From Hand to Mouth

Just as food links the body and the soul, it also connects us as individuals with the rest of creation--not only with the soil and sunshine and water from which our food is formed, but with the many human beings whose work has brought it to our tables.

In every direction from Salina, Kansas, the proverbial amber waves of grain stretch to the horizon. A palpable excitement fills the air as farmers at the heart of the nation's breadbasket count down the days to harvest.

In Salina, a town of 42,000, many office workers save their two weeks annual vacation for June, so they can "go home"—which is wherever they have relatives who are still farming—and help bring in the harvest. People who work as secretaries or bank tellers by day will be driving combines and grain trucks long into the summer night. Nearly everyone you meet in Salina either grew up on a farm or has a close relative who did.

Yet even here, and even among farm families, most of the food on people's tables comes from the supermarket. And stores here are stocked with the same brands that fill grocery shelves all over the United States and, increasingly, around the world.

Gone is the Salina hatchery that for years supplied local families who raised chickens for eggs and meat. Gone too is the cheese plant that used to process milk from local dairies. Of the six flour mills that once hummed in this wheat capital, only one remains, and it is owned by a huge multinational corporation.

The story has been repeated in thousands of towns across America. In the smallest towns, where agriculture is the entire base of the local economy, the story ends in tragedy. As grain elevators, equipment dealerships, and other farm-related businesses fold, residents move away, the tax base dries up, schools close, more residents leave, churches empty out, and the town dies. While every town's story is unique, each is merely a local variation on what has become a worldwide phenomenon—the industrialization of agriculture.

It's a phenomenon of which we tend to be unaware—even though it touches most of our lives at least three times a day. Unless we make conscious efforts to support alternatives, we participate, with every meal we eat, in the global-industrial food system. This system has not only destroyed thousands of rural communities but, through its reliance on pesticides, animal drugs, and chemical food additives, is gradually destroying our health. The system knows no national boundaries, nor does it respect cultural traditions, community bonds, human health, or the sacredness of life.

FOR MOST OF HUMAN HISTORY, food has been treated as a gift from God. The Plains Indians of North America practiced elaborate rituals revolving around the buffalo, which, as their main source of food and shelter, was considered a sacred creature. For the Hopi people of the desert Southwest, the successful cultivation of corn depends as much on prayer and ceremony as it does on practical skill.

Reverence for food is not unique to indigenous cultures. Judeo-Christian peoples have a long tradition of reverence for the body as "the temple of the soul." Accordingly, food, the stone from which this temple is constructed, also deserves profound respect.

Just as food links the body and the soul, it also connects us as individuals with the rest of creation--not only with the soil and sunshine and water from which our food is formed, but with the many human beings whose work has brought it to our tables.

Until fairly recent times, most of the food people consumed was planted, harvested, and processed by themselves, their families, and neighbors. Even people living in large cities were supplied by the farmers in their own local region. The link between one's food and the rest of one's community was not theoretical but immediate and tangible.

Industrial agriculture has changed all that. Currently, each calorie of food you consume has traveled an average of 1,600 miles to reach you. That's largely because many functions that were once performed by farm families have been moved off the farm to wherever corporations can perform them most "efficiently."

Corporations achieve "efficiency" by using their vast stores of capital to build operations so huge—poultry houses containing up to 80,000 chickens apiece, for instance—that "economies of scale" come into play. This enables corporations to undercut the prices charged by smaller-scale farmers and processors, eventually driving them out of business.

However, corporate economies of scale are illusory; they only work because corporations are able to avoid paying the real social and environmental costs of their operations. For example, workers in chicken- and meat-processing plants have the highest rates of injury of any occupation, but wages and workers' compensation benefits in those industries are notoriously low. Corporate hog-farming operations, in which up to 30,000 sows are confined at one location, have polluted groundwater in at least 18 states, yet corporations have paid only piddling sums in fines.

Large companies are able to maximize profits by locating each segment of the food production process wherever costs can be minimized. Tyson Foods, for instance, raises and slaughters chickens in Arkansas, where environmental regulations are lax; processes the carcasses in Mexico, where wages are extremely low; then ships the final product to Japan for consumption.

Over the last 20 years, thousands of independent poultry growers in the United States have lost their poultry operations as a few dozen large corporations have taken over the nation's chicken production. Similar attrition has occurred in every sector of agriculture. As a result, less than 4 percent of the U.S. population lives on farms anymore, down from 30 percent in 1920. Like Native Americans, farmers have become a small, forgotten minority who are seeing their way of life destroyed. Forced to move to the cities, many find only unemployment and despair.

THE TRANSFORMATION of agriculture has been fueled by a combination of government policy and consumer apathy. Tax loopholes and farm program incentives have favored large corporate agribusinesses. Tyson Foods, for instance, with 1988 sales of more than $1.9 billion, was able to avoid paying any income taxes at all from 1981 to 1985.

Consumers, meanwhile, have focused on paying the lowest possible price for their food while ignoring the broader issues involved in how their food is produced. Yet the food supplied by corporate agribusiness is increasingly hazardous.

For example, approximately 5,000 deaths per year in the United States result from salmonella, a bacterium that spreads rapidly in the huge, crowded chicken factories where most of the nation's chicken and eggs are produced. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 40 percent of the nation's chickens are infected with the deadly bacterium, which is transmitted to humans when chicken or eggs are not thoroughly cooked.

Adopting a meatless diet will not protect you from dangers in your food, either. In a report issued last year, the General Accounting Office concluded that up to one-third of the imported fruits and vegetables seized by the Customs Service because they contained pesticide residues that exceeded allowable U.S. levels ended up on grocery shelves anyway.

OBVIOUSLY, WE NEED GREATER accountability on the part of food corporations. That's difficult to achieve, however, when these corporations operate across national boundaries, beyond the control of any single government—and when the companies involved are so huge that their annual sales exceed the gross national product (GNP) of many countries. For instance, Philip Morris, the largest consumer-goods company in the world after having taken over Kraft and General Foods, had 1990 gross annual sales of $44 billion, a figure that exceeds the GNP of Israel, Portugal, or the Philippines.

Concentration of power is always frightening, but particularly so when it involves food. Today, half of our nation's food comes from only the largest 4 percent of the farms, many of them run by large corporations that value profits above health and nutrition. Given that food, unlike cars, radios, or designer clothes, is a necessity that people cannot choose to forego, one wonders how long democracy will last as the food system becomes increasingly consolidated. As author Wendell Berry has written, "Political freedom means little within a totalitarian economy."

Indeed, less than 25 giant corporations now supply most of the items on American grocery shelves. That's not immediately obvious given the dizzying variety of food products on display. However, during the "merger mania" of the 1980s, as leveraged buyouts and corporate mergers became everyday occurrences, control of hundreds of food brands and labels was quickly acquired by a handful of corporations.

ConAgra, a conglomerate whose annual sales exceed the GNP of the entire country of Ecuador, is an interesting case in point. Since 1980, ConAgra, which started out as a grain- and poultry-processing company, has acquired Armour, Swift, and Monfort Meats, along with giant Beatrice Foods, which in turn controls Hunt-Wesson and many other brands. Originator of Healthy Choice frozen dinners, ConAgra has also bought out Banquet, Morton, Patio, and several other lines, making it the nation's top distributor of ready-to-eat frozen foods.

But consumer brands are only part of the ConAgra empire. ConAgra is also the No. 1 flour miller in the United States; the No. 2 meatpacker; the No. 2 chicken processor, after Tyson; and the No. 1 turkey producer. The conglomerate processes pet foods, deli goods, dairy products, and edible oils; it controls distribution companies, retail chains, and even a tire company. ConAgra is also a major distributor of animal feeds and fertilizers, and as of 1990, it was the United States' leading distributor of agricultural pesticides—causing one to wonder, perhaps, about the company's commitment to food safety.

ConAgra provides a good example of what economists call "vertical integration," which occurs when a company owns or controls operations at many different levels of production. In terms of the food chain, ConAgra is integrated from the bottom—consisting of farm inputs such as fertilizer and animal feed—all the way to the top—represented by the microwaveable chicken dinner in the grocery store freezer case.

Vertical integration has had a tremendous impact on family farmers. When farmers must both purchase their inputs from and sell their products to the same company, they are at the company's mercy, especially since companies typically charge high prices for inputs and pay low prices for crops. If the resulting squeeze is tight enough, farmers go bankrupt. In fact, as hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their family farms during the 1980s, ConAgra and other large traders and processors reported record profits.

Another problem for farmers is that there are fewer and fewer buyers to choose from. Just six companies control 85 percent of the world's grain trade. Nearly 80 percent of the beef in the United States is slaughtered by only three meatpackers. With so few outlets for their livestock and crops, farmers are forced to accept however low a price the processors wish to pay.

Indeed, from a $2.59 box of breakfast cereal, the farmer who grew the grain in it typically receives about three cents. The remaining $2.56 covers processing, storage, transportation, packaging, and marketing gimmicks.

Surely there must be an alternative.

AS DAWN BREAKS OVER Fairplain Farm, Lynn Byczynski and her husband, Dan Nagengast, are already hard at work picking vegetables. Before noon they must gather everything that's ready to be picked in their four-acre organic vegetable garden and sort it into bags for their customers in nearby Topeka.

In an arrangement the farm couple calls a "subscription market garden," 80 households have each made a commitment to purchase a 1/80th share of the garden's weekly yield each week of the growing season. On Saturdays, Dan hauls a truckload of produce from the farm to several delivery points in the city.

Every week brings new surprises depending on what's ready in the garden. This week, each customer's grab bag will include lettuce, spinach, peas, beets, Swiss chard, and a variety of herbs. It will also contain a newsletter offering an update on the garden activities, along with cooking tips and some natural history or folklore about this week's vegetables and herbs. In giving the plants a natural, cultural, and culinary context, Lynn hopes her customers will find their food not only tasty but fun.

Customers who desire an even more tangible connection with where their food comes from are invited to come out to the farm and help with the field work in exchange for extra food. The opportunity for city dwellers to get out to the countryside and dig their fingers into warm, rich soil is one of the chief attractions of what has come to be known as community-supported agriculture (CSA).

Fairplain Farm is just one variation on the CSA theme. While Dan and Lynn allow their customers to pay on a weekly basis, most CSAs require participants to make an upfront capital investment before the growing season begins. Thus, consumers commit themselves to sharing the financial risks that traditionally have been borne by the farmer alone. If a hailstorm or late freeze or drought damages the crop, the losses will be shared by all. If good weather produces a bumper crop, all will share in the bounty.

"The CSA movement is spreading like wildfire," Lynn says. "There's a real hunger for good food, food that's getting difficult to find through the usual channels such as the supermarket. We're seeing an increased awareness that locally produced food is more environmentally sound." And because corporate intermediaries are eliminated, CSA farmers, unlike most conventional farmers, are paid a fair price for their work.

At Fairplain Farm and the more than 400 other CSAs that have sprung up in the United States since the concept was introduced just six years ago, the age-old link between farmer and consumer is being restored.

IN MANY CITIES AROUND the country, that link is forged every week or even daily at farmers' markets. Unlike CSAs, farmers' markets are not a new idea. However, in recent years they've been gaining tremendously in popularity. Although they're less convenient than one-stop shopping at the supermarket, many consumers find that the extra trouble of making a trip across town is far outweighed by the benefits of buying fresh produce directly from the farmer. Some customers even develop ongoing relationships with particular growers.

Urban dwellers who would like to become growers themselves can join a community garden. Even in congested inner cities, community gardens are transforming vacant lots into verdant cornucopias. Individuals or families may plant whatever vegetables they like in their own assigned plots, but all participants are asked to help with certain shared community tasks.

Of course, there will always be staples that even avid gardeners would find it difficult to grow in adequate quantities, such as wheat for flour. Rather than purchase these at the supermarket, more and more people are opting to join food cooperatives, which often specialize in organically grown or minimally processed foods. Co-op members typically make a commitment to volunteer a certain number of hours per week or month working at the co-op store in exchange for discounts on food.

Another popular arrangement is the "buying club," in which members pool their orders of such goods as beans, grains, dried fruits, and spices so that they can enjoy the price savings that come with ordering in bulk. When the shipment arrives, usually once a month, members gather to divide the bulk goods into the appropriate amounts for each household.

Since they weigh and package the goods themselves, members recapture the large portion of their food dollar that normally goes for packaging and advertising. These savings leave more money available to cover the often higher cost of organically grown foods. Thus, food dollars go toward real nutritional quality, rather than for a pretty (and often wasteful) package.

Most cooperatives and buying clubs obtain their goods from suppliers who share a commitment to supporting sustainable, chemical-free farming. Not only are such arrangements beneficial for consumers desiring safe, nutritious foods, but they are necessary to preserve family farming as a way of life. As corporate agribusiness destroys more and more farms, many farmers are deciding that their futures are more secure if they bypass the corporations and market their products through alternative channels such as cooperatives.

FOR THESE EFFORTS TO be successful, there must be sufficient consumer demand, and that sometimes requires education. At the Community Mercantile cooperative in Lawrence, Kansas, nutrition educator Nancy O'Connor shows people how to cook nutritious meals using organically grown foods from local farmers. Of course, as some of her students point out, cooking from scratch takes time. But O'Connor, who is employed full-time and is the mother of two young sons, blames much of the "no-time-to-cook" mentality on television watching.

"TV robs your time," O'Connor asserts. "Our family doesn't own one; that's how we find time that other families don't. For us, food preparation is a time of family togetherness." Evidently, what provides the best physical nourishment offers spiritual nourishment as well.

It's been said that in a market economy, we vote with our dollars. In a very real sense, we cast our vote for the type of food system, the type of land use, and ultimately, the type of society we want every time we sit down at the dinner table. We can vote for continued corporate domination of our food, and hence, of our bodies and minds—or we can vote for true economic democracy, a communion of equals in which both the Earth and our bodies are treated with reverence.

Kathryn Collmer was a free-lance writer in Minneapolis, Kansas and wrote frequently on agricultural, environmental, and social justice issues when this article appeared.