Industrial farming

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

How Big Business Feeds You Hazardous Food
Toxic to the Tongue
by Lenora Todaro

Village Voice, July 31 - August 6, 2002

Frontier communities had a quick and certain remedy for anyone who poisoned 
the town's well: they hanged the son-of-a-bitch. Today, though, when the ag 
economists draw up their efficiency equations, well poisoning is not even 
marked down as a cost charged to the poisoners?instead, it's dismissed as 
an "externality." Did people get breast cancer? Did the pesticides run off 
into the bay and shut down the fishing industry? Was a farmworker's baby 
born with birth defects? Hey, pal, stuff happens, life ain't fair, not our 
fault, get out of the way of progress . . . and if you're so prissy about 
poisons, maybe you oughta start boiling your water.
?Texas radio commentator Jim Hightower, from Fatal Harvest

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To step into the gallery of photos in Fatal Harvest, a most unusual 
coffee-table book, is akin to spiraling downward into Dante's nine circles 
of hell. Avarice and deceit take on the characters not of Dante's Malacoda 
or Geryon, but of industrial agriculture's multinational corporations: 
Monsanto, Philip Morris, Archer Daniels Midland. The book tells the story 
of how in the years after World War II, food-producing corporations found a 
renewed purpose for the noxious chemicals developed to protect soldiers 
from insects (including DDT and malathion): As pesticides, they would 
expand industrial agriculture. For decades these corporations doused the 
soil on massive farms with these toxins, with the aim of growing more food, 
more efficiently, and reaping vast profits. In the meanwhile, they have 
often knowingly and gradually poisoned countless generations of plants, 
animals, and humans.

Fatal Harvest is an oversized handbook for those who would fight back. 
Packed with statistics and anecdotes, both verbal and visual, this 
collaboration between design and prose makes concrete the problems of 
industrial agriculture, and dramatizes the disconnect between what we eat 
and how it is created. There is some fine writing here, with essays by 
prominent environmental thinkers such as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Jerry 
Mander, and Vandana Shiva. The essays are short, but not light; some are 
preachy, some shocking. But Fatal Harvest is not merely strongly worded. 
The 11 3/4-inch by 12 1/4-inch book literally illustrates America's current 
food crisis, with some 250 sweeping photographs of pesticide-soaked 
industrial farms, rivers filled with chemical runoff, and the like. And it 
contrasts those bleak images with more familiar coffee-table fare?lushly 
diverse organic farms, the 50-odd types of tomato you'll never see at Food 
Emporium.

That the politics of food, and in particular, the organic food movement, 
are moving steadily forward into the mainstream consciousness is evidenced 
by the bestseller status conferred upon two excellent recent books, The 
Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, 
and by the decisions of a growing number of supermarket chains to offer 
organic foods.

Fatal Harvest is divided into seven parts. Of particular interest is Part 
Two, which provides a rousing response to myths perpetuated by 
multinational agricultural corporations. A sample:

Large-scale industrial farms help feed the nearly "800 million people who 
go hungry each day." No, argues Fatal Harvest. "World hunger is not created 
by lack of food but by poverty and landlessness, which deny people access 
to food."

Industrial food is safe, healthy, and nutritious. No, argues Fatal Harvest. 
"Since 1989, overall pesticide use has risen by about 8 percent, or 60 
million pounds . . . in 1998, the FDA found pesticide residues in over 35 
percent of the food tested . . . the average hamburger . . . may receive 
the equivalent of millions of chest X rays in an attempt to temporarily 
remove any potential bacterial contaminants."

Biotechnology will solve the problems of industrial agriculture. No, argues 
Fatal Harvest. Genetically modified foods and high-tech, 
pesticide-resistant crops will "consolidate control of the world's food 
supply in the hands of a few large corporations . . . destroy biodiversity 
and food security; and drive self-sufficient farmers off their land."

Part Three of Fatal Harvest speaks to the eyes with large-format pictorials 
that document the illusion of choice (you can buy beefsteak tomatoes at the 
supermarkets, but how about fresh-picked Golden Pandoras and Early Girls?) 
and contrast the appearance of industrial and organic farms. To emphasize 
the difference, two odd but effective postage-stamp-sized graphic eyeballs 
look back at the reader from sidebars on the outer edges of each page. In 
the iris of the "industrial eye," one sees long, deep straight lines of a 
one-crop field; in the other, the "agricultural eye," one sees zigzag 
patches and tufts of a many-crop field. The eyes, superimposed upon 
full-page photos of produce fields (industrial and organic) project a bad 
trip versus a good trip, a barcode pattern versus a gently rolling 
landscape, a zoned-out state of mind versus an alert one. The sidebars 
themselves summarize information from previous essays. In one example, 
"industrial eye" points out that Florida, the nation's top tomato producer, 
was cited by the USDA for bathing tomatoes in 5 million to 8 million pounds 
of methyl bromide (a toxic nerve gas) in one year alone. After that, 
tomatoes are dunked in paraquat and Diazinon. Then the tomatoes arrive at 
the grocery store; finally they lie, tempting and succulent in your 
salad?until you eat one, and notice that it is rubbery and flavorless.

In this way Fatal Harvest drives home its message: Progress is about 
diversity, not monoculture; small, local farms will ultimately be safer and 
more efficient than large, industrial ones.

If organic farming has failed in any way, Fatal Harvest doesn't let on. It 
remains steadfastly optimistic. Parts Four through Six deal with 
biodiversity and wildlife and the social and economic impact of industrial 
agriculture. Part Seven looks forward to ways organic farming can mitigate 
the problems created by industrial agriculture, and the book ends with a 
note on hope by Wendell Berry?but how can you feel hopeful when the power 
of industrial agriculture mutes numerous attempts to properly label 
genetically modified foods, squeezes out the organic farmer, and appears to 
have little concern for the rising incidences of cancer among Americans? 
It's hard, but the point of the book is to keep demanding change armed with 
the information provided. What Fatal Harvest does best is make the 
invisible visible by transforming numbing statistics and hard-to-imagine 
pesticides into something concrete that the reader sees with many eyes.




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