Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
23
Culture, Community, and Sustainability
In his topic
Radical Agriculture
, published in 1976, Rich
Merrill wrote about the need to “get culture back into
agriculture” (Merrill, 1976). His was an early voice-
calling attention to the negative effects of a process that
had already been underway for decades: the transforma-
tion of agriculture into agribusiness.
Merrill was playing with the dual meaning of
culture
,
substituting the meaning having to do with the tilling of
the soil with the meaning we have in mind when we use
the phrase
human culture
. In this latter sense, culture is an
integrated system of human knowledge, belief, and behav-
ior. So Merrill was essentially warning us that agriculture
was being drained of its humanity — that the values,
behaviors, and social relationships that once supported a
stewardship orientation to farmland were falling away.
Now, three decades later, Merrill's plea is as relevant
as ever. The agribusiness model, with its drive toward
industrialization of food production, has been remarkably
successful by many measures, but it has completely
changed the social and economic relationships surround-
ing the production and consumption of food. In reducing
farmers to sources of farm products, farm workers to labor
costs, and the purchasers and eaters of food to consumers,
it has ensured that the real people who populate our food
systems will interact only through the medium of money,
in a system organized to meet the demands of capital and
little else.
Agriculture has not lost its grounding in human cul-
ture, as one reading of Merrill's statement might suggest;
the problem is that the knowledge, beliefs, behavior, and
relationships that have grown up around the production
and consumption of food have become major obstacles to
sustainability. Consumers have no idea where the food
they eat comes from, how their choices affect agroeco-
systems, the environment, and farmers and farm workers.
“Eating is an agricultural act,” according to Wendell Berry,
but consumers eat as if they are only satisfying their hun-
ger. On the production side, farmers are increasingly at
the mercy of a system that separates them from consumers
and leaves them with little choice but to play by agribusi-
ness rules, often at the expense of their values.
In order to be sustainable, agriculture needs a “culture”
surrounding it that promotes sustainable practices rather
than helping to destroy them. To put this kind of culture
back into agriculture, we need to reestablish the connec-
tions between farm and table, form human relationships
around food that are more than economic, and promote
values in relation to food consumption that look beyond
narrow self-interest.
THE DECLINE OF FARMING IN THE AGE OF
THE GLOBAL SUPERMARKET
When human cultures depended primarily on hunting and
gathering, foods directly reflected the local environment.
This connection between diet and the local environment
remained even after the development of agriculture (Chap-
ter 14), producing remarkable differences and diversity in
diets, consumption patterns, and cuisines around the
world. But as trade in food grew over time, and profit
could be made in such trades, cultures grew less distinct
in their diets, and in the quantities and qualities of the
foods they consumed. At the same time, the universe of
what was available to eat expanded for many people. In
the last several decades, these trends have accelerated
(Menzel and D'Aluisio, 2005). The food industry now
functions in a global marketplace in which food moves
quickly from one part of the world to another, the raw
materials from farmers purchased at low prices converted
into an incredible array of processed, packaged, and pre-
served food items that hardly resemble the products they
were made from.
Anyone who recalls shopping for groceries just two
decades ago knows that our diet has changed dramatically,
especially in the U.S., but few people realize that this
transformation is occurring all around the world. Globali-
zation of the economy is the main causative factor, as
large-scale capitalism reaches new parts of the globe.
These changes are also the result of economic growth and
increasing affluence: as people gain new means to pur-
chase food items they did not consume much before, they
eat more meat and fish, and more of the wide array of
processed, convenience, and fast-food items now on the
market. The global movement of people also plays a part
in the transformation of our diets, as travelers, immigrants,
and refugees bring their own foods to new lands and learn
new food preferences in return.
327
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