More Food for Thought

I found a lot to like in the three pieces we read for today, Schlosser, Kenner and Lappe respectively. The three authors all focused on more humanitarian efforts to solve what some might think is just a problem of where our food comes from. Despite some incendiary satirical tactics I may have employed in earlier posts may have suggested, I do really have at least a modicum of faith left in humanity. Especially when authors like Eric Schlosser, who have "made it" in the literary world, can still take the time not only to denounce the Industrial Food Machine's corporate greed and the political elite that defend it, but to remind readers that it is up to each one of us to look out for one another. Schlosser states that "bringing healthy food into public schools...creat[ing] a health care system that looks after everybody...rais[ing] wages.." (16) are all efforts to clean up our dinner plates of chemicals and sad dead animals. We need to look at this issue from an expanded and thoughtful point of view and "eliminate some of the factors that keep the price of [food] artificially low...[thereby improving] the health of consumers, livestock and the land" (16). This is excellent advice, though it may sound a bit too easy, dare I say utopian, for some.

That is where Anne Lappe comes in with a tangible solution. Small-scale, organically sustainable farms. Indeed, if more people grew their own crops/cattle organically, we could have a much healthier biosphere. She states that "converting 10,000 medium-sized farms to organic would store as much as carbon in the soil as we would save in emissions if we took one million cars off the road" (115). Though this doesn't seem like an awful lot, the nature of business is expansion. If we started with 10,000 farms becoming less reliant on a centralized system of huge factory farms, the trend would undoubtably spread. We all have to eat. We have simply been trained by corporations to do it their way, cheaply and like machines.

Corporations, of course, won't be keen on the idea. Kenner blew my mind with his discussion of "veggie libel" laws challenging enough to take media moguls like the ever-infallible Oprah to the bank. This is quite a damning set of circumstances wherein a victim of the food industry cannot speak of its ills without millions of dollars being spent in legal fees. What if your car exploded and killed your family but you couldn't report your choice of another brand of car to the media? It's odd that the food system should have to answer to different sets of rules than other forms of consumer products in America. Anyone have thoughts on this?

I think it is laudable that these three authors are attempting to open up the discourse to all aspects of human interaction and stressing that if we are equitable to one another in health care, farming, education, etc. we can hope to change the way we eat. Eating is essential. It is a wonder it is so hard to get people to do it right. Perhaps citing figures of diseases like obesity and heart attacks while providing tangible solutions is a great way to start.

Food Inc revelations

In a lot of ways, Film is the fast food of media (if you don't count TV, which occupies its own insidious category in my mind, but I digress).Films deliver succinct messages that can be easily digested by large groups of people who don't want to meander through a mammoth tome to get to the meat of an argument. In this way, Food Inc does an excellent job of boiling down Pollan's seminal Omnivore's Dilemma into what amounts to be a sum of its parts, a tv dinner portion of a 12-course gustatory delight, made suitable for mass distribution. This, in and of itself, is actually a pretty good idea. As we talked about in class, most of the willfully ignorant American populace don't read (a mind-boggling, outrageous 3% read?!!). This is a sad state of affairs, considering that reading is the only certifiable way to grow more intelligent...save, I suppose, documentary films.

The film, or the first half anyway, does a satisfactory job of highlighting the main tenets of Pollan's message; Marketing the pastoral fantasy is a tactic used by Corporate Giants to convince people that their foods are farm-fresh while at the same time allowing said corporations to maintain cruel factory farms to assemble dangerous foods behind the scenes using ammonia, antibiotics, cramped hellish conditions for animals , corn, growth hormones, corn, more antibiotics, ad naseum to allow for "cheap" meals. The film itself, from its opening titles of glossy names on equally glossy products, is a commodified entity. Therein lies the rub. To appeal to a wide audience base, the descriptions of Pollan watching a chicken get slaughtered are gone, replaced by the repeated imagery of chickens strung up on a processing line in Christ-like (albeit inverted and headless) sacrificial poses. There is still a healthy amount of Gothification here, especially a particularly touching segment where a young boy named Kevin contracts a deadly strain of bacteria (E-coli 015787) and dies within 12 days. We are treated to repeated images of him as a happy scamp who met an untimely death. This is depressing stuff, to be sure.

Equally depressing are the flurry of factoids that jounce about the screen, vying for our attention. 1 central control center for the 13 major beef producers in the country? These kind of frightening mechanically estranged abattoirs are the sort of death sheds we'd expect to see in Hostel or the fading Saw franchise. A man at a computer terminal watches as cows in various states are carved up and liquified. Yum. The problem is, apart from one nasty slice of a mechanical saw, we, as viewers, are kindly spared by the filmmakers. Elsewhere we learn that Americans gulp down an unprecedented 200 lbs of meat a year, as much as 75% of which is treated with an ammonia-based meat filler. Mm-mm good, just like momma used to secrete from her poison glands! Absolutely sickening. Let's not forget too about the fact that 1 in every 3 American boy born after 2000 will have Type-2 Diabetes. While not a death sentence, persay, this is ample evidence of an epidemic in our midst, one that is bolstered by the public's predilection for maintaining a veil of gallumphing ignorance. PETA is constantly under fire (or at least dismissed) for disseminating information and or photographs of animals being slaughtered, rotting, gutted, their entrails violently flung away across shit-smeared floors, their drooling faces hacked apart and burned...for fear that the public will get all queasy. Is it worse to show these images or to hide from them?

My problem with Food INC is that it is a bit too glossy, a bit too neutered for its own good. Sure the images it does choose to show have an impact. I shook my head in disdain more than once. And yet, call me a masochist, but I am left wanting more scenes like the gaping, bile excreting hole in the side of the cow where the fellow could delightfully, and as he claimed "painlessly", empty a cow's rumen. In the same way that Morgan Spurlock's cultural touchstone Super Size Me didn't have quite enough bite (though it did lead to the phasing out of Super Sized meals, which is good), as it didn't stop me from lounging in gluttonous repair beneath the golden arches, this film doesn't seem to push the discourse far enough. Let's get into the abattoir. Let's see the dying kids. Let's push and push until the audience is screaming, writhing with the intention of murdering the board of directors at Cargill or ADM. But, of course, this sort of rebel-rousing is invariably poo-pooed if the film makers want to reach a broad audience, because, once again, we're faced with the age old Orwellian conundrum of Ignorant Bliss. We don't want to harbor these rash, irresponsible feelings toward our fellow man, neither the homely blue-collar slaughterhouse worker nor his conniving white collar boss. But, hell, animals are expendable, right? So who cares if they are savagely mutilated for our Big Macs. Who gives a shit.

To steal a page from our old friend Jonathan Swift, I'm advocating we start eviscerating and serving up the executives at Tyson, not as punishment for their nefarious business practices, but because they are corn-fed products too, why not let them share in the misery of Pollan's #534 or poor dead Kevin and his grieving mother whose pleas to congress are shut down with absolute firm authority. If 30% of the landscape is devoted to corn, just think of the glut of the market if we shift the rest of the landscape (all those metal office silos...mmmm) into the abattoir for thanksgiving. What's the difference? We're all animals, after all.

Zea Mays: The cornerstone of an unhealthy diet

Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is a brilliant dissection of our one principle need as humans (aside from oxygen); Food, as it is warped and constricted by the guise of perpetually infinite choice in our consumer industrialist society. His analysis of our food culture is most enlightening, in my mind, when he delves into the horrors of our incredibleCorn consumption. I had a vague idea about the tenacity of the dreaded "zea mays", but never knew it was listed (or not listed) among the ingredients in well...everything! On pgs 18-19, Pollan rattles off a list of corn-infused products including but not limited to; Pop, beer, processed foods, glucose syrup, maltodextrine, coffee whitener, Cheez Whiz, frozen yogurt, TV dinners, frosting, mayo, hot dogs, and even Vitamins! The vitamin comment struck me as particularly horrifying, as I assume it is referring to the sweet glossy shell vitamins are encased in. Even something as ostensibly healthy and harmless as vitamins has been subsumed into the Corn machine. I believe this sort of fixation with one food source is highly unsustainable, as it is robbing the soil of nutrients and starving the farmers who have been essentially coerced by corporations to grow it.

I believe Pollan would agree with me that our Corn Culture has fundamentally altered the course of nature and the course of humanity as we know it. Pollan remarks quite shrewdly that we eat/use so much corn we have in fact become "corn people" (p. 23). This is a bold statement that I find incredibly valid. You are what you eat, after all. We eat so many corn derivatives we are lucky it isn't coming out of our ears, to use the parlance of yesteryear. This is an epidemic that has a stranglehold on us as consumers. It is very, very difficult to buy cornless products. Even organic cows and chickens were probably fed corn. Not to say that a little bit of corn is a bad thing. I happen to enjoy the taste, even though it is fairly indigestible. I am waiting for Pollan to discuss the ramifications of a staple food that is apparent in perhaps 1,000s of products that they body can't even break down...see any variety of corn-embedded feces for evidence. Gross, I know, but it seems that not only does corn provide a disconnect between those who grow it and those who eat it (Pollan visits a farmer names George Naylor whose corn farm produces enough food for 129 other people but cannot sustain his own family. The kicker is, George never meets the people he grows for. Indeed, Pollan writes "the 129 people who depend on George Naylor for their sustenance are all strangers, living at the far end of a food chain so long, intricate and obscure that neither producer nor consumer has any reason to know the first thing about the other" (p. 34)) but it is also not exactly an endlessly rewarding life-source. It may have "entered the industrial age and, in time...brought the whole American food chain with it" (p. 31), but what good is that if our bodies have an especially hard time breaking it down! We might as well make our staple food gravel or tiny pieces of plastic. It is disgusting also that the corn we feed our livestock and crush up into our preservative-friendly tv dinners is not edible in its natural form. This is quite a concern, especially when we think that this is the same insidious substance that makes up a good percentage of our bodies and our world!

In the end, I believe our fixation on corn rests firmly in the hands of avarice-driven corporations looking to exploit farmers and make a lot of capital. Why else would they have bred such oddities as the "genetically modified [seed] 34B98" (p. 36), a scary fast growing seed that costs farmers an extra $25 a bag. This is shameless capitalism gone awry. Not to mention the widespread use of pesticides and fertilizers that we developed for "the making of explosives [and] based on poison gasses developed for [world war I]" (p. 41). Why do we put our faith into these corporations so blindly? This book, thus far (and I haven't even read 50 pgs) makes me want to never eat a processed meal again (but I probably will), and I'm sure I haven't even gotten to the juicy parts yet. I am disgusted by the pervasiveness of our corn-fed nation. Tonight it is only fresh foods for me, no Mac'n'Cheese or Hungry Man dinner. Pollan has already made me re-think my eating habits, which is probably something I should have done a long time ago.

Whitman's Instructions

Walt Whitman, preeminent American poet, finds a lot to love about nature in his seminal Leaves of Grass. We get a sort of pastoral beauty in descriptions of "the tinge [awakening] over the willow tree and the mulberry tree/the he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she/birds sit in their nests/the young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs" etc. This motif of birth up from the earth for all beings is important and implemented by the poet to reiterate the incorruptible power of nature. Whitman wonders how the land is not poisoned entirely, but recognizes its resilience. This rings especially true today when we are faced with toxically destructive elements invading from every corner of the globe, in our oceans, in the sky, seemingly everywhere and yet nature sallies on.

Whitman, however, remains oftentimes deliriously optimistic. He states that "the winds are really not infectious...[and as] I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease." The world is a re-birth mechanism, it will not be sullied by our bad intentions. It this these intentions, I believe, that evoke Whitman's lamentation that "I am terrified at the Earth..with such endless successions of diseased corpses." Here is a world where everything dies, especially when humans expedite the process. We must recognize instead a utopian "unseen moral essence" that goads us subliminally. We must follow this guiding natural way, instead of mutilating the pastoral landscape with "the echo of teamsters' calls and the clinking chains, and the music of choppers' axes." We must protect our investment, so to speak.

I agree wholeheartedly with Whitman that we need to "build a grander future." Though, I'm not sure, in his epoch, or in ours, we have really made it. The last stanza seems a bit too hopeful for me. Call me cynical but I don't think that in 1874, there was any kind of "genius...clearing the ground for...the true America." In fact, in the time since elapsed, we have seen a bit of the opposite. Whitman's intentions are good and maybe its my proclivity for the harsher ramifications of toxic discourse but I didn't find the ending of this excerpt all that believable. We are not quite "proportionate to Nature", but at least, I suppose, we are trying.

Environmental Anxiety Globalized

Lawrence Buell writes that Toxic Discourse is defined as "expressed anxiety arising from perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency" (31). This anxiety can take many forms. Generally, it is propagated by the mass media's prediliction for fear-mongering that, in some cases, has genuine concern behind it. Richard Kirkland Jr wrote an article for Fortune magazine in 1988 that is just as relevant today as it was then. The article is entitled Environmental Anxiety Goes Global. It portends a future where all nations will be striving to quell environmental concerns, while at the same time continuing their enjoyable states-of-being. This idea of keeping intact a wall of "pastoral-uptopian innocence" (Buell 37) stands in the way of Toxic Discourse as a prevailing attempt to key the public in on the threat of environmental disasters. Kirkland writes about "Western Europeans...slow...[adoption of] catalytic convertors" to help cut down on automotive exhaust pollution. This is indicative of the stance of many white, rich consumers. Pretending to care about pollution is good (ie reading Toxic Discourse documents and nodding in agreement), but this feigning interest can only go so far. Real force must play into the equation to thwart what Kirkland cites as Britain's then prime minister Margaret Thatcher's idea of pollution as "the enemy within". Only with direction action, can "the individual or social panic [of Toxic Discourse]" (31) be assuaged. This may include reclycing, passing new legistation to clean up the environment, implementing other green-friendly energy sources (solar, wind, etc), and the list goes on.

For better or worse, Toxic Discourse often provides "totalizing images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration" (38). This is essentially what Kirkland's article relies on to paint a global picture of the threat of epic environmental disaster. Countries such as Germany, England, France and others are mentioned in regard to what steps they have taken to clean up their respective environs. This sense of common identity forged by outside forces is pivotal to the idea of Toxic Discourse. Collective action is needed to save the trees, oceans and other natural wonders, yet it can sometimes be alienating, since the charge might seem, to some, too large a task to even comprehend. Kirkland writes that, "Peugeot, a major French employer, convinced the governmental that [an anti-pollution control on small cars] would make its cars too expensive, costing sales and ultimately French jobs." This is paradoxical. Companies rule the world, yet we cannot possibly rely on them to fix the problems that they cause with their low production costs and slurry ponds and other massive industrial waste. Globalization has connected us all, totalized us onto a world scale awash with dark oil clouds and related uncertainty.

This is dark territory, something Buell refers to as "Gothificication", a tool used by purveyors of Toxic Discourse to create a sense of emotional panic. This use of haunting imagery to evoke social change is seen as an alternative to trying to get corporate involvement for the better of the planet. Keying people in on the desolation associated with environmental disasters as an empathetic plea is the first line of Kirkland's article, as he writes, "Dead seals did for Europe's environment awareness last summer what medical waste did in the U.S."- that is, let people know that something wicked was brewing under the surface. Abandon your lawn mowers and look to the coast, the storms are raging.

Neither Buell nor Kirkland provide clear-cut solutions to environmental problems. Toxic Discourse seems, to me anyway, as more of a channel of information, than a marked change of pace. Buell perhaps believes that by simply convincing consumers there are many damaging impacts associated with their gobbling up of natural resources (dead seals, burning waste, oil spills galore, etc etc etc ad naseum), they will attempt to change their ways. New legislation must be implemented however, for things to really turn around.

Crumb and Dick VS the Great Erasures

There is a Modest Mouse lyric I love. The song is Novocain Stain on the seminal album "This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About." The lyric goes, "More housing developments go up/named after the things they replace/so welcome to Minnow Brook/and welcome to Shady Space/it all seems a little abrupt/No I don't like this change of pace." There is a lot of truth to that. As we try to make the world ours, we destroy what beauty there is in the land of the Native Americas, regions wild and true, not carved up by our many housing tracts. Artist R. Crumb renders the dismal progression of communities in his cartoon A Short History of America with a kind of cunning precision that a writer could take upwards of a dozen pages laboring over. Crumb's city is birthed from trees that gradually disappear from the frames, replaced by buildings, telephone lines, general clutter. As we construct our social infrastructures, what are we destroying? Philip K. Dick, in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," presents a future where animals will be so scarce that the existence of a sleepy, wizened woodland owl would be an amazing find, worthy of massive corporate costs. I believe Dick and Crumb to be kindred spirits with Isaac Brock. Their shared lamentation is one of fear and disbelief. Our attempts to create our own national consciousness from what we perceive as ripe for our picking (Huckleberry picking, if you will) is an egotistic and ultimately destructive notion. Dick's protagonist feels a "need for a real animal" (453). More than that, what humans require is a real world, a world containing not merely restaurants, bars, sporting goods stores, suburban sprawl, but trees, deer, grassy fields to rest our heads on. The natural world is inextricable from our own. So we have brains capable of building steel obelisks and internationally-spreading forms of communication. Bully for us. Do we have enough oxygen-producers? Are we supporting other forms of sentient life? As the title of another Modest Mouse album suggests (I'm a fan, so sue me) all that most of us care about is the greedy endeavor of unceremoniously "Building Nothing out of Something."

Thoreau through Cronin's Eyes: A Conquerer

William Cronin's ideas posited in The Trouble with Wilderness, stand largely in opposition to the Romantic wanderlust of good ol' Henry David Thoreau. Cronin argues that the Frontier Myth (or the Garden of Eden vs. harsh "hairy" forest tall tale) reinforces a cruel paradox, stating that the very idea of Wilderness "embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside of nature" (80). The reality is, according to Cronin, and I happen to believe him, that man and nature exist concurrently with one another, unless, of course, we seek to destroy it, or hide it away in our sidewalks and behind our titanous, aching dormitories. By thinking of nature as separate entity, a place where men like Thoreau can "shed the trappings of civilization...and thereby [reunify] themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity," (76) we are, in fact, perpetuating a cycle of racism and ugly hubris.

According to Cronin, this fascination with sheltering ourselves in the bosom of the woefully engendered "mother nature" emerges from the fact that we exist in cities which we destroy as well. Industry and capitalism, and Thoreau might agree, are greedy, monstrous enterprises. Yet to seek escape into "untamed" lands and subsequently create the illusion of isolation, while at the same time overlooking the fact that the American Indians who once lived there were eradicated chiefly by God-fearing English folk like Henry T, is equally as misguided as destroying the countryside with smoke-stacks and snaking causeways.

Truly our misconceptions of penetrating for our own leisure and reflection what is perceived as "wild", or, perhaps worse, "virginal" about the woodland sphere that surrounds us (indeed the very notion that Thoreau can somehow be made better, purer, by the time he outside of Concord) overlooks the fact that our ability to evoke that freedom is unquestionably the result of large, large scale genocide. Though Thoreau does touch on the positive social constructs of Native Americans in Huckleberries, stating "the earth and all its productions were common and free to all the tribe" (30) and therefore better than his fellow Concordians and their pillaging ancestors, he does not address the "the removal of the Indian to create an "uninhabited wilderness" (Cronin 79) for us build our respective $28 houses in.

Furthermore, Thoreau's idea that nature "exists for no other end [other than to] make us well" (36) is an incredibly selfish assertion, creating a sense that Thoreau's forest romp/fledgling homesteading venture is really just a masturbatory exercise. Cronin suggests, indelibly, that we should "never [imagine] that we can flee into a mythical wilderness to escape history and the obligation to take responsibility for our own actions" (90). There is a good chance the rest of Thoreau's city-bound career makes a better argument than urging the reader to "suck the marrow out of [nature]" with a "Spartan-like" intensity (19). Hopefully, anyway. Otherwise, I'd say he is a little full of a hot air.