“Our ethical standards have gone out the window,” said Dr. Leslie Jermyn. You don’t normally hear about deranged morality when it comes to food, but that’s what Jermyn stressed in her presentation at Saturday’s organic food conference.
Jermyn, a lecturer in U of T’s department of anthropology, argued that the globalization of food over the past century have had negative consequences. Mass-produced food depends on technological improvements: improvements in transportation techniques, the development of inorganic nitrates as fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, and animal antibiotics that allowed farmers to force their animals to small, confined spaces without triggering the rapid spread of disease.
But there is a price for cheap eats: decreased biodiversity, increased human populations, increased environmental damage, and the loss of sustainability and food security. According to Jermyn, by accepting these changes in food production, humans have lost their moral integrity.
The Varsity sat down with Jermyn to talk about our global, good-for-nothing gluttony.
The Varsity: What is the difference between produce that claims to be “organic,” rather than “local,” and what are the consequences of choosing one over the other?
Leslie Jermyn: Many of our supermarkets have organic sections that rely, almost exclusively, not on local organic growers, but on very distant ones, and these are primarily in California because you get a constant supply of broccoli or carrots or lettuce there.
So what’s happening is that not only are [supermarkets] getting the food from very far away, and that’s having a huge ecological footprint, but also we’re then getting “organic food” that is being standardized with a set of standards that many people would say are not actually organic.
So what happens then is that you dupe or fool consumers. You say, “Here, pay two or three times the price to have organic food,” generally because you want to be healthier and because you want to protect the environment. But on the one hand, you’re going to do more harm than good to the environment, and on the other hand, you may not actually be eating completely pesticide-free food.
What happens then, is you get one or two journalistic exposés on that, and people whose only entry into the environmentally-conscientious world was organic food are then told “Oh, you fool, you’ve been contributing to worse environmental problems and you haven’t even been protecting the health of your children!”
So, it inspires cynicism. People would say, “Well, if organic isn’t even working, why the heck should I bother with any of these other things. They’re all likely to be equally problematic. I’m being fooled in some way by fair-trade coffee or sweatshop-free clothing.” And so they tune out. So, it seems to me that we need to give them a very clear message that isn’t going to come back and bite them.
And that message is: First, buy local, because you can guarantee that the [ecological] footprint is lower. It’s absolutely demonstrable, and it’s not debatable. Then, if you can, buy local organic. “Then if you can” meaning if you can find it, and if you can afford it, then we should be supporting our local farmers who choose to go organic. If you really want organic food, and you want to be environmentally-sensitive, the obvious step would be to go out of your way a little bit to let farmers know what you want. In other words, to go to farmers’ markets to set up the “field to table” [program] where you can buy produce in advance from a farmer. With our pocketbooks we give the signal to our local farmers that we’re willing to pay for organic produce.
V: The definition of “organic” appears to vary. As a result, consumers cannot always trust labels that promise organic foods. Is it because the standards for organic foods vary in different countries, or because these products are not as rigorously checked as in Canada?
L.J.: As I understand it, one of the problems is the pressure to scale up. A lot of Californian producers farm on a huge scale. When you farm on such a big scale, it could be argued that it’s nearly impossible to do it organically, because organic farming requires a much higher ratio of labour to land. If lots of markets are demanding a consistent supply of organic produce, then the farmer may continually expand production to the point where absolutely pure, rigidly organic production becomes impossible. They have to do what’s called “integrated pest management,” which actually means using pesticides sometimes.
But for me, this is the problem. I have a very absolutist view of things. If you use pesticides, you can’t be organic. I’m not interested in “integrated pest management,” I’m interested in using words the way they’re meant to be used. I think that organic production of food almost absolutely requires a pretty intimate scale. A family farm can’t really exceed 100 acres, and still they’re going to have to be highly laboured. And that is one of the reasons that it is necessarily more expensive.
Other countries set different standards, but they do so in response to the business climate.
V: In your talk, you mentioned a number of consequences of the globalization of food. Are these consequences irreversible?
L.J.: I think that human beings are extremely lax about this. I made a lot of links to technology, as technology is a human product, and how we choose to use it is subject to us making decisions. Technology doesn’t necessarily run us, though it sometimes feels like that.
So, is it reversible? Sure. We could get off the hydrocarbon farming system that we’re currently on which makes our food-even if it’s grown locally-dependent on far-away sources of natural gas or oil. Yes, we could imagine some other food system, but the consequences of that are multifold. It’s not just a matter of using less equipment, or transporting foods shorter distances, or finding ways to integrate animals back on the farm so that we use manure instead of inorganic nitrogen fertilizer-all of these things are part of it. But if we were going to do that on a broad scale, if we actually said “This is the way forward everywhere; everybody has to do this,” the problem would be that we would not produce enough food to feed all of us. I do not want to suggest that the consequences are dire, that we do this and then just starve out five million people. But what I’m suggesting is that the decisions we make to change the farming system would have to go along with decisions we make about how we run our society.
By eating locally, we can reduce the amount of fuel that goes into transport, for example. By eating non-processed foods, we can reduce the amount of fuel and plastics, which are oil-based, that go into getting the food to our table. We can make some small adjustments, but if we want to talk about long-term sustainability and returning to a situation where, forever, we can produce food to feed ourselves, that is also going to require rethinking the question of population.
And that leads to the question of reproduction. We’re going to have to start thinking about whether everyone can have one or two or three kids, and possibly they can’t. That’s a very sticky area, where people shudder and say, “I don’t even want to think about it!”
I don’t want to say that [the consequences] are not reversible, but I would like to suggest that reversing them or taking steps toward something that is more sustainable is not as simple as changing farming practices. We have to also change the way we think about reproducing our own society into the future.
V: There essentially has to be an entire paradigm shift, then?
L.J.: Yes, an entire paradigm shift. We have to see ourselves as part of a larger web, and not a kingpin in a hierarchy.
V: While your talk was on the globalization of the food market, what is your opinion of globalization in other markets? Has it had a totally negative impact on humankind and the environment, or do you see any saving grace?
L.J.: In terms of the production of things, it has generally been negative for the same reasons that it has been negative for food, and that is that we have access to cheap resources and cheap labour in order to produce things-everything from clothespegs to snow boots. And what that has permitted is a very false standard of living for some people on the planet. A very small slice of the planet has been able to live like kings, a life of material plenty. Many would argue that it’s not necessarily a good life because they work themselves to death and get into debt in order to have this material life. But nonetheless, materially, we’ve been incredibly wealthy, and we’re probably the wealthiest generation to ever walk the face of the planet. That has a very negative environmental impact because…we’re simply consuming more than the world can provide for us indefinitely or for everyone equally.
So, yes, [globalization] been negative for the same reason [as with food]. Stuff has become falsely abundant and cheap. It shouldn’t be that abundant and it definitely shouldn’t be that cheap. In a sense, there’s nothing wrong if we choose to trade around the world. I don’t have a problem with trade by itself, and it’s not that we should all shut down the borders and say that nothing should ever come in or out and we all need to be self-sufficient. We can trade, but we have to do it within much stricter limits with regards to how much material stuff is being processed for each of us just to get from birth to death. That amount of stuff has to be severely reduced.
