August 2009 Archive for On the Udder Hand

If you’ve been by the magazine stand at your local supermarket or library, you’ll note that one of the nation’s major weekly magazines has as this week’s cover story a blistering attack on conventional agriculture.  [And I see fellow AgWeb blogger Matt Bogard has beat me to the punch, but as most fighters know, a 1-2 combination is most effective].

The Aug. 21^st issue of Time magazine is entitled “the Real Cost of Cheap Food.”   What’s mostly notable about the piece is how predictable and derivative it truly is.  There is not a single new fact or assertion in the article that hasn’t long been trotted out by the various anti- activists.  You know the ones:  Anti-large farms, anti-antibiotic use, anti-carnivores, anti-change. In reading through the article, I kept waiting for something really provocative to appear, but in truth, it read like a college newspaper article.  By that I mean that the author didn’t really sift his facts or consider whether the source of them was pushing their own agenda.  He just threw them all in the article, because (in ironic comparison to the article itself, which says that too much cheap food leads to obesity) stuffing all those criticisms in one story makes for a very fattening diatribe.

Examples of falsehoods?  The first page talks about the carbon footprint of the U.S. livestock sector.  It said that 19% of fossil fuels go to animal agriculture.  That is a ludicrous assertion, and apparently is based on the well-known and well-refuted United Nations report which found that globally, livestock production produces 18% of all greenhouse gases.  In the U.S., that figure is more like 6%, precisely because farming and ranching here is more efficient and productive than subsistence-level production in the third world. 

Another familiar if misleading trope in the piece was that a return to local, subsistence-style farming is going to be more environmentally friendly.  Sorry, but that just doesn’t make sense.  In dairy, since the end of WW II, we’ve gone from 20 million cows to 9 million.  Does Time really think that putting a few milk cows on every farm, and then trucking a can of milk a day to the local creamery, is really going to reduce the carbon footprint and improve the environmentalism of milk production?  That’s nutty.

Now, the sad truth is that Time, which used to be the newsweekly of record for decades, has, like most of its brethren, succumbed to a loss of readership from the internet, and the general decline in advertising.  So it and Newsweek both are now more opinionated, and a lot less factual, or at least, certainly less objective.  That’s fine, if not very enlightening.  The reporter had an agenda he wanted to promote, and he didn’t let any contrary notions or balance slow him down.  Good luck with that as a business model.

I also want to single out the coincidental appearance this month of a very different perspective on modern agriculture, this one from someone who actually appears to have visited farms and knows what he’s saying.

The American Enterprise Institute’s journal had this insightful article in their July 30^th issue, called The Omnivore’s Delusion.  It’s really a point by point rebuttal of the notion, promoted by the likes of Michael Pollan and subscribed to by Time magazine, that the romantic dream of the backyard yeoman farmer is one society should strive for in the future.  Author Blake Hurst correctly asserts that consumers who profess shock and horror at the use of production efficiencies in farming are the same who have few qualms about using similar approaches in other aspects of their lives, from cell phones and laptops, to microwaves and Viagra.  What’s good for the goose is obviously not good for the gander, in the minds of some.

The food business has its challenges, just like journalism today, but it is responsive to consumer expectations and it is held accountable for its practices.  It would be great if the same could be said for Time magazine.

Actress Mae West was noted for many colorful sayings, including “too much of a good thing is wonderful.”  While that aphorism was correctly interpreted as her view of physical pleasure, one has to wonder what she would think of life in the first part of the 21^st century, where today, the ubiquity of sex is taken for granted, but too much food, at least the wrong kind, is most certainly frowned on.

This notion was the subject of a hugely insightful and provocative article from earlier this year in the Hoover Institution Policy Review. Although it’s been out for six months, I’ve been holding off on commenting on it for want of figuring out just what to say….because the thesis — that the common societal views of sex and food have switched places in the past 50 years  –  is a profound commentary on our culture.  It’s one I’ve talked about on occasion here, and here.

The article posits that many of the trends we see in food consumption, from organic, to slow, to local, to animal- and earth-friendly, are being driven by this idea, as article author Mary Eberstadt describes it:

“As the consumption of food not only literally but also figuratively has become progressively more discriminate and thoughtful, at least in theory (if rather obviously not always in practice), the consumption of sex in various forms appears to have become the opposite for a great many people: i.e., progressively more indiscriminate and unthinking.”

Eberstadt describes the contrast where Betty, a typical housewife of the 1950s (think Marian Cunningham from Happy Days) would place a high moral value on sexual relations and be very discriminatory in her sexual tastes, but not give much thought to where dinner comes from.  Whereas her granddaughter Jennifer (think Jennifer Aniston’s character Rachel in Friends) would be indiscriminate about sex, but instead place a high moral value on her food choices. As Eberstadt says,

“In just over 50 years, in other words — not for everyone, of course, but for a great many people, and for an especially large portion of sophisticated people — the moral poles of sex and food have been reversed. Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law of some kind; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.

Jennifer feels that there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends her exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn those who believe otherwise, but she doesn’t understand why they do, either. And she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if more people evaluated their food choices as she does. She even proselytizes on occasion when she can.

In the 40 years since Woodstock (which itself has been defined in this past week of anniversary commemorations as sort of a cultural touchstone), societal mores concerning sex have greatly relaxed.  It started in the 1960s, and even after the AIDS crisis of 25 years ago, people are generally much more blasé about who does what with whom in the bedroom. 

But I agree with Eberstadt that our finger-pointing and tsk-tsking has shifted from the bedroom to the kitchen and dining room.  Perhaps it’s as much a comment about the sexual revolution as it is about food politics, but clearly the lifestyle choices we make about food consumption have become more black-and-white as carnal appetites have become grayer.  Since both activities are necessary for the survival of the species, don’t expect that trend to diminish anytime soon.

The news from England last week was about as bad as it could be for the organic foods industry:  perhaps the largest and most thorough-ever analysis of the nutritional benefits of organic food found…none.  That is to say, a British government review of hundreds of scientific papers over the decades which have evaluated the nutritional composition of organically-produced food, including dairy, haven’t located any positive differentiations.

For the 98% of U.S. dairy farmers who are not certified organic, this shouldn’t come as a great surprise.  Milk has pretty much always been milk, whether the cows are organic or not.  Organic dairy marketers have been adept at bludgeoning conventional products with the “unholy trinity” of no added antibiotics, pesticides, or synthetic growth hormones, but those are production practices that don’t result in a different product, since conventional milk itself doesn’t have those things, either.

I’ve blogged about this general topic in the past: how just like bottled water, dairy products are increasingly being sold based on sizzle, not the underlying steak itself.  In other words, when you’re marketing a commodity, how do you differentiate something that is nutritionally the same?  You tout dubious “benefits” to those that are willing to pay a hefty premium (organic gallons of milk are still about 100% more expensive than conventional) for such benefits, tenuous though they may be.  And now this UK research takes off the emperor’s clothes.

In the marketplace, it’s good that consumers have choices, just as it’s good that farmers have choices about their production practices.  I’m not a critic of the practice of organic farming, but I have been a critic of the marketing approaches which use unsubstantiated doubts about food safety to make a case for their products.

The recession has hit organic dairy farming hard, as processors cut off their organic milk suppliers during the downturn.  What was thought to be a recession-proof business model is not.  Now that the science modeling has also clarified whether food safety and nutrition are legitimate – or not, as the case turns out to be – marketing distinctions for organic sellers, they’ll be in search of a new model.