Food for Thought
In 1998, in the Central Campus library in Des Moines, Iowa, someone cracked the lid of a glass jar of brown liquid. Within moments, the audience of eighth grade students was gagging and whispering, no longer paying attention to the poor kid mid-argument at the podium. The debate was over. And that smell—a smell that gouged your nostrils and your eyeballs, a smell that made you wonder if the contents of your own intestines were now floating up your throat because you could taste it—that smell declared victory for the side “against.” Hog lot sewage was something, even in the hormone-charged, pubescent-angst of eighth grade, that none of us would wish on our worst enemy.
As an adult, I am less kind, especially as I learn that what was so obvious to us as kids was dismissed for the sake of dollar signs. I would love it if Iowa’s hog confinements opened up into the living rooms of the people making bank off their ethically-indefensible operations. Of course, that’s not who really deals with the consequences. From Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry by Austin Frerick: “In Iowa, confinements are often as close as a quarter mile from homes, schools, and businesses,” potentially leading to “air quality too poor for their kids to play outside,” among other terrible downsides. And, “because of H.F. 519, counties have virtually no policy avenue for blocking confinements as long as the facilities meet the state’s requirements. Meanwhile, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources rubber-stamps permits for medium and large animal warehouses and levies only paltry fines for manure spills.” Let’s not forget: “61 percent of Iowa’s rivers and streams and 67 percent of its lakes and reservoirs do not meet basic water quality standards, according to a 2020 assessment by the Iowa DNR.”
Did you have to do a double-take on those numbers? I sure did. And there’s more. Each chapter of Barons is dedicated to a different type of agricultural baron (à la the robber barons): hog, grain, coffee, dairy, berry, slaughter, and grocery. This book is direct, easy-to-read, and short with an outsized impact. With it in hand, it’s easier to understand what we’re up against and what we’re fighting for. Everyone who eats in the United States should read it. (Eating organic isn’t an exception here, sadly. Check out the Cornucopia Institute to see how your favorite organic groceries rate. My friend Dina let me know about it.)
What surprised you the most when reading Barons? Did it change any of your shopping habits?
My sister Emily kindly shared this animated reading of Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things” with me when I mentioned I was reading his book.
I paired Barons with Bringing it to the Table by Wendell Berry because I thought, “Why not? They’re both short.” And so I tortured myself with my most difficult to write newsletter yet because Frerick and Berry’s work is so intertwined with issues beyond agriculture. You might look at this and say, “Leigh, what a bunch of factory-farmed bologna. This newsletter’s not that complicated.” To which I say, “Because I spared you, dear reader, from two hundred tangents, so please indulge me with the one or two below.”
Wendell Berry has been giving us food for thought (sorry) for decades. Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, collects essays and selections of his novels from the 1970s to the early 2000s. I filled my notebook with favorite quotes, but I think this passage gets to the heart of our problem:
“We have animal factories, in other words, because of a governmental addiction to short-term economics. Short-term economics is the practice of making as much money as you can as fast as you can by any possible means while ignoring the long-term effects. Short-term economics is the economics of self-interest and greed. People who operate on the basis of short-term economics accumulate large ‘externalized’ costs, which they charge to the future—that is, to the world and to everybody’s grandchildren.”
—Wendell Berry, “Stupidity in Concentration” (2002)
Of course, animal factories aren’t the only consequence of short-term economics. We’ve seen this on steroids this year with the short-sighted dismantling of government funding for science research, environmental regulation, emergency services, international aid, and more. But let’s talk about AI. Because as much as agriculture and AI seem like opposite ends of the spectrum, I found myself thinking about it over and over again as I read Wendell Berry’s essays.
“The old sun-based agriculture was fundamentally alien to the industrial economy; industrial corporations could make relatively little profit from it. In order to make agriculture fully exploitable by industry it was necessary (in Barry Commoner’s terms) to weaken ‘the farm’s link to the sun’ and to make the farmland a ‘colony’ of the industrial corporation. The farmers had to be persuaded to give up the free energy of the sun in order to pay dearly for the machine-derived energy of fossil fuels.”
—Wendell Berry, “Energy in Agriculture” (1979)
We stand at a similar crossroads, only it’s machine-derived intelligence that we’re also paying dearly for, and we’re robbing ourselves to do it. What’s left of us after we’ve sacrificed our time and attention spans to social media algorithms and 24-hour “news,” and have handed generative AI our ability to reason, create, and build skills? (Because even though it doesn’t “think” we’re definitely trying to hand off work that requires us to do so.) Are we really people after that? Because I keep picturing Dax Shephard’s character Frito in Idiocracy and the passengers of the spaceship in WALL-E and thinking that seemed impossible in 2006 and 2008, but now it feels like the final stage of “the consumer.” Honestly, I thought Idiocracy one of the stupidest movies I’d ever seen when I first watched it. Now I watch it every few years for the “laugh so you don’t cry” vibes. AI companies are creating super PACs, by the way, to make sure politicians won’t try to regulate them the way they deserve to be regulated, so we’ve circled right back around to Barons. One more Berry quote, because he’s just that good:
“When workers’ minds are degraded by loss of responsibility for what is being made, they cannot use judgment; they have no use for their critical faculties; they have no occasions for the exercise of workmanship, of workmanly pride.”
—Wendell Berry, “A Defense of the Family Farm” (1986)
The writing platform I use, Dabble, recently reached out to its users to see what we thought of AI writing tools. I was quick to respond that I would drop Dabble in a heartbeat if they added AI to their platform, and I obviously wasn’t alone, because Dabble sent a follow-up email promising they wouldn’t. If there’s one thing I can say about writing, it’s that I experience every minute spent at the keyboard or with my notebook at hand. And because I am learning and thinking and feeling, my novel is richer, and so am I.
In short, read Barons, because it’s important to know who’s calling the shots for the contents of your plate and your kid’s school lunch. Read Bringing it to the Table to remember there are other ways of doing things, both for farming and for the rest of your life.
Do you have a favorite essay or fiction excerpt from Bringing it to the Table? What stuck with you?
Pretty Plates & Carrot Cake
Do you remember the scene in Simply Irresistible where she has mismatching plates in her restaurant (that subsequently get destroyed by a rampaging side character)? It was the first time I realized you could do that—coordinate them however the heck you wanted! (If you haven’t seen Simply Irresistible, it’s a lovely movie and currently streaming on Hulu.)
Our plates take many shapes. Beautiful ceramic plates that may have been handed down in a set, picked up piecemeal at a big box store, or unearthed at a garage sale. Black plastic microwaveable trays imprisoning each portion. Discs of plastic, paper, or bamboo in quantities 16 to 200. Maybe nothing more than a paper wrapper or to-go container.
There’s something to be said for pretty dishes, though, whether you’re enjoying the view at the dining table or feeling the weight of your plate as you sit in front of the TV. And I appreciate our attractive plates even more when I make carrot cake baked oatmeal, as the version I make is delicious but aesthetically challenged, especially left over. I slightly adapt the carrot cake baked oatmeal recipe from the wonderful Plant You, adding 1/2 cup of chopped golden raisins and skipping the icing. I’ve used fresh ginger or ground, both are good. When I didn’t have coconut yogurt on hand, I added 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to 1 cup of oat milk (for a total of 2.5 cups of oat milk). Makes a great breakfast when you want to garden in the early morning.
(My doodle above is based on our actual dining setup: plates handed down from my grandma to my mom to me, placemats from my mother-in-law, napkins picked up on an Iowa City trip with my mom and sisters last year, and pink water glasses just because.)
Carrot cake baked oatmeal—yay or nay? Raisins or no? Do you have any favorite new recipes?
September’s Book
“I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature,” Berry says in his 2004 essay, “Renewing Husbandry,” which, from what I’ve been able to gather, seems like the perfect tidbit to mull over with our September read. Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life by Ferris Jabr is described on the book jacket as “an awe-inspiring journey through the hidden workings of our planetary symphony—its players, its instruments, and the music of life that emerges—and an invitation to reexamine our place in it.”
See you next month!
Image Credits
Pig reference photo by Unknown
Chicken reference photo by Land Between the Lakes
Forest reference photo by Chris Clogg
All digital artwork and other photography by Leigh Anne Gray
