Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Dietary Regimes, Obesity, and the Tough Fix

I'm frustrated when I hear, "Gee, I know it sucks that small farmers can't make a go of it, but with today's input and capital costs you have to be big to stay in farming." That's why I really like Tony Winson's work. Faced with that assertion, he'd get to the root of it. He'd ask why the input and capital costs have increased so much, and what the returns really are for economies of scale, and what externalities are being sloughed off by large farms, and by gum, he'd have some answers. He knows that there are structural and systemic forces that are producing the agri-food system we have.

At the AFHVS conference in Missoula, I got to hear Winson present on his latest theoretical innovation - dietary regimes, building on Friedmann and McMichael's work on food regimes. Winson's thesis is that rather than just being products of idiosyncracy or cultural preference, diets are created and reproduced by specific material conditions, socio-economic-political climate, and technical developments. Okay, I'll be specific at the risk of jargon turning you off: he attributes them as well to "distinct phases of capital accumulation". But the argument still makes sense without an understanding of that.

Therefore, diets can be divided into distinct eras (regimes) based on elements of their production. For example, with the neolithic revolution, diets started to take on a class character. The second industrial diet regime, which Winson dates from 1950-1980, is probably the most apparent to us: the degradation of food intensifies with the trends of suburbanization, mass marketing, convenience foods, a car culture of fast food, women working out of the home, and a decline of farms and self-provisioning. This is not to say that those things are unequivocally bad, but that they had definite effects on shaping diet in a certain direction. They have lead today to the expansion of this diet to developing countries and a shift from state to capital as the dominating structural force. They have also lead to food that Winson describes with the absolute best use of language I have heard in a while:

 “nutritionally compromised edible commodities”.

Excuse me while I fan myself vigorously. 

The importance of framing dietary changes in terms of a dietary regimes approach is that this approach gets at what is behind these changes. And if we can get at the root of them, we can more effectively shape what is happening in a healthy way.

Here's an example. In this light, although choice of course plays a role, obesity is not merely "taking in more calories than one expends" - something one could easily choose not to do. It is a result of a complex web of factors including the aforementioned growth in mass marketing and convenience foods; the increase in sedentary work and a longer work day; the inaccessibility (due to price, location, or culinary knowledge) of healthy foods; unwalkable neighbourhoods; and even psychological factors, such as a tendency to self-medicate with food, that are socially influenced. While an individual may choose to eat unhealthy food, that choice is easier, and far more likely to be made, in the food system we have now.

Society-wide obesity cannot be solved by educating obese people about nutrition and promoting exercise. But that focus on individual responsibility and choice does "serve to shift our gaze from the social conditions that produce [obesity], to pathologizing the individual that carries the weight (literally) of our social plight. The advantage of this shift in focus is that it dilutes attention from the structural change that would be needed to actually make a difference."* And that structural change is not only difficult, but challenges some pretty powerful interests.

* Russell-Mayhew, Shelly. Eating Disorders and Obesity as Social Justice Issues. Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, Volume 1, Number 1 Spring 2007.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Contemplating Beer

Prairie mythology has long seen us as the Breadbasket of the World. However, wheat production has decreased in proportion to other crops in the past decade. Perhaps it is time to redefine ourselves as the Beerbasket of the World.

(I'm curious - does anyone know if this ad is running in non-prairie provinces?)

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

More than Speculation on Speculation

Sent to the Minister of Finance:

Dear Mr. Flaherty,

I was absolutely appalled to read your comments to Reuters Insider TV on Wednesday June 15 in regards to France's proposal to tighten controls on commodity speculation. You are quoted as saying, "We try not to interfere in markets, including the food market...Markets will find their price levels. We know that's sometimes difficult in the oil situation and so on ... it's discomforting, but in the long run it's the best policy and we maintain our belief in open markets."

In essence, you are saying that the hunger and starvation caused by food shortages and high prices as markets "find their price levels" - in turn influenced by speculation - is "discomforting"! This apparent lack of sympathy with hungry people in Canada and abroad is both arrogant and cruel. If, indeed, you did not mean to say this, I urge you to clarify your remarks.

As for the speculation, which Agriculture Minister Ritz believes does not effect prices, you may wish to educate yourself on the effect that it does, indeed have. I recommend the following:

FAO (2010) ‘Final Report of the Committee on Commodity Problems: Extraordinary Joint Intersessional Meeting of the Intergovernmental Group (IGG) on Grains and the Intergovernmental Group on Rice’

O. de Schutter (UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food) (2010) ‘Food Commodities Speculation and Food Price Crises: Regulation to Reduce the Risks of Financial Volatility

C. Gilbert (2010) ‘How to Understand High Food Prices’, Journal of Agricultural Economics

World Bank (2010) ‘Placing the 2006/2008 Commodity Price Boom into Perspective’.

*I know there are people out there who disagree with my opinion. Please educate me in the comments!

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Salad Days

Why do I have this gorgeous bed of lettuce when I find salads intimidating?

Black seeded Simpson and Matina Sweet
"Oh, just bring a salad." I dread those words. To me, salads mean one of two things. The first is the gourmet salad One tosses together with an airy laugh, with ingredients like "caramelized seckel pear halves stuffed with gorgonzola dolce" - ingredients I have never seen, let alone possess. I am the type of person who occasionally throws caution to the wind and buys something like Italian parsley for a new recipe, then realizes she has no other uses for it, and discovers it weeks later, brown and slimy, in the bottom of her crisper.

The second thing salad means to me is the wodge of green that is slapped on a plate and nudged to the edge by the fleshocentric* main dishes that the salad offers a weak justification for gorging on. In my world, it is typically one of three options:

  • The Triumvirate (lettuce, cucumber, wedge of pallid tomato tasting of dirty water)
  • The Slaw (cabbage and carrot, creamy dressing)
  • The Jello (orange or red with fruit, or occasionally, and hideously, green with slaw)


Usually when I make salad I try to compensate for the lack of taste in a typical Triumvirate and add every vegetable I happen to have. This results in a salad that tastes of nothing in particular and has to be drowned in dressing for flavour. But I do have a gorgeous bed of lettuce. So I decided to try a new approach: use common ingredients, but with a "less is more" philosophy.

This is my lettuce, carrot, sunflower seed salad, with crushed garlic, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar dressing. Fresh and sweet. I look forward to more experimentation!

 *Thanks to Hugh Joseph's presentation on salad at the AFHVS conference for introducing this hilarious term to me.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Speculation about speculation

Can anyone help me? I recently read an article that quantified the increase in speculation on food commodities, and now I can't find that information. Does anyone have some good sources about speculation and food?

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

You can't go home again.

My hometown's centennial is this summer, and there's a big reunion planned. I was a farm kid living half a mile from town during the 75th reunion. Hundreds of people attended. I remember a floor-shaking country dance, driving a John Deere 3020 in the parade down main street, and christening the pioneer memorial (mostly, I remember ringing the giant bell).

Today, the town has twelve residents. Those of you from rural areas probably know what happened.

Last weekend, I saw a presentation by geographer Christiane von Reichert at a conference in Missoula, Montana. She studied rural depopulation. Every area sees out-migration, she said, but rural areas don't see any in-migration in return. The people who are most likely to move to and stay in rural areas are returnees who grew up in that area.

Von Reichert and her team attended high school reunions in 21 counties and conducted 400 interviews with people who stayed, left, and came back to their town to find out what attracted people back to rural areas and what made them stay. She then made recommendations for rural areas attempting to maintain or increase their population.

The number one reason people returned was for their children. They wanted their kids to be close to nature, be safe, be close to their family and roots, and have personalized educational experiences in smaller schools. So the biggest attraction in small towns was child-friendly infrastructure - quality child care, education, activities, parks, libraries, etc.  A related point was to have senior-friendly infrastructure: often, families moved back so children could get to know their grandparents.

The biggest barrier, of course, was economic. There tends to be few job opportunities in small towns. To that end, the geographer recommended that towns stay connected with former residents, point out employment opportunities, and most importantly, rather than "chasing smokestacks" - enticing big footloose factories to locate only to have them pull up roots for more attractive places later - help returnees with local business start-ups.

I don't think I'll ever be able to go home again, but I hope that some small towns will be able to entice people back. Agroecologist John Vandermeer believes that re-ruralization is necessary for a sustainable food system. For my part, I just think a child-friendly, community-minded, vibrant small town sounds like a really nice place to live.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

First Roots of the Season

I planted radishes because they're fast growing and colourful. If I'd known my kids would actually like eating them, I would have planted a lot more!

Easter Egg radishes

Monday, June 6, 2011


When I was eight, the starving kids in Ethiopia didn't get any of my food. Not because I had to clean my plate, although I did. I would have gladly given them the brussels sprouts, or the headcheese. I had plenty to spare. But they didn't get any of my food because the global food distribution system doesn't work that way.

No new article on the food system today is complete without a mention of the need to increase production drastically in the near future to feed either a growing global population or the growing Chinese and Indian middle class who will demand our obesity-based diet. Food is scarce or about to be, and genetically modified crops are increasingly touted as the way to increase production, despite the fact that they have shown only negligible increase in yields of staple crops. (For example, The USDA recently said, in its assessment of Monsanto's drought-tolerant corn,  "The reduced yield [trait] does not exceed the natural variation observed in regionally-adapted varieties of conventional corn".)

There used to be other accepted theories about hunger out there. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen caused a sensation in 1981 when he proposed that famines aren't caused solely by a lack of food, but from social and economic inequalities that affect food distribution. This seems obvious when we juxtapose the need for Food Banks in Canada with the 40% of food that Canadians waste in their households. We might also wonder, if there is a present or near-future global food scarcity, why millions of hectares of land are devoted to crops for biofuels or for feed for cattle that are turned into McDonalds hamburgers

But a lot of food movement organizations and activists believe in this scarcity, and this bothers me. It obscures the power relations in the world that not only decide who gets food and who doesn't, but create the hungry. Why did those Ethiopian kids on TV have big bellies? Yes, there was a drought. There was also a number of other factors: insurgencies in the country, lack of government preparation, the removal of peasants from their land, poor infrastructure, instability of land tenure, cash cropping for export rather than domestic production, and more. And as Amartya Sen remarked, "The rulers never starve." There is only relative scarcity.

Historian Iain Boal was recently interviewed on the philosophy of scarcity. He discusses Malthus' belief that population increases exponentially while food production increases arithmetically and therefore, without conscious checks on population growth, a population-reducing catastrophe is inevitable. It is not a coincidence that Malthus came up with his theory in the era when a forced scarcity occurred - the enclosure movement where peasants were forced off the common land and into the cities. Boal says:

The people of England, I mean the commoners, in 1800 are being literally excluded by fences enclosing the common lands that had sustained them for centuries. They are living the new scarcity that is being produced around them....And Malthus was the economist rationalizing and justifying the cutting off, or another way to put it is the rendering scarce, of the means of subsistence for the laboring poor, in the name of thrift and self-control and the efficiency of private property... 
I am not in any way saying that the earth's resources should be used up willy-nilly, that societies shouldn't concern themselves with how to live on the planet in the most sane and sustainable way possible....I'm not saying ecological destruction hasn't occurred in the human past - the deforestation of the coastal areas around the Mediterranean sea is a classic case, caused by centuries of Imperial Roman overfarming - but it tends to be by non-locals and elites. Let's call it the state. The major culprit in modern times is capitalist farming in private hands...

So what we're saying here is: it's important to notice the ideological move that naturalizes events which are the result of human decisions. It turns disasters that have as much to do with human agency and decision into natural and inevitable events.... 

For one thing, it's interesting to ask,  "Why all this talk of scarcity and collapse now? " After all, catastrophes are a permanent feature of history. So when you hear someone say,  "The world's food supply is going to run out in such and such a year, " well, excuse me! Forty thousand children die each day from the effects of malnutrition. Or perhaps I should say – from the causes of malnutrition....

Everywhere you look, there nothing much natural about it, this kind of scarcity. It's a story of artifice and force.

As an update, here's what's happening in Ethiopia right now. Chinese, Indian, and Saudi investors are renting millions of hectares for what amounts to pennies in order to produce food to export to their own countries.  Ethiopia exports many agricultural commodities as well. Surely, since Ethiopia can be so generous with its land and food, this means there is no famine now?

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Homemade Bread

Boy, was I jealous of the other kids in elementary school. They got bologna sandwiches made with squishy, white Wonderbread, and I got crumbly, dense homemade brown bread sandwiches, usually with lumps of homemade sausage and pickle. I tried to hide them behind my hands as I ate.

And now, I am going to inflict the same indignity upon my children. Because my mom was right, after all.

Ingredients for the sponge
Sponge after rising for an hour
Punch me! Punch me!