Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front
by Joel Salatin
Polyface, 338 pp., $23.95 (paper)

All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?
by Joel Berg
Seven Stories, 351 pp., $22.95 (paper)

Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Little, Brown, 341 pp., $25.99

Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities
by Carlo Petrini, with a foreword by Alice Waters
Chelsea Green, 155 pp., $20.00 (paper)

The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society
by Janet A. Flammang
University of Illinois Press, 325 pp., $70.00; $25.00 (paper)

1.

Food Made Visible

It might sound odd to say this about something people deal with at least three times a day, but food in America has been more or less invisible, politically speaking, until very recently. At least until the early 1970s, when a bout of food price inflation and the appearance of books critical of industrial agriculture (by Wendell Berry, Francis Moore Lappé, and Barry Commoner, among others) threatened to propel the subject to the top of the national agenda, Americans have not had to think very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society.

Most people count this a blessing. Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history—slightly less than 10 percent—and a smaller amount of their time preparing it: a mere thirty-one minutes a day on average, including clean-up. The supermarkets brim with produce summoned from every corner of the globe, a steady stream of novel food products (17,000 new ones each year) crowds the middle aisles, and in the freezer case you can find “home meal replacements” in every conceivable ethnic stripe, demanding nothing more of the eater than opening the package and waiting for the microwave to chirp. Considered in the long sweep of human history, in which getting food dominated not just daily life but economic and political life as well, having to worry about food as little as we do, or did, seems almost a kind of dream.

The dream that the age-old “food problem” had been largely solved for most Americans was sustained by the tremendous postwar increases in the productivity of American farmers, made possible by cheap fossil fuel (the key ingredient in both chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and changes in agricultural policies. Asked by President Nixon to try to drive down the cost of food after it had spiked in the early 1970s, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially) at any cost.

The administration’s cheap food policy worked almost too well: crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even. This led to a deep depression in the farm belt in the 1980s followed by a brutal wave of consolidation. Most importantly, the price of food came down, or at least the price of the kinds of foods that could be made from corn and soy: processed foods and sweetened beverages and feedlot meat. (Prices for fresh produce have increased since the 1980s.) Washington had succeeded in eliminating food as a political issue—an objective dear to most governments at least since the time of the French Revolution.

But although cheap food is good politics, it turns out there are significant costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture—and as these became impossible to ignore in recent years, food has come back into view. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of food safety scandals opened people’s eyes to the way their food was being produced, each one drawing the curtain back a little further on a food system that had changed beyond recognition. When BSE, or mad cow disease, surfaced in England in 1986, Americans learned that cattle, which are herbivores, were routinely being fed the flesh of other cattle; the practice helped keep meat cheap but at the risk of a hideous brain-wasting disease.

The 1993 deaths of four children in Washington State who had eaten hamburgers from Jack in the Box were traced to meat contaminated with E.coli 0157:H7, a mutant strain of the common intestinal bacteria first identified in feedlot cattle in 1982. Since then, repeated outbreaks of food-borne illness linked to new antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria (campylobacter, salmonella, MRSA) have turned a bright light on the shortsighted practice of routinely administering antibiotics to food animals, not to treat disease but simply to speed their growth and allow them to withstand the filthy and stressful conditions in which they live.

In the wake of these food safety scandals, the conversation about food politics that briefly flourished in the 1970s was picked up again in a series of books, articles, and movies about the consequences of industrial food production.Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.

Besides drawing women into the work force, falling wages made fast food both cheap to produce and a welcome, if not indispensible, option for pinched and harried families. The picture of the food economy Schlosser painted resembles an upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as “Fordism”: instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has, in effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in America.

2.

Food Politics

Cheap food has become an indispensable pillar of the modern economy. But it is no longer an invisible or uncontested one. One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years is the “food movement,” or perhaps I should say “movements,” since it is unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high.

As that list suggests, the critics are coming at the issue from a great many different directions. Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids.

It’s a big, lumpy tent, and sometimes the various factions beneath it work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen federal food safety regulations have recently run afoul of local food advocates, who fear that the burden of new regulation will cripple the current revival of small-farm agriculture. Joel Salatin, the Virginia meat producer and writer who has become a hero to the food movement, fulminates against food safety regulation on libertarian grounds in his Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front. Hunger activists like Joel Berg, in All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?, criticize supporters of “sustainable” agriculture—i.e., producing food in ways that do not harm the environment—for advocating reforms that threaten to raise the cost of food to the poor. Animal rights advocates occasionally pick fights with sustainable meat producers (such as Joel Salatin), as Jonathan Safran Foer does in his recent vegetarian polemic, Eating Animals.

But there are indications that these various voices may be coming together in something that looks more and more like a coherent movement. Many in the animal welfare movement, from PETA to Peter Singer, have come to see that a smaller-scale, more humane animal agriculture is a goal worth fighting for, and surely more attainable than the abolition of meat eating. Stung by charges of elitism, activists for sustainable farming are starting to take seriously the problem of hunger and poverty. They’re promoting schemes and policies to make fresh local food more accessible to the poor, through programs that give vouchers redeemable at farmers’ markets to participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and food stamp recipients. Yet a few underlying tensions remain: the “hunger lobby” has traditionally supported farm subsidies in exchange for the farm lobby’s support of nutrition programs, a marriage of convenience dating to the 1960s that vastly complicates reform of the farm bill—a top priority for the food movement.

The sociologist Troy Duster reminds us of an all-important axiom about social movements: “No movement is as coherent and integrated as it seems from afar,” he says, “and no movement is as incoherent and fractured as it seems from up close.” Viewed from a middle distance, then, the food movement coalesces around the recognition that today’s food and farming economy is “unsustainable”—that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind, whether environmental, economic, or both.

For some in the movement, the more urgent problem is environmental: the food system consumes more fossil fuel energy than we can count on in the future (about a fifth of the total American use of such energy) and emits more greenhouse gas than we can afford to emit, particularly since agriculture is the one human system that should be able to substantially rely on photosynthesis: solar energy. It will be difficult if not impossible to address the issue of climate change without reforming the food system. This is a conclusion that has only recently been embraced by the environmental movement, which historically has disdained all agriculture as a lapse from wilderness and a source of pollution.¹ But in the last few years, several of the major environmental groups have come to appreciate that a diversified, sustainable agriculture—which can sequester large amounts of carbon in the soil—holds the potential not just to mitigate but actually to help solve environmental problems, including climate change. Today, environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group are taking up the cause of food system reform, lending their expertise and clout to the movement.

But perhaps the food movement’s strongest claim on public attention today is the fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers. The health care crisis probably cannot be addressed without addressing the catastrophe of the American diet, and that diet is the direct (even if unintended) result of the way that our agriculture and food industries have been organized.

Michelle Obama’s recent foray into food politics, beginning with the organic garden she planted on the White House lawn last spring, suggests that the administration has made these connections. Her new “Let’s Move” campaign to combat childhood obesity might at first blush seem fairly anodyne, but in announcing the initiative in February, and in a surprisingly tough speech to the Grocery Manufacturers Association in March,² the First Lady has effectively shifted the conversation about diet from the industry’s preferred ground of “personal responsibility” and exercise to a frank discussion of the way food is produced and marketed. “We need you not just to tweak around the edges,” she told the assembled food makers, “but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children.”

Mrs. Obama explicitly rejected the conventional argument that the food industry is merely giving people the sugary, fatty, and salty foods they want, contending that the industry “doesn’t just respond to people’s natural inclinations—it also actually helps to shape them,” through the ways it creates products and markets them.

So far at least, Michelle Obama is the food movement’s most important ally in the administration, but there are signs of interest elsewhere. Under Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, the FDA has cracked down on deceptive food marketing and is said to be weighing a ban on the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in factory farming. Attorney General Eric Holder recently avowed the Justice Department’s intention to pursue antitrust enforcement in agribusiness, one of the most highly concentrated sectors in the economy.³ At his side was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, who has planted his own organic vegetable garden at the department and launched a new “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative aimed at promoting local food systems as a way to both rebuild rural economies and improve access to healthy food.

Though Vilsack has so far left mostly undisturbed his department’s traditional deference to industrial agriculture, the new tone in Washington and the appointment of a handful of respected reformers (such as Tufts professor Kathleen Merrigan as deputy secretary of agriculture) has elicited a somewhat defensive, if not panicky, reaction from agribusiness. The Farm Bureau recently urged its members to go on the offensive against “food activists,” and a trade association representing pesticide makers called CropLife America wrote to Michelle Obama suggesting that her organic garden had unfairly maligned chemical agriculture and encouraging her to use “crop protection technologies”—i.e., pesticides.

The First Lady’s response is not known; however, the President subsequently rewarded CropLife by appointing one of its executives to a high-level trade post. This and other industry-friendly appointments suggest that while the administration may be sympathetic to elements of the food movement’s agenda, it isn’t about to take on agribusiness, at least not directly, at least until it senses at its back a much larger constituency for reform.

One way to interpret Michelle Obama’s deepening involvement in food issues is as an effort to build such a constituency, and in this she may well succeed. It’s a mistake to underestimate what a determined First Lady can accomplish. Lady Bird Johnson’s “highway beautification” campaign also seemed benign, but in the end it helped raise public consciousness about “the environment” (as it would soon come to be known) and put an end to the public’s tolerance for littering. And while Michelle Obama has explicitly limited her efforts to exhortation (“we can’t solve this problem by passing a bunch of laws in Washington,” she told the Grocery Manufacturers, no doubt much to their relief), her work is already creating a climate in which just such a “bunch of laws” might flourish: a handful of state legislatures, including California’s, are seriously considering levying new taxes on sugar in soft drinks, proposals considered hopelessly extreme less than a year ago.

The political ground is shifting, and the passage of health care reform may accelerate that movement. The bill itself contains a few provisions long promoted by the food movement (like calorie labeling on fast food menus), but more important could be the new political tendencies it sets in motion. If health insurers can no longer keep people with chronic diseases out of their patient pools, it stands to reason that the companies will develop a keener interest in preventing those diseases. They will then discover that they have a large stake in things like soda taxes and in precisely which kinds of calories the farm bill is subsidizing. As the insurance industry and the government take on more responsibility for the cost of treating expensive and largely preventable problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes, pressure for reform of the food system, and the American diet, can be expected to increase.

3.

Beyond the Barcode

It would be a mistake to conclude that the food movement’s agenda can be reduced to a set of laws, policies, and regulations, important as these may be. What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself.

One can get a taste of this social space simply by hanging around a farmers’ market, an activity that a great many people enjoy today regardless of whether they’re in the market for a bunch of carrots or a head of lettuce. Farmers’ markets are thriving, more than five thousand strong, and there is a lot more going on in them than the exchange of money for food. Someone is collecting signatures on a petition. Someone else is playing music. Children are everywhere, sampling fresh produce, talking to farmers. Friends and acquaintances stop to chat. One sociologist calculated that people have ten times as many conversations at the farmers’ market than they do in the supermarket. Socially as well as sensually, the farmers’ market offers a remarkably rich and appealing environment. Someone buying food here may be acting not just as a consumer but also as a neighbor, a citizen, a parent, a cook. In many cities and towns, farmers’ markets have taken on (and not for the first time) the function of a lively new public square.

Though seldom articulated as such, the attempt to redefine, or escape, the traditional role of consumer has become an important aspiration of the food movement. In various ways it seeks to put the relationship between consumers and producers on a new, more neighborly footing, enriching the kinds of information exchanged in the transaction, and encouraging us to regard our food dollars as “votes” for a different kind of agriculture and, by implication, economy. The modern marketplace would have us decide what to buy strictly on the basis of price and self-interest; the food movement implicitly proposes that we enlarge our understanding of both those terms, suggesting that not just “good value” but ethical and political values should inform our buying decisions, and that we’ll get more satisfaction from our eating when they do.

That satisfaction helps to explain why many in the movement don’t greet the spectacle of large corporations adopting its goals, as some of them have begun to do, with unalloyed enthusiasm. Already Wal-Mart sells organic and local food, but this doesn’t greatly warm the hearts of food movement activists. One important impetus for the movement, or at least its locavore wing—those who are committed to eating as much locally produced food as possible—is the desire to get “beyond the barcode”—to create new economic and social structures outside of the mainstream consumer economy. Though not always articulated in these terms, the local food movement wants to decentralize the global economy, if not secede from it altogether, which is why in some communities, such as Great Barrington, Massachusetts, local currencies (the “BerkShare”) have popped up.

In fact it’s hard to say which comes first: the desire to promote local agriculture or the desire to promote local economies more generally by cutting ties, to whatever degree possible, to the national economic grid.⁴ This is at bottom a communitarian impulse, and it is one that is drawing support from the right as well as the left. Though the food movement has deep roots in the counterculture of the 1960s, its critique of corporate food and federal farm subsidies, as well as its emphasis on building community around food, has won it friends on the right. In his 2006 book Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher identifies a strain of libertarian conservatism, often evangelical, that regards fast food as anathema to family values, and has seized on local food as a kind of culinary counterpart to home schooling.

It makes sense that food and farming should become a locus of attention for Americans disenchanted with consumer capitalism. Food is the place in daily life where corporatization can be most vividly felt: think about the homogenization of taste and experience represented by fast food. By the same token, food offers us one of the shortest, most appealing paths out of the corporate labyrinth, and into the sheer diversity of local flavors, varieties, and characters on offer at the farmers’ market.

Put another way, the food movement has set out to foster new forms of civil society. But instead of proposing that space as a counterweight to an overbearing state, as is usually the case, the food movement poses it against the dominance of corporations and their tendency to insinuate themselves into any aspect of our lives from which they can profit. As Wendell Berry writes, the corporations

will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

The Italian-born organization Slow Food, founded in 1986 as a protest against the arrival of McDonald’s in Rome, represents perhaps the purest expression of these politics. The organization, which now has 100,000 members in 132 countries, began by dedicating itself to “a firm defense of quiet material pleasure” but has lately waded into deeper political and economic waters. Slow Food’s founder and president, Carlo Petrini, a former leftist journalist, has much to say about how people’s daily food choices can rehabilitate the act of consumption, making it something more creative and progressive. In his new book Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities, Petrini urges eaters and food producers to join together in “food communities” outside of the usual distribution channels, which typically communicate little information beyond price and often exploit food producers. A farmers’ market is one manifestation of such a community, but Petrini is no mere locavore. Rather, he would have us practice on a global scale something like “local” economics, with its stress on neighborliness, as when, to cite one of his examples, eaters in the affluent West support nomad fisher folk in Mauritania by creating a market for their bottarga, or dried mullet roe. In helping to keep alive such a food tradition and way of life, the eater becomes something more than a consumer; she becomes what Petrini likes to call a “coproducer.”

Ever the Italian, Petrini puts pleasure at the center of his politics, which might explain why Slow Food is not always taken as seriously as it deserves to be. For why shouldn’t pleasure figure in the politics of the food movement? Good food is potentially one of the most democratic pleasures a society can offer, and is one of those subjects, like sports, that people can talk about across lines of class, ethnicity, and race.

The fact that the most humane and most environmentally sustainable choices frequently turn out to be the most delicious choices (as chefs such as Alice Waters and Dan Barber have pointed out) is fortuitous to say the least; it is also a welcome challenge to the more dismal choices typically posed by environmentalism, which most of the time is asking us to give up things we like. As Alice Waters has often said, it was not politics or ecology that brought her to organic agriculture, but rather the desire to recover a certain taste—one she had experienced as an exchange student in France. Of course democratizing such tastes, which under current policies tend to be more expensive, is the hard part, and must eventually lead the movement back to more conventional politics lest it be tagged as elitist.

But the movement’s interest in such seemingly mundane matters as taste and the other textures of everyday life is also one of its great strengths. Part of the movement’s critique of industrial food is that, with the rise of fast food and the collapse of everyday cooking, it has damaged family life and community by undermining the institution of the shared meal. Sad as it may be to bowl alone, eating alone can be sadder still, not least because it is eroding the civility on which our political culture depends.

That is the argument made by Janet Flammang, a political scientist, in a provocative new book called The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society. “Significant social and political costs have resulted from fast food and convenience foods,” she writes, “grazing and snacking instead of sitting down for leisurely meals, watching television during mealtimes instead of conversing”—40 percent of Americans watch television during meals—”viewing food as fuel rather than sustenance, discarding family recipes and foodways, and denying that eating has social and political dimensions.” The cultural contradictions of capitalism—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display at the modern American dinner table.

In a challenge to second-wave feminists who urged women to get out of the kitchen, Flammang suggests that by denigrating “foodwork”—everything involved in putting meals on the family table—we have unthinkingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal. It is at “the temporary democracy of the table” that children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civility—sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending—and it is these habits that are lost when we eat alone and on the run. “Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.”⁵

These arguments resonated during the Senate debate over health care reform, when The New York Times reported that the private Senate dining room, where senators of both parties used to break bread together, stood empty. Flammang attributes some of the loss of civility in Washington to the aftermatch of the 1994 Republican Revolution, when Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, urged his freshman legislators not to move their families to Washington. Members now returned to their districts every weekend, sacrificing opportunities for socializing across party lines and, in the process, the “reservoirs of good will replenished at dinner parties.” It is much harder to vilify someone with whom you have shared a meal.

Flammang makes a convincing case for the centrality of food work and shared meals, much along the lines laid down by Carlo Petrini and Alice Waters, but with more historical perspective and theoretical rigor. A scholar of the women’s movement, she suggests that “American women are having second thoughts” about having left the kitchen.⁶ However, the answer is not for them simply to return to it, at least not alone, but rather “for everyone—men, women, and children—to go back to the kitchen, as in preindustrial days, and for the workplace to lessen its time demands on people.” Flammang points out that the historical priority of the American labor movement has been to fight for money, while the European labor movement has fought for time, which she suggests may have been the wiser choice.

At the very least this is a debate worth having, and it begins by taking food issues much more seriously than we have taken them. Flammang suggests that the invisibility of these issues until recently owes to the identification of food work with women and the (related) fact that eating, by its very nature, falls on the wrong side of the mind–body dualism. “Food is apprehended through the senses of touch, smell and taste,” she points out,

which rank lower on the hierarchy of senses than sight and hearing, which are typically thought to give rise to knowledge. In most of philosophy, religion, and literature, food is associated with body, animal, female, and appetite—things civilized men have sought to overcome with reason and knowledge.

Much to our loss. But food is invisible no longer and, in light of the mounting costs we’ve incurred by ignoring it, it is likely to demand much more of our attention in the future, as eaters, parents, and citizens. It is only a matter of time before politicians seize on the power of the food issue, which besides being increasingly urgent is also almost primal, indeed is in some deep sense proto- political. For where do all politics begin if not in the high chair?—at that fateful moment when mother, or father, raises a spoonful of food to the lips of the baby who clamps shut her mouth, shakes her head no, and for the very first time in life awakens to and asserts her sovereign power.

In our town my favorite store after the Smile a While Bookshop was Morosini’s market with its pyramids of navel oranges from California which seemed to glow within their pink tissue wrappers. Apples, pears, even potatoes wrapped in tissue imprinted with the word “Idaho” were stacked in woven baskets beneath a frieze of pineapple soldiers with crossed swords. I remember the wooden crates of Bibb lettuce under crushed ice, the cloying sweetness of ripe honeydew in August, the yeasty smell of fresh bread, and the sweet, sharp smell of Parmigiano. Beside the cash register were faded sepia prints of Mr. Morosini’s native village, old men in black hats wearing white shirts under tight black suit coats. It was in Morosini’s that I saw my first Red Delicious apple, a new hybrid that lived up to its name until it was manipulated into inanity for the sake of shelf life.

I remember too my dismay edged with fear and anger when the first supermarket opened across the street from Morosini’s. This must have happened in August of 1939 because I conflate this memory with the day my father told me that war was certain if Hitler attacked Poland. He hoped the war would not begin on the 25th, my birthday. But it was not war that worried me. It was the fate of Morosini’s California navels. I was an eleven-year-old isolationist and an elitist. The new supermarket was selling Florida oranges for ten cents a dozen. Mr. Morosini’s navels were ten cents each. I consoled myself that the supermarket would fail, that no one would buy its pallid Florida oranges. But a shadow had fallen across my tissue-wrapped world for I knew even then that Mr. Morosini didn’t stand a chance.

The subject of Michael Pollan’s fine new book, In Defense of Food, is the technological abyss toward which humankind with its tacit consent is being driven by the industrialized American diet. Pollan’s critique of the American food industry and the plague of obesity, diabetes, coronary disease, cancer, and untimely death for which it is largely responsible is comparable to the work of Rachel Carson as a contribution to the history of human self-destruction, for the food fabricators could not have done their work without our complicity any more than the environmental polluters could have done theirs. One might go so far as to say that these calamities are themselves the outcome of a species failure, an evolutionary maladjustment of the human brain implicit in the triumph of ingenuity over wisdom.

What Pollan calls the American diet of refined white flour, polished rice, soy and corn oil, corn sweeteners, and corn-fed animal fats has now rampaged across world markets, upending traditional diets wherever it erects its golden arches. It has done so by extrapolating from their natural settings the essential fats and sugars to which animal appetites instinctively respond and on which human life has always depended, stripping away their inherent complexity and turning processed corn, wheat, and soy into such marketable forms as Wonder Bread, Twinkies, Whoppers, and Chicken McNuggets.

“Per capita fructose consumption has increased 25 percent in the past thirty years,” Pollan writes. The mass production of food for a mass society was of course inevitable, but was it also inevitable, as one nutrition expert put it, that “we’re in the middle of a national experiment in the mainlining of glucose,” the form in which fructose is metabolized in the liver and transmitted by insulin to the cells to be used as energy? We assimilate the complex nutrients of traditional foods slowly, but the rush of refined sugars supplied by our industrialized diet overwhelms the ability of the protein hormone insulin to process it. The result is a sudden jolt of energy and soon a craving for more, as the unused glucose is stored as triglycerides, i.e., fat. “An American born in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes in his lifetime,” Pollan writes. “80 percent of diabetics will suffer from heart disease.” This “global pandemic in the making…is well on its way to becoming normalized in the West”"recognized as a whole new demographic and so a major marketing opportunity” for “the various drugs and gadgets for diabetics…dialysis and kidney transplantation.”

The symbiosis of the American food and pharmaceutical industries, to which Pollan refers, is the grotesque avatar of the primitive supermarket that I dreaded on the eve of the Second World War. “Is it just a coincidence,” Pollan asks,

that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent…on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income.

Pollan describes a telling experiment:

In the summer of 1982, a group of ten middle-aged, overweight, and diabetic Aborigines living… near the town of Derby, Western Australia, agreed to participate in an experiment to see if temporarily reversing the process of westernization they had undergone might also reverse their health problems. Since leaving the bush some ten years before, all ten had developed type 2 diabetes; they also showed signs of insulin resistance …and elevated levels of triglycerides in the blood”"a risk factor for heart disease.

“Metabolic syndrome,” or “syndrome X,” is the medical term for the complex of health problems these Aborigines had developed: Large amounts of refined carbohydrates in the diet combined with a sedentary lifestyle had disordered the intricate (and still imperfectly understood) system by which the insulin hormone regulates the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats in the body.

Metabolic syndrome has been implicated not only in the development of type 2 diabetes, but also in obesity, hypertension, heart disease, and possibly certain cancers. Some researchers believe that metabolic syndrome may be at the root of many of the “diseases of civilization” that typically follow a native population’s adoption of a Western lifestyle and the nutrition transition that typically entails.

The ten Aborigines agreed to return to their traditional homeland, “more than a day’s drive by off-road vehicle from the nearest town,” where they had “no access to store food or beverages.” Accompanied by the nutrition researcher who designed the experiment, the Aborigines during their seven-week stay relied “exclusively on foods they hunted and gathered themselves…seafood, supplemented by birds, kangaroo, and…the fatty larvae of a local insect.” Moving inland to a riverbank the Aborigines expanded their diets “to include turtle, crocodile,…yams, figs, and bush honey.”

Their civilized diet had consisted mainly of “‘flour, sugar, rice, carbonated drinks, alcoholic beverages (beer and port), powdered milk, cheap fatty meat, potatoes, onions, and [some] fruits and vegetables’”"the local version of the Western diet.” After seven weeks the Aborigines had lost on average 17.9 pounds and their blood pressure had dropped. Their triglycerides had fallen to within normal range and “all of the metabolic abnormalities of type II diabetes were either greatly improved…or completely normalized…by [their] relatively short… reversion to traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle.”

“The human animal,” Pollan writes, “is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.” But few of us can retreat to pre-industrial habitats and only the rich can afford spas and fat farms. For the poor even the Whole Foods Market and the seasonal farmers’ markets are beyond their reach. Yet we are not helpless against what Pollan calls the endemic “diseases of civilization.” These arise directly from “highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of…biological diversity…to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy” that supply our diet. But the Aboriginal experiment shows that the damage to individuals and even to the habitat itself is reversible.

Though Pollan has not written a diet book in the usual sense, his aim is to show how this reversal can be accomplished. His advice is deceptively simple: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This is not as easy as it sounds, especially for those too poor, too busy, or otherwise distracted to follow Pollan’s advice or even to admit that their lives depend upon it. But one piece of advice is available to everyone: avoid all foods packaged with long lists of ingredients, especially those whose names cannot be pronounced. For example, the list of ingredients in Sara Lee’s Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White [sic] Bread occupies half a page of Pollan’s book and includes beside the omnipresent high-fructose corn syrup such wonders as ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, azodicarbonamide, and guar gum. By contrast, a ciabatta loaf from my local bakery lists only unbleached wheat flour, durum flour, water, starter, salt, diastatic barley malt, and yeast, all of which, except the malt and starter, can be found in my own pantry.

First, however, it is important to know how this great dietary transformation took place. In his previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma,[*] Pollan visits a sustainable farm near Charlottesville, Virginia, a remarkable experiment in self-regulating, small-scale agriculture in which the farm family and its cattle, hogs, poultry, and grass flourish in symbiotic harmony without agricultural chemicals or antibiotics and only minimal amounts of processed feed. But sustainable farming is not sustainable on a national scale any more than Alice Waters can cook for the entire United States or an Aboriginal diet of insect larvae and crocodile can feed Australia. A vast industrial organism extends from the United States Department of Agriculture to nutritionist laboratories to cornfields to feed lots to test kitchens to Super Bowl commercials to supermarkets to obesity and untimely death. This entire process has become our second nature.

Pollan is not a Luddite. The problem is not the existence of a mass feeding industry but its ethics, for the purveyors of our high-fructose and glucose diet must know by now that Americans are sickened by their products just as surely as the tobacco promoters know the terrible risk they are urging smokers to take. The organic movement now largely co-opted by the food industry offers a partial solution at somewhat higher cost but, as Pollan writes, though “the superiority of real food grown in healthy soils seems clear…it makes no difference to your metabolism if the high-fructose corn syrup in your soda is organic.” The burden, in other words, is on the consumer but the structure of American agro-industry makes self-preservation difficult.

The industrialization of the food supply is, of course, inseparable from industrialization itself, but it assumed its present dangerous character in the mid-1970s when in response to a “spike in food prices [which] brought protesting housewives into the street… the Nixon administration…adopt[ed] an ambitious cheap food policy” to produce and sell “large quantities of calories as cheaply as possible.” Since the 1930s federal subsidies had encouraged farmers to limit production in order to maintain stable prices: what its New Deal sponsors called the Ever-Normal Granary. But now “agricultural policies [have been] rewritten to encourage farmers to plant crops like corn, soy, and wheat fencerow to fencerow,” driving production up and prices down:

Since 1980, American farmers have produced an average of 600 more calories per person per day, the price of food has fallen, portion sizes have ballooned, and… we’re eating…at least 300 more calories a day than we consumed in 1985…. Nearly a quarter of these additional calories come from added sugars (and most of that in the form of high-fructose corn syrup); roughly another quarter from added fat (most of it in the form of soybean oil); 46 percent from grains (mostly refined)…. The overwhelming majority of [these added calories] supply lots of energy but very little of anything else.

As a result Americans are “both overfed and undernourished.”

This radical change resulted in large part from a decision by Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture and a champion of large-scale “fencerow to fencerow” farming, to dismantle New Deal farm policy and its subsidized crop limits and install a new system to encourage farmers to maximize production while the government made up the shortfall between its “target price” and the much-reduced market price by direct payments to farmers per bushel. The more a farmer produced, the more he would be paid.

By depressing farm prices through overproduction Butz was subsidizing not only the growers but agribusiness and the food manufacturers so that now all parties were growing fat on Butz’s cheap grains”"Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, General Foods, beef cattle in their feed lots, and the American consumer. The exceptions were marginal farmers in poor countries who were devastated by cheap American exports.

But this was not the only sin perpetrated in the 1970s. Another was the result of a controversy aroused in 1977 by the Select Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs chaired by George McGovern that advised Americans for the sake of their health to eat less meat and fewer dairy products. When cattle ranchers, including Senator McGovern’s own South Dakota constituents, objected angrily, the unnerved committee responded by a subtle change in language from “reduce consumption of meat” to “choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake.”

Hereafter government warnings would be addressed not to foods themselves but to ingredients. The result, according to Pollan, was the deluge of ingredients that were added by food marketers to promote their denatured product. The problem, Pollan points out, is not that these additives are worthless but that they are extracted from their natural origins and may not have the intended effect. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” according to Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.” The nutritionists hired by food manufacturers to enhance and promote their refined grains face a problem familiar to economists: an abundance of complex variables, including the vagaries of human nature, that make forecasting highly problematic. Pollan goes further:

The uncomfortable fact is that the entire field of nutritional science rests on a foundation of ignorance and lies about the most basic question of nutrition: What are people eating?

Pollan tested this claim over lunch with Dr. Nestle, asking if he was “perhaps being too harsh.” She smiled and replied,

To really know what a person is eating you’d have to have a second invisible person following [him] around, taking photographs, looking at ingredients, and consulting accurate food composition tables, which we don’t have….

It’s impossible. Are people unconsciously underestimating consumption of things they think the researcher thinks are bad or overestimating consumption of things the researcher thinks are good? We don’t know. Probably both. The issue of reporting is extraordinarily serious. We have to ask, How accurate are the data?

Another leading nutritionist, Professor Gladys Block, nearing retirement at Berkeley and the designer of the Food Frequency Questionnaires on which the Womens’ Health Initiative based its survey, goes further: “It’s a mess…. I don’t believe anything I read in nutritional epidemiology anymore. I’m so skeptical at this point.” Pollan concludes that

thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating.

The best way to learn this new way is to read Pollan’s new book and then its predecessor, his wonderful Omnivore’s Dilemma. I have done that and in two weeks have lost eight pounds and feel fine. You will too.

by Michael Pollan

Penguin, 450 pp., $26.95

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

by Bill McKibben

Times Books, 261 pp., $25.00

Michael Pollan believes that America has a national eating disorder, and in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, he shows that it goes back a long way–at least to the early 1900s, when Dr. John Harvey Kellogg attracted crowds to his sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan. There the inmates endured all-grape diets and almost hourly enemas, yet despite the discomfort (or perhaps because of it) his quackery flourished and Kellogg soon found himself with competitors. Among them was Horace Fletcher, otherwise known as “the Great Masticator.” Fletcher recommended chewing each mouthful of food one hundred times. I still remember my mother instructing me in 1950s Australia to chew my food one hundred times on each side. Just how this doubling of the great masticator’s dictum occurred is unclear to me, but I can tell you that after the twentieth chew or thereabouts, most kinds of food were reduced to a bilious sludge.

Down the decades the food faddists have just kept coming, and today we seem to have more of them (even if they are less flamboyant) than ever before. Among the better known are the late Dr. Atkins with his low-carbohydrate diet and Dr. Sears with his Zone plan. Then there are the more obscure Dr. Brownell with the LEARN scheme and Dr. Ornish with a regime named after himself. Pollan argues that Americans are more susceptible to such fads because they lack a food tradition that embodies the wisdom of earlier generations. Maybe so, but faddish diets seem to be prospering everywhere, and the public has never been more confused, or more misled, about the simple matter of eating. Many of us, it seems, have more or less given up. A recent study found that one out of every five Canadians eats by selecting from a group of ten or fewer food types.

As intriguing as they are, Pollan does not overly concern himself with diet fads, for he has an altogether more weighty matter in his sights: the dysfunction of the entire American industrial food complex. The situation is a lot worse than most of us dare imagine, for Americans are some of the most specialized eaters on earth. At the base of the national food chain is a single species of grass–corn–and its growth, processing, and sale constitute a titanic industry which is focused on increasing profits rather than health and well-being.

In America, foods as diverse as Gatorade, Ring Dings, and hamburgers have their beginning with corn. Indeed, huge factories transform its kernels into an almost unimaginable array of compounds. To illustrate how pervasive corn’s influence is, Pollan gives us the example of the chicken nugget, which he says “piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn” (because the chickens are corn-fed), as does “the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget ‘fresh’ can all be derived from corn.”

So dominant has this giant grass become that of the 45,000-odd items in American supermarkets, more than one quarter contain corn. Disposable diapers, trash bags, toothpaste, charcoal briquettes, matches, batteries, and even the shine on the covers of magazines all contain corn. In America, all meat is also ultimately corn: chickens, turkeys, pigs, and even cows (which would be far healthier and happier eating grass) are forced into eating corn, as are, increasingly, carnivores such as salmon.

If you doubt the ubiquity of corn you can take a chemical test. It turns out that corn has a peculiar carbon structure which can be traced in everything that consumes it. Compare a hair sample from an American and a tortilla-eating Mexican and you’ll discover that the American contains a far larger proportion of corn-type carbon. “We North Americans look like corn chips with legs,” says one of the researchers who conducts such tests.

You might argue that there’s nothing wrong with eating such a corn-rich diet. But you are what you eat, and Pollan provides much graphic evidence that the American way of eating spreads illness, waste, and ecological devastation across the globe. As its title suggests, his book follows the makings–from farm to plate–of four very different meals. The first is a pure product of the industrial complex that feeds most of us–a McDonald’s meal eaten in a car. Next he examines an organic meal, then a meal prepared from ingredients grown on an ingenious farm called Polyface in the Shenandoah Valley. Finally Pollan relates the making of a meal made almost entirely of ingredients he himself harvests from the suburbs and hills of northern California, where he lives.

Pollan’s research into the origins of the McDonald’s meal takes him to the farm of George Naylor in Greene County, Iowa. Like his neighbors, George is slowly going broke growing corn for what he calls the “military-industrial complex,” and he is only able to stay on the land because of a salary earned away from the farm by his wife. You don’t have to look far to find the cause of this, for the more corn George grows, the faster he goes broke. That’s because in order to grow more corn you need more expensive fertilizer, special seed stock, and machinery, which farmers can ill afford. Yet because they often need the big paycheck, and because they are urged to do so by industry reps and government agencies, corn farmers continue to grow larger and larger crops. They all hope for a good price for corn, but because so much is being produced, improvements in the price never seem to arrive. Iowa State University estimates that it costs $2.50 to grow a bushel of Iowa corn, but when Pollan visited in October 2005 the grain elevators were paying farmers $1.45. The only reason the system survives is that the federal government gives farmers substantial subsidies. Federal payments “account for nearly half the income of the average Iowa corn farmer, and represent roughly a quarter of the $19 billion US taxpayers spend each year on payments to farmers.”

Not only is the industrial corn production system destroying farm families, it is destroying the farms themselves. The soil on Naylor’s farm is beautifully rich and two feet thick. What you can’t see, Pollan tells us, is the soil that’s no longer there. Originally there was four feet of soil, but intensive crop growing has destroyed half of that natural bounty. Only corn diseases, debt, and the wind (which has increased markedly since fences and trees were torn down to make way for more corn) seem to be prospering in the bleak Iowa landscape described by Pollan.

In order to follow the food chain, Pollan buys a steer–a nameless creature bearing only the number 534–and follows it from the Blair Ranch in South Dakota, where it was born, to the feedlot where it is fattened for slaughter. Despite its having been branded and castrated at the Blair Ranch, Pollan thinks that No. 534 might look back at its time there as the “good old days,” for its life on the feedlot is grim indeed.

Cows have not evolved to feed on corn. Nor are they suited to living in crowded conditions while standing up to their ankles in feces. In the feedlot, however, they have little choice. The corn diet induces indigestion, which must be treated with repeated courses of antibiotics, and the cows seem to be miserable or vacant a lot of the time. They are subjected to this regime because it makes them grow fast, and in times past they were even fed the offal from other slaughtered cows, which is how mad cow disease came into the food supply.

Pollan describes a Karmic cycle in which the poor health of the feedlotted cows is visited on their consumers. Because they are not allowed to eat grass, their meat is higher in dangerous fats and lower in good ones than that of cows leading a more natural life. And the abattoirs where they are slaughtered need to be absolutely fastidious about hygiene, because bacteria on their skins thrive in the crowded, fecal conditions, and could easily contaminate their meat. Despite all of this, grain-fed beef has a cachet in America, where it is preferred by many for its alleged tenderness. I’m often offered it with pride, even by up-market restaurants that don’t seem interested in serving meat from cows that have lived their life on the range. Having read Pollan’s book, I’m now ordering buffalo.

Corn of course is used for many purposes apart from feeding factory-farmed chickens, cattle, and pigs. High-fructose corn syrup, for example, has replaced sugar in many processed food and beverages, and is now, according to Pollan, “the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year.” But in trying to track down how such products are made, Pollan hits a dead end. The big corn millers–Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland–won’t let him into their factories, so he wasn’t allowed to see how the corn products Americans consume are the result of complicated chemical processing.

Reading Pollan’s book, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the food industry has confined many Americans to their own urban feedlots, in which they have grown obese, ill, and uncurious about the source or nutritional quality of their food. In this system, human appetites are simply another bottleneck to be overcome in the search for greater sales. Hence the “supersizing” now so prevalent at fast-food outlets. A segment of the American population, however, is making a break for food freedom. They can often be found haunting the organic section of the supermarket, and in his quest to understand how their food is produced, Pollan travels to the great California farms where most organic produce is grown.

In the 1970s the organic food movement was a local, small-scale affair which was established as an open act of rebellion, but those days are long gone. Today, organic farms are hard to distinguish at a glance from their nonorganic neighbors, and indeed they are often worked by the same crews of migrant laborers. It’s not all bad news, however, for organic methods are kinder to the soil, and they do not permit use of synthetic hormones and antibiotics. But still, organic food is subject to industrialization in ways that damage the environment. For example, it is often transported over vast distances, thereby burning much fossil fuel.

It’s only when Pollan arrives at Polyface Farm, in pursuit of his third meal, that we see a vision of production that seems miraculous in its capacity to nurture both us and the environment. The farm is owned by Joel Salatin, whose father purchased it in the 1960s when it was a run-down dairy farm full of erosion gullies. As a result of careful ecological sculpting, that land now produces 35,000 dozen eggs, 10,000 broiler hens, 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of hogs, 1,200 turkeys, and 1,000 rabbits every year. All this is achieved without artificial fertilizer, hormones, or antibiotics and, even more remarkably, Salatin has converted 450 of his 550 acres to forest! The birds and other creatures it harbors, and the woodchips it yields, all play vital parts in maintaining the productivity of the 100 acres of worked land.

The secret of Salatin’s astounding success is a deep understanding of ecology. Everything on the farm works with everything else to promote fertility, and the creatures all seem to lead fulfilling lives. The laying hens, for example, roost in “eggmobiles” that are moved around the farm, allowing them to feed on the maggots in cow pats and spread about their own nitrogen-rich fertilizer. The cows graze grass in a rotational pattern, sweetening the pasture, while the pigs root in the compost, helping to turn it over, aiding the compost’s fertility.

While at Polyface, Pollan slaughters chickens, an experience that causes him to investigate animal rights. He deplores the practices to which animals are subjected on factory farms, and condemns them on grounds of cruelty. Yet after seeing how the animals live at Polyface, and understanding how integral they are to the fertility of this marvelous farm, he decides that it would be better for the ecology, our human health, and for animals as a whole if most of us became eaters of sustainably produced meat. Many readers will doubtless ask whether vegetarianism is better still. Pollan tells us that even vegan lifestyles result in animal cruelty. Just think of the thousands of field mice shredded by harvesters, the woodchucks crushed in their burrows by tractors, and the songbirds poisoned by pesticides when farmers grow the wheat for our bread. Pollan’s message seems to be that to live we must kill, and the best we can do is both treat animals decently while they live and kill them humanely.

An important aspect of the success of Polyface Farm is that Joel Salatin believes that everything has its own scale. He doesn’t want a bigger farm or to grow more eggs (despite the fact that demand is high), because to do that would knock the entire enterprise out of balance. You need just so many chickens per cow on such a farm, and if the whole thing becomes too big, the farmer himself can’t give the attention that the entire complex system requires.

One of the most heartening things about the Salatin farm is that all of the produce is eaten locally, thus minimizing the impact on climate through reducing the burning of fossil fuels to transport it. And the produce is good. A chef who uses the farm’s produce told Pollan: “Oh, those beautiful eggs! The difference is night and day–the color and richness and fat content. There’s just no comparison. I always have to adjust my recipes for these eggs–you never need as many as they call for.”

Pollan is entirely converted by Salatin’s approach to food production, but he worries about how applicable it is to the big cities, so he decides to ask the farmer how he thinks New York might fit into the local food economy. Salatin’s answer is not much help: “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?” he replies.

Pollan’s final meal is both wonderfully comical and deeply revealing of human nature. He decides that it will be based on wild boar and mushrooms, despite the fact that he’s never hunted and his mother has imbued him with a deep dread of poisonous toadstools. Pollan’s description of hunting–the singleness of purpose, the drama, the “fog of war” that descends following the shot, and the stomach-churning task of “dressing” the carcass–is completely absorbing. In trying to sum up the kaleidoscope of emotion it released in him, he paraphrases Ortega y Gasset,[3] saying that “hunting offers us our last best chance to escape history and return to the state of nature.” He adds: “It’s even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked at myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that’s the word) to eating that pig, I have to say that there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu-eater. Yet part of me pities him, too.” Although the hunted boar, “a very large grayish sow”–part of “a large group of pigs, big ones and babies together”–supplies the most deeply satisfying meal of all, Pollan acknowledges it is a satisfaction that most people will not be able to have.

The question left hanging by Pollan–can we create a new and better food production system for Americans?–is explored in a very practical manner at the beginning of Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. McKibben, who lives in Vermont near Lake Champlain, conducts an experiment which he calls “the year of eating locally.” During the warmer months, McKibben explains, if you live in his area you’d be crazy to do anything but eat locally. The challenge comes, however, with the short, cold days of winter. As he tries to locate the resources he will need to survive, McKibben discovers wonderful people in his neighborhood, including a farmer who grows fifty varieties of potatoes on three acres, a bison wrangler, and even an emu farmer, who can supply part of his requirements.

Some essentials are missing. Oats once grew everywhere in the valley, but the industrialization of farming means that today none can be had in the region. By February, McKibben’s eleven-year-old daughter (a remarkably tolerant and even-tempered child, one suspects) was “using the words ‘icky’ and ‘disgusting’ fairly regularly, always in connection with root vegetables…. It is a little hard to imagine how people got through winter on the contents of their root cellars alone,” McKibben admits.

Can eating locally be done in the larger cities? McKibben finds lots of evidence that this is possible. A few hundred acres of wasteland known as the Intervale near the center of Burlington, Vermont, provides one example. When Will Rapp, who runs a catalog company, arrived in Burlington in 1980 the floodplain soil of the Intervale was buried under four or five feet of garbage. He formed a nonprofit foundation and leased two hundred acres of it, which he rented in smaller lots to people who wanted to start gardening. Today, those two hundred acres yield over half a million pounds of produce annually, and supply 7 or 8 percent of all the fresh food consumed in Burlington. The productivity of this plot, which is farmed sustainably, is truly astonishing. But could you feed Manhattan in this manner? “You could not; every place is different,” says McKibben. Knowing a few New Yorkers, however, I suspect that these words will be seen as more of a challenge than a verdict.

Deep Economy is about far more than food. At its heart is a marvelous exposition of Joel Salatin’s belief that everything has an appropriate scale. For McKibben, the appropriate scale for a sustainable and fulfilling life is the community. The dysfunction that comes with increasing scale is revealed adroitly when he investigates the impact of Wal-Mart upon the economic health of communities:

By now the sequence of events is depressingly clear: the big box store out by the interstate drains the life out of downtown, shuttering businesses left and right. In the few years when Wal-Mart was expanding fastest in Iowa, the state lost 555 grocery stores, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 161 variety shops, 158 women’s clothing stores and 116 pharmacies.

Summarizing the impact, McKibben says that while individuals may benefit from lower prices, their communities inevitably suffer, which eventually leads to a worse deal for all. This is seen clearly when we take account of the money the megastores suck out of the regions they operate in. A dollar spent in a local store stays in the town, while the same amount spent in Wal-Mart exits quickly. Studies from Great Britain show that £10 spent on a local food business is worth £25 to the local economy, but only £14 if spent at a supermarket. According to the study:

The farmer buys a drink at the local pub; the pub owner gets a car tune-up at the local mechanic; the mechanic brings a shirt to the local tailor; the tailor buys some bread at the local bakery; the baker buys wheat for bread and fruit for muffins from the local farmer. When these businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction.

It is not only the food business that prospers if our lives are lived at the right scale. McKibben provides a wonderful example of how the expansion of radio networks in America–at the expense of truly local radio stations–has cost communities dear. In the 1920s people perceived that radio had an important social function, and the rules reflected that. In 1928 the FCC ruled that “the commission is convinced that the interest of the broadcast listener is of superior importance to that of the broadcaster…. Such benefit as is derived by advertisers must be incidental and entirely secondary to the interests of the public.” Remarkably, there are still a few local radio stations–such as Vermont’s WDEV–that continue to reflect this. But for every such survivor there are a thousand that have been slain by the Rush Limbaughs of the world.

The offerings of local radio stations, in McKibben’s account, tend to reflect the interests of the community. They are characterized by a mix of music, both left- and right-leaning commentary, and items of local interest and importance. When a big flood hit Montpelier, Vermont, the owner of WDEV says, “we took all our sales staff and turned them into reporters.” As radio stations grow in size they lose both their diversity of offerings and this sense of service to the community, and instead many of them begin spouting a steady diet of right-wing rubbish. One suspects that were they confined to truly local radio, the likes of Rush Limbaugh would be more clearly seen as nothing but the offensive, bigoted buffoons that they are. If, that is, they could get anywhere near a microphone in the first place.

In one aspect of life after another McKibben shows us how globalization has destroyed communities and detracted from the quality of life of Americans. Lumber now comes from overexploited forests rather than carefully shepherded local woodlots. Our food travels 1,500 miles to reach us, and as we gather in celebration to eat it, globalization deprives us of further pleasures. I suspect that most older Americans can remember an uncle or aunt who sang at family weddings and get-togethers. Today, the pride they and their family took in such performances has been replaced by recorded music. It may be technically superior, but it lacks the heart and “community” of the old ways.

There is evidence that all of this dysfunction is leading to an epidemic of psychological depression in America. A study done in 1985 reveals that only 1.3 percent of Americans born in 1910 had suffered a major depressive episode in their lifetime–which is remarkable given the wars, economic crises, and change they experienced–but that 5.3 percent of those born after 1960 had experienced one. “Each succeeding cohort in each area had a higher rate of depression than cohorts before it. There were huge differences…suggesting a roughly ten-fold increase in risk for depression across generations.” Tellingly, the Old Order Amish do not exhibit such a trend, perhaps because their community is more intact.

Why has America so often given rise to the great, community-destroying corporations? McKibben argues that the unique view many Americans have of the Bible is revealing. “75 percent of American Christians think the saying ‘God helps those who help themselves’ can be found in the Bible,” he writes. While misunderstandings about the Bible are widespread (12 percent of Americans are confident that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife), this one is special. It was Benjamin Franklin, in fact, who came up with the saying, and it was meant to express the hyperindividualist vigor of the young, frontier America. In fact Franklin’s sentiments are markedly out of step with the Bible’s central teachings. McKibben (who was once a Sunday school teacher) tells us, “Every time Jesus tries to sum up his message, he falls back on the formula ‘Love your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.’ That is, he posits a life built around others.”

Thus do American values contribute to the feedlotting of their champions and true believers. But the American bureaucracy is also doing its part to keep its citizens well corralled. Both Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben have little but harsh words for the US Department of Agriculture, whose rules and regulations are tailored to give advantage to the big corporations, and make it exceedingly difficult for small-scale growers to get their produce to market.

With so much against them, the prospect that Americans can regain control of their food chain might seem poor. But readers of these two excellent books will surely perceive that the gate to the urban feedlot is now ajar, and that by following the sage advice of McKibben and Pollan they are free to move to better pastures. If they do so in numbers, then the process of healing their bodies, their communities, and their environment could begin.