Alice Waters’s wish has come true: an organic garden at the White House. First Lady Michelle Obama and her family are converting 1,100 square feet of the South Lawn. President Obama pulling weeds has been mentioned. This is a good thing. It sets a good example. And it’s just a part of the First Lady’s advocacy for better food and healthier eating.
Does it have the potential to affect people so deeply that an unstoppable wave of home gardens and demand for healthy food overwhelms our current food system?
Of course not. It is just two simple things. It’s a woman concerned about her children’s health who has the will and means to do something about it. It’s also a woman following the lead of people who helped put her husband into office. It’s naïve to think that this is the vanguard of a revolution in the way we eat and the way we produce what we eat.
The recently published book Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get it Back by Ann Vileisis, captures an important part of the story. It is a history of how the vast knowledge that virtually every household, particularly its women, possessed about food sources, quality, availability, and preparation was systematically erased by the food industry and it’s handmaidens in government and academia. Over a period of about six generations, the ordinary task of raising your own food has become a thing of wonder, a remarkable political act, essentially an abstraction from the ebb and flow of daily life.
While some people will be drawn to this particular wonder and, as a consequence, revolutionize their personal food economy, most people will not. Organic food illustrates this point. A USDA survey conducted in 2000 found that almost 70% of respondents believed that organic food is better than conventional food. However, despite these beliefs, another survey found that only 30% of shoppers ever buy organic. And, finally, organic food comprises only 3% of total food sales.
This is not a criticism. It is not an illustration of how consumers fail. It’s an acknowledgment that our food culture isn’t a matter of personal choice. Our food culture comes from how people respond as best they can to dominant food production and distribution institutions.
Growing a garden has two principle barriers: first, it calls upon skills we’ve lost, as documented in Kitchen Literacy, and, second, it’s extra effort. Humans are adapted to conserve effort, which is a very valuable characteristic when survival depends on hunting and gathering. However, once people were collected into urban enclaves with regimented work routines, they had little opportunity to grow their own food. Seeing opportunity, industry entered with solutions that appealed to both food desires and the desire to conserve effort. And with their resources, the food industry created products and information that created desire itself. God did not on the sixth day create supermarkets and processed foods.
The implicit—and sometimes explicit—hope behind the kind of thing that’s happening at the White House is that in emulating our leaders, we as a nation will have an awakening to the virtues of home-grown food. The only reason we wouldn’t is ignorance and sloth—two of the seven deadly sins.
This doesn’t make sense because it puts the burden for changing our food culture entirely on the shoulders of consumers. Believing that consciousness-raising wonders such as an organic garden nestled in the South Lawn of the White House will be the vanguard of a food revolution relies on the bankrupt ideology of consumer sovereignty, an ideology that where consumers go, industry must follow. It’s an ideology promoted by industry. It’s an ideology in the old sense of the concept: ideas that lead us to put great effort into achieving goals that ultimately are not in our best interests.
How could that be? Didn’t I say that growing your own food is a good idea?
Yes, I did. But it’s not nearly enough. If people motivated by food issues work tirelessly to stimulate victory gardens, it will be very nice for those who enjoy the bounty but will leave the monster that is the food industry untouched. This is true for two reasons.
First, growing your own food is what you do in your spare time. Minions of the food industry are paid handsomely to perpetuate our current system.
Second, as just an example, although President Obama might be pulling weeds in the new family garden, I doubt that he’ll direct his Secretary of Agriculture to shift spending from subsidies for agribusiness to subsidies for home and community gardens. Consumer sovereignty will be cited: children want Cocoa Puffs so it’s our responsibility to make sure they get them, with the appropriate health warnings so parents are at fault.
How we eat and how we produce what we eat is of a piece with how we produce the other things we consume, how we earn the income that enables us to consume what we consume, how government maintains the institutions that make this all work smoothly, and how sources of information from academia to the media tell us what it all means and how it all works. The simple truth is that few people will grow their own food because it doesn’t make sense given the way they’re forced to live.
In other words, it’s the production side, not the consumption side that’s driving this bus.
The vanguard of the revolution in our food culture isn’t in home gardens. It’s in such things as the renewal of the Farm Bill that’s coming up in two next years where better food will be up against agribusiness as usual.
