The Foodie Attack on Food

The New York Times has done it again. Or rather, its Sunday Magazine has done it again. For the second year in a row, it has published its annual Food Issue without a word about most of the people who grow America's food or most of the people who eat it.

The issue was devoted to "food as community," which is fine for the people one sees in Gourmet Magazine, gathered outdoors around a rustic table, beneath a grape arbor, ingesting the artisanal grub they have spent the previous three days cooking. It has nothing to do with "food as food," which is the concern of the vast majority of America's farmers and eaters.

The articles, all lavishly illustrated, dealt with a Maine woman who sells oysters and peekytoe crab to high-end chefs, with community renewal built around a pie shop in rural Alabama, with multi-ethnic kosher diners in Brooklyn, and with locavores in (naturally) the Bay Area of California. One article featured Michael Pollan, the author and food guru from Berkeley, and the 36 hours he spent preparing a dinner party based on roast goat.

There is nothing really wrong with any of this (although Pollan and his holier-than-thou attitude is beginning to wear thin). I wish the folks in Maine and Alabama nothing but the best. I'm a big fan of farmers' markets -- I picked up some late-season sweet corn and early-season Brussels sprouts from a market in the Chicago Loop just before sitting down to write this. The small farming praised by the Times is growing, a positive trend. Anybody who increases the variety and quality of food and encourages good people to grow, market and eat it gets my vote.

So what's the problem? Just this: the Times is America's premier newspaper and, in an era when virtually all other papers are jettisoning both staff and serious reporting, we look to the Times to set the national agenda, to dig deeply into important issues that the rest of the media treats in sound bites. The weekly Dining section specializes in wrapping frivolous articles about foodies and locavores around ads and recipes: that's what it's for. But the Magazine, week in and week out, does a great job of devoting long-form journalism to the major issues of the day.

Except food.

There are huge and controversial issues about food:

• Most food comes from big (2,000-acres-plus) farms, highly specialized. These farms are in charge of feeding the world. The higher their yields, the better the world eats. How can we encourage the growth and productivity of these farms?
• But this factory farming (which is what it is) also relies on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other products that damage the soil and pollute rivers. These farms also are big users of oil. Many of them, to increase output, use tiling to drain surface water, contributing to recent disastrous flooding. How can they feed the world without poisoning it?
• Farm size has been doubling every generation for decades. How big can these farms get?
• As we've learned in the recession, big banks and big business need firm regulation to keep from doing more harm than good. Big farms -- and big agribusiness firms, too -- are big business. The recent Iowa egg scandal showed one gap -- not the only one -- in this regulation.
• Most Americans -- not Pollan and his pals, but too many other people -- eat fast and badly. If you're working two or three jobs, you don't have 36 hours to roast a goat. Vast areas of inner cities are food deserts, with no decent grocery stories. Obesity, not a shortage of oysters, is a major problem. How can farms be encouraged to grow healthier food? How can companies be encouraged to produce it? How can stores be encouraged to stock it? Especially, how can Americans be encouraged to eat it?

These are the real food issues in the United States today. The stories in the Times Magazine featured niche farming which is just that -- niche. It produces a miniscule proportion -- perhaps 1 percent or less -- of American food. Big farming, for better or for worse, is the real story.  The Times once again missed this story, and that's bad journalism. (This is not my first swat at the problem, and it probably won't be the last.)  

This is important, and not just to the Midwest, where so many of these big farms are. Public policy depends on public information and public perceptions. There is a growing feeling in this country that big farming is bad and that niche farming is pure, somehow better. It encourages newspapers like the Times to treat big farmers as villains. It enables writers like Pollan to flourish (his books, like "The Omnivore's Dilemma," are regular best-sellers). It is the atmosphere that permits activists and journalists to treat the urban farming movement in Detroit as something other than the tragedy is it -- impoverished residents, descendants of people who came north to escape sharecropping down south, trapped in a bombed-out city that literally has no chain groceries, reduced to plowing up vacant lots and polluted brownfield sites to get a little green in their diet.

In this atmosphere, big is bad, and small is good. It is an attitude most often held in cities, not out in the country where real farming happens. I met a woman recently from the North Shore of Chicago who wanted to break up big farms into millions of niche farms. This is the 21st-century equivilent of "40 acres and a mule" and is mostly a recipe for famine.

North Shore matrons need not be expected to know better. But the Times is supposedly the pinnacle of American journalism. So why does it abandon all journalistic standards where food is concerned?

Having spent my life in the newspaper business, I think I know the answer. Real reporters go out and try to see what's going on. But too many editors and reporters -- especially those working on special feature sections like the Magazine -- spend their time in the office, talking with each other, venturing forth only after work to have drinks and dinner with people just like themselves. Most of these people are foodies. Most are well-paid and can afford divers scallops and heirloom tomatoes. Most swap recipes, together with the email addresses of artisanal cheesemakers. Most live in their own little world and think the rest of the world is just like them.

About 20 or 30 years ago, newspapers were filled with news about gentrification of urban streetscapes, about urban pioneers rehabbing one neighborhood or another. There was some of this going on but, at that time, not much: most people in those days were still moving further out into exurbia, not back into the city. What was really happening here was that a lot of newspaper people were into rehabbing, just like they're into niche food today. They assume that, just because everybody they know is doing something, the whole world must be the same.

They're wrong. But by perpetuating journalism that psalms mini-farms while demonizing big farming, they're helping to set up an urban-rural divide that keeps us from dealing with the real issues of what people eat. 

For more information on agriculture in the Midwest, visit the In the News section of the Global Midwest Web site.

Comments

[Holly]

I certainly don't have any answers in the big farming vs small, local farming debate. But have you read "$20 per gallon" by Christopher Steiner? He talks about how when gas prices rise high enough, shipping massive amounts of food around the world won't be economical. He says that we'll have to have smaller farms ringing our urban centers that supply us with local food and hothouses to grow tomatoes and such in winter. I would be interested in your reaction to his ideas.

[Thomas Leavitt]

The comment posed by Holly begs the question "What happens to agriculture when we run out of oil?". Since big agriculture is so dependent on, and our environmental ills are so connected to oil and fossil fuels, what do you propose as the next step to avoid disaster?

Your position is solidly on the side of large scale farming as a means to feed a hungry world. Yet, you recognize the un-sustainability of this type of farming. I admire your journalistic integrity in pointing out different sides of the issue. You lament the NYT's lack of journalistic perspective in a media world focused on the trivial. They come down on the side of the local food movement while the rest of the media touts the corporate line of bigger is better and we need GMOs to feed the world.

My support falls on the side of small farmers practicing sustainable agricultural techniques here and abroad. You call this naive and idealistic. Our industrial farming model does nothing for small farmers in impoverished countries who have no access to capital let alone GPS run combines. Increasing support for bigger conventional farms supports bigger corporate interests and ignores local resilience. I call this naive and arrogant. I'll gladly be idealistic and grow my own food and spend my food money locally to keep it out of the hands of the corporations.