Déjà chew: “The Planet on Your Plate” issue from Sierra

Farmers face a bumper crop of troubles. Family farms continue to be squeezed out by agribusiness. The chemical "inputs" recommended by county agricultural-extension agents have poisoned the groundwater, and officially approved tillage techniques have caused the topsoil to wash away…[D]ebt-ridden farmers can't get off the commodity-program Stair Master.

That's from the Sierra Club magazine's November/December food issue … of 1994.

It was titled "The Planet on Your Plate: Saving the Earth Three Times a Day," and was recently lent to me by its then-editor, a colleague and occasional commenter on this site who prefers to go by "Aunt Biddy." Aunt Biddy is a foodie — and a lot cooler than his self-chosen nickname makes him sound — and says that while the issue was his idea, it was a real departure for the environmental group and a hard sell for the publisher. Back then, Greens apparently didn't see what they had in common with people who liked arugula.

What's fascinating, and ultimately demoralizing, for a late-to-the-table food politico like me is that this issue could have come out this month and been completely relevant. In fact, Sierra did just publish its food issue, for November/December 2006, and it's got a lot of the same coverage and some of the same faces. But I'm saving that one for another time.

Silly, silly me. I thought Michael Pollan was the first to connect all these dots and make dinner in The Omnivore's Dilemma; turns out this system's been rotten for a long, long time. The more you want things to change, the more they seem to insist on staying the same.

(Note: Aunt Biddy gave me a hard copy of the magazine; unfortunately Sierra's online archives stop in 1995. If you have university-library access, like I do, you can get the entire issue through Proquest here. ALSO: Aunt B. says he has beaucoup copies of the issue; if you want one, e-mail me.)

Sierra's 1994 food issue came out the year before a major revision to the Farm Bill, just like we're facing now. The Farm Bill is supposed to be updated every five years, but Congress often lobbies to extend or delay the bill, which I guess is why the 1995 one the magazine talks about didn't end up getting passed until 1996, and then the next one in 2002. Already the groups are lined up who want to extend 2002's until 2009, instead of revising it next year.

In the lead front-of-the-book article, "Future Farming of America," staff writer Paul Rauber is transparently trying to persuade Sierra readers that changing the Farm Bill should matter to them in terms of the environment. After detailing the polluted runoff from fields saturated with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, he explains why commodity subsidies may seem like a boon to small farmers, but

The biggest winners are the biggest farmers: more than 80 percent of farm subsidies go to fewer than 3 percent of the farms. The programs virtually require farmers to grow the same amounts of the same crops year after year, thereby penalizing those who rotate their crops, encouraging the use of vast amounts of chemical fertilizer and pesticides, and creating the very problems that other government billions are spent to clean up.

Rauber also wrote the piece that I used for an epigraph to this one, "Down on the Farm Bureau," in which he argues that under the leadership of Dean Kleckner, the American Farm Bureau Federation has become the nation's most influential anti-environmental organization. Kleckner believes his job is to "defend farmers' property rights against assaults by 'envirocrats' who use environmental legislation to take control of land use out of the hands of private-property owners."

Huh. Sounds kind of familiar…California's Proposition 90, anyone?

An update: Unsurprisingly, Kleckner is still around. He's the chair of one of those "nonprofits" that suck hard on the Big Ag teat, called the Truth about Trade and Technology. According to its website, it's an "advocacy group led by American farmers — narrowly focused, issue specific — as we support free trade and agricultural biotechnology." He also owns a 350-acre family farm in Iowa, raising corn and soybeans, along with hogs to eat his presumably genetically engineered crops.

Some of the other articles in this time capsule that inspired a sense of "deja chew" for me:

The note from the editors that kicks off the special issue, titled "Setting the Table," argues that when it comes to food, the customer is king, and unlike in many industries, individual actions can result in meaningful change just as much as from public policies. In fact, this whole essay — which I'm pretty sure was written by Aunt Biddy himself, who now claims to be "over the food thing" — is so dead-on, and inspiring, that I'm going to download it from Proquest and post it as a PDF here.

Elsewhere, "Born to be Wild" looks at the damage done by overfishing, and the environmental problems caused by its supposedly sustainable solution, fish farming.

"Vintners Take the Pledge" discusses how many winemakers are eagerly embracing sustainable agriculture — but are "less eager to put the O-word on their labels." Then there's the tension between old-guard organic growers like Frey's and large-scale vintners like Gallo, who at the time was the world's largest organic grape grower, but didn't advertise it. (Who knew?)

I'm skipping the gardening features and trail-food taste tests — although that one is pretty funny, with lashings of Aunt Biddy's best scathing sarcasm — as they were clearly meant as sops to Sierra's readership.

The issue's lead article, "Conservation a la Carte" by Paul Rauber, is not only its most passionately written, but also its most timeless. In it, Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, looking even more youthful than she does now — she's a walking advertisement for the beauty benefits of an organic diet, IMHO — lays out the by-now-familiar arguments for buying and eating locally and seasonally. Poor Alice. She must be really tired of debunking the "stigma of elitism" attached to organic food.

"I'm not talking about food for gourmets," Waters insists heatedly. "I'm talking about a ripe tomato just sliced. You can make polenta for 100 people for $6. I'm talking about shell beans, 20 different varieties of shell beans that give you a great deal of pleasure all winter long, and cost next to nothing. Wholesome, honest food should be an entitlement of all Americans, not just the rich."

The best cure for this stigma, she argues, is the growing popularity of farmers markets, and for Americans to realize that their food is artificially cheap, made possible by large conventional growers' ability to "externalize" their costs by passing on things like sterile soils and polluted waterways to communities, not consumers.

"Conservation a la Carte" is not just a paean to Waters; it also focuses on chefs who have access to less-stellar year-round produce: Odessa Piper, who founded L'Etoile in Madison, WI, a few years after Waters did Chez Panisse, and continues to be hugely successful using local, seasonal produce from Madison's farmers markets; and Charlie Trotter and Rick Bayless in Chicago, both of whom have stood the test of time.

This article in particular, while it was clearly ahead of its time and is very well written, could easily have appeared, say, in Food and Wine this month — changing only a few figures. For example, instead of the 12% of the average U.S. income that consumers were spending on food in 1994, compared to 20-30% in most other countries, we're now down to 10%. And Chez Panisse's Saturday prix fixe menu is now $85, up from $65 twelve years ago.)

And because what Rauber closed that article with remains so insistently relevant still, I'm going to quote the whole damn chunk:

"It seems to me that there are two choices," writes novelist Jane Smiley in her essay, "A Wedge of Lettuce." "We can continue to process our food, as through a machine, from field to table, and continue to content ourselves with mechanically opening our jaws and processing it through our alimentary canals, or we can sow the seed, harvest the fruits, bring care and interest to the preparation of meals, and take our daily reward in the pleasure of aroma, flavor, and visceral satisfaction. We can decide that what doesn't taste good cannot be good for us."

This is, perhaps, a challenging message for many Americans, whose tastes tend toward the utilitarian, who view food as fuel, and who regard time spent procuring and preparing it as time wasted. Yet that attitude runs directly counter to our most deeply held beliefs about the land, our bodies, and how they should be treated. Luckily, we don't have to wait for change to come from Capitol Hill or the EPA to realize these aspirations; we can achieve them every time we sit down to dinner.

You can make your own decisions about food without needing anyone's permission and without anyone else's help," says Alice Waters. "If you choose to eat mass-produced fast food, you are supporting a network of supply and demand that is destroying local communities and traditional ways of life all over the world — a system that replaces self-sufficiency with dependence. And you are supporting a method of agriculture that is ecologically unsound — that depletes the soil and leaves harmful chemical residues in our food.

But if you decide to eat fresh food in season — and only in season — that is locally grown by farmers who take care of the earth, then you are contributing to the health and stability of local agriculture and local communities. Actions have consequences, and people acting responsibly can make a difference. I believe that how you eat, and how you choose your food, is an act that combines the political — your place in the world of other people — with the most intensely personal — the way you use your mind and your senses, together, for the gratification of your soul. It can change the way we treat each other, and it can change the world."

That was 1994, people. Depressing it may be, but we must pick up our forks and keep voting.

Comments