China by bureaucrats intent on forced collectivization.
The
U.S.
Bittman is focused on the U.S., tracking how ‘family’
farmers gradually disappeared to be replaced by massive operations in debt to
banks and equipment manufacturers. These
giant farms and ranches use mono-cropping, artificial fertilizer, chemical
pesticides, patented seeds, feedlots, cage farms and heavy machinery to produce
food for animals, cars or humans (in that order), methods encouraged by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. EPA and every Ag. School. Capital
and state here are joined at the hip, downplaying rural workers and smaller
farmers.
Bittman goes into detail about the toxic effect of
industrial food on human health – increases in empty calories and nutrition-less
garbage like Wonder Bread©. The hysteria
for vitamins is a result of the lack of nutrients in marketed factory-food. Animal fats, over-salting, the lack of fiber
and added sugar lead to diabetes, heart disease, obesity, hyper-tension, cancer,
muscle aches, etc. – the scourges of the ‘western’ profit-based diet. He calls non-nutritious sugar a modern form
of tobacco in its toxic effects. He describes how the U.S. would not sign-on to
an international convention in support of breast-feeding and also refused to
stop television marketing sugary junk breakfast cereals and candy to
children. He parses the division between
processed ‘simple’ junk carbohydrates (white rice, white bread, white noodles,
multiplying treats and ‘snacks,’ white flour pancakes, pizza crusts, hamburger
buns, etc.) and healthy complex carbohydrates.
INTERNATIONAL
POLICY
The U.S. exported industrial capitalist agriculture to the
rest of the world in Norman Bolaug’s “Green Revolution” (GR) as an answer to
Mao’s ‘red revolution.’ It was based on an
export model of growing cash crops using synthetic fertilizers, patented seeds,
chemical pesticides, GMO techniques and large machinery. These were provided by U.S. agri-business –
ADM, General Foods, Cargill, General Mills, Monsanto, John Deere, etc. This created debt and the winnowing away of
formerly successful small farmers and peasants in the rest of the world too. It was claimed that the GR vastly increased
yields, but further analysis shows that huge price subsidies, increased rain
and parallel non-GR examples show that to be false. In fact, if you exclude non-GR China, hunger
actually rose in the world during the GR!
Its clear negative effects are now coming to light – toxicity, debt,
suicide, urban poverty, soil depletion, exploitation, pollution, privatization.
Mexico is an example of where ‘free trade’ and ‘comparative
advantage’ play out regarding food.
After NAFTA was passed by the Clintonites and the Republican Party Mexico
lost 2 million small farmers, increasing emigration to the U.S. It now imports 40% of its food from the U.S.,
while virtual slavery has returned in the export of avocadoes and
tomatoes. Mexico has the highest obesity
levels in the world due to the ‘new’ diet introduced by the U.S. capitalists
and the Mexican collaborator class.
 |
| Liebig, founder of soil science and source for Marx |
ALTERNATIVE
AGRICULTURE
Bittman supports alternative agriculture under its various names: Organic, sustainable, regenerative, agroecologic,
small-holder, traditional, circular, permaculture, integrated, no-till, low
carbon, food sovereign, biodiverse, climate resilient. He does not advocate full veganism or
vegetarianism, but calls for vastly downgrading animal products and the CAFO industry.
He relies on Justus von Liebig, Marxist John Bellamy Foster, George Washington
Carver, Rachel Carson, Frances Moore Lappe, Fannie Lou Hamer, Scott Nearing, Vandana Shiva and
the Black Panthers. He narrates the U.S.
government’s convoluted approach to ingredients over the years and how
industrial food concerns manipulate ‘organic’ for profit, as organic is a very
limited definition according to the USDA.
It could still be slave-grown, mono-cropped, heavily carbon, from
tortured animals and owned by a vast food conglomerate, as most organic firms
now are. Nor are ‘fake’ meats the solution to Bittman, as they are also
processed, though better than real meat.
Bittman narrates the host of ills from industrial and meat
agriculture, contributing a huge percentage to global warming and devastating
health across the globe with junk food. The
fuel and feed inefficiencies of aqua-culture, which is the source of 50% of
fish, are even worse than those of beef. Or the takeover of fertile agricultural land
by speculators, investors, corporations and countries.
 |
| Detroit Urban Farm, one of over 1,000 |
Da
Plan Boss?
However like most left-liberals, he has no major strategy
except agroecology. He makes familiar,
‘moderate’ suggestions about what kinds of foods to eat instead of taking a
harder line. He does finally admit that
food comes back to labor. He cites
various state efforts to improve farmworker conditions; urban gardens and farms
in cities like Detroit; farmer’s markets, SNAP programs; farm to table and
school programs; CSAs; campaigns against junk food; anti-hunger programs in
Brazil; natural agriculture programs in India and France; meatless Mondays;
partial veganism; the Green New Deal; healthy school food programs in
Minneapolis. The list is long but not
dominant at all.
This book is a good compendium of the massive, systemic and
multiple problems in capitalist agriculture which are leading to severe
breakdowns. It’s a collection of points
from many other books, so it is a pretty complete, detailed survey. But it fails at understanding how to overturn
capital in the rural political space, even though he’s aware that capital’s
profiteering is the main source for everything that is happening on the land. Instead
Bittman wants to supplement Big Food, not replace it, with “incremental changes.”
This is a familiar dead-end for left-liberals, who cannot make the next step
towards a cooperative, eco-socialist outlook.
Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these
terms: “Collapse” (Diamond); “Propaganda” (Bernays); “Salt, Sugar, Fat,” “The
Potlikker Papers,” “Foodopoly,” “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” “A
Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism,” “Grocery Activism,” “Land Grabbing,” “Behind the
Kitchen Door,” “Vegan Freak,” “$15.4 Billion Write-down for Kraft-Heinz,” “Dead Epidemiologists,” “In Dubious Battle”
(Steinbeck); “Damnation,” “Seaspiracy,” “Land Grabbing” or the 4 books John
Bellamy Foster wrote on Marx and environmentalism - “The
Ecological Revolution,” “Marx and the Earth,” “the Robbery of Nature” and
“Marx’s Ecology.”
And I bought it at
Second Story Books, Ely, MN
Red Frog
June 21, 2022
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