Tuesday, June 21, 2022

You Are What You Don't Eat

 “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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