Getting It Straight Before We Eat Ourselves to Death: From Food System to Foodshed in the 21st Century

Society and Natural Resources 9: 93-96

Jack Kloppenburg and Sharon Lezberg University of Wisconsin-Madison

One of our favorite cartoons of the past few years is one in which a young boy watches a Willie Nelson concert on television while his father reads from a newspaper the headlines of which report famine and starvation in Africa. Perplexed, the boy says to his father, "Now let me get this straight. There was a Live Aid concert 'cause there isn't enough food and this is a Farm Aid concert 'cause farmers produce too much food." How can it be, the boy is really asking, that we live in a world in which the food production "problem" appears in some places and social contexts as scarcity, and in others as overabundance?

One implication of this simple question is that there is a connection between these twin moments of scarcity and surplus. And, of course, there is a connection. When consumers from the overdeveloped North bite into a banana, they bite into a chain of production processes that links them directly not only to landlessness and labor conditions on plantations in Costa Rica or Venezuela, but also to the misuse of pesticides and the destruction of tropical forests (Hecht and Cockburn 1990). The production processes that bring food to our own plates often involve both the displacement of small and subsistence farmers and the replacement of biologically complex landscapes with monocultures, thus undermining both local food security and biodiversity. Even though some displaced farmers may find employment on plantations or in the industrial sector, the need to purchase food--often imported and high-priced--can actually be associated with declining nutritional status in the Third World (Wimberley, 1991).

Though the impact of agricultural development on natural resources in developing nations has received much attention in recent years, the environmental and social effects of agricultural production in the North are less well recognized but similarly problematic. The technologies that have provided an apparent superabundance of food in the United States have also facilitated surface and groundwater pollution, the salinization of irrigated land, soil erosion, the depletion of fossil fuels, wetland and wildlife habitat destruction, loss of genetic diversity, and social dislocation (National Research Council 1989). The seventy five cents of every dollar spent on food that goes to processors, packagers, shippers, advertisers and retailers is a rough measure of the additional costs that processing, shipping, packaging and disposal of foodstuffs imposes on the environment (Orr 1991).

How we eat is a major determinant of how natural resources are used and misused. The global sourcing increasingly being practiced by the food industry has resulted in the emergence of the "global steer" (Sanderson 1986), the global broccoli plant, the global grape, as well as the "global car". And since the 20 percent of people who live in the North consume 80 percent of global production, it ought to be apparent that should our profligate and destructive patterns of consumption continue, we are in danger of eating ourselves to death as we are already eating the poor of the South to death. If we are to move toward a sustainable future in the coming century, patterns of food production, processing, distribution and consumption must be recognized as natural resource issues.

We agree with Frances Moore Lappé (1991:8) that what we eat is an effective "entry point" to the much larger issues of the global community. We all eat. The preparation and sharing of food is one of the clearest expressions of the care and affection we show to one another. Food is still wrapped round with family, ethnic, and community traditions that remind us of who we are, where we are, and what we value. Food is closely connected with the health and vitality of our bodies. Food represents our most intimate link with the land and with the other beings with whom we share that land. In the production, purchase, and preparation of food we yet retain substantial capacity to disengage from some of the most damaging components of the global economy and create alternatives.

Recognizing the ecological and social destructiveness of the globally-based food system, a variety of analysts have suggested an alternative founded on respect for the integrity of particular socio-geographic places (e.g., Berry 1992; Crouch 1993; Dahlberg 1993; Friedmann 1993; Kemmis 1990; Kneen 1989). While there are differences among these approaches, those differences are less important than the degree to which a common vision is shared. Counterposed to the global food system in such analyses are self-reliant, locally or regionally based food systems comprised of diversified farms using sustainable practices to supply fresher, more nutritious foodstuffs to small-scale processors and a broad range of consumers to whom producers are linked by the bonds of community as well as economy. Rather than rely solely upon necessary but weak and uneven governmental regulatory mechanisms for the protection of workers, consumers, and the environment, mutual responsibility and stewardship are seen as the basis for community-based regulation. The landscape is understood as part of that community and, as such, human activity is shaped to conform to knowledge and experience of what the natural characteristics of that place do or do not permit.

Bioregionalists such as Gary Snyder have championed the utility of the concept of the "watershed" as an organizing framework for thought and action directed to understanding and implementing appropriate and respectful human interaction with particular pieces of land (Snyder 1992). In a creative analogue to the watershed, permaculturist Arthur Getz has recently revived the term "foodshed" to facilitate thought about "where our food is coming from, and how it is getting to us (Getz 1991)."

We find the "foodshed" to be a particularly rich and evocative metaphor; but it is much more than metaphor. Like its analogue the watershed, the foodshed can serve as a conceptual and methodological unit of analysis that provides a frame for action as well as thought (Kloppenburg et al., forthcoming). While the corporations which are the principal beneficiaries of a global food system now dominate the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food, alternatives are emerging that together could form the basis for foodshed development. Just as many farmers are recognizing the social and environmental advantages to sustainable agriculture, so are many consumers coming to appreciate the benefits of fresh and sustainably produced food. Sustainable producers and sustainable eaters are being linked through such innovative arrangements as community supported agriculture and farmers markets. Alternative producers, alternative consumers, and alternative small entrepreneurs are rediscovering community and finding common ground in municipal and community food councils (Dahlberg 1993, Toronto Food Policy Council 1993).

A methodological tool that appears to be particularly effective for uncovering the environmental and social costs of agricultural production and for elaborating the nature/society nexus in food is "commodity chain analysis" in which particular products are traced from point of production to point of consumption (Gereffi et. al. 1994). Commodity chain analysis illuminates the complex interaction of production processes and the environment at multiple levels of organization. The method allows each commodity to tell its own story--a story of travels across vast distances, of transformations in the landscape, of environmental impacts, of power relations among human actors, of the effects of rapidly changing technologies, and of the linkages between the local and the global. Through commodity chain analysis we can link the consumption of french fries with groundwater pollution in the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River Basin and the barrios of Hispanic factory workers (Egan 1994). From the imported Brazilian grapes available in Chicago's supermarkets can be teased out the story of unequal gender relations and increasing landlessness in the San Francisco river valley of northeastern Brazil (Collins 1995). Similarly instructive analyses have been accomplished for coffee (Durning and Ayres 1994), tomatoes (Salitan 1994), and shrimp (Hamilton 1994).

Examining commodity chains has the potential to catalyze action as well as analysis. What is eaten by the great majority of North Americans comes from a global everywhere, yet from nowhere that we know in particular. The distance from which our food comes represents our separation from the knowledge of how and by whom what we consume is produced, processed, and transported. If the production, processing, and transport of what we eat is destructive of the land and of human community--as it very often is--how can we understand the implications of our own participation in the global food system when those processes are located elsewhere and so are obscured from us? How can we act responsibly and effectively for change if we do not understand how the food system works and our own role within it?

By illuminating the concrete ways in which local food consumption is linked to global structures, commodity chain analysis can help elucidate how consumption choices in one place affect natural resource use and social conditions elsewhere. Such knowledge can provide the impetus for consumers to become more sustainable eaters. And just as eating globally obscures the negative impacts of food production, eating locally can catalyze positive local transformations. Recognition of one's residence within a foodshed can confer a sense of connection and responsibility to a particular locality. The foodshed can provide a place for us to ground ourselves in the biological and social realities of living on the land. A political economy of food is now well established (Bonanno et al. eds. 1994, Goodman et al. 1987). But perhaps we need a political ecology of food, which explicitly encompasses natural resources. Social scientists interested in natural resources have much to contribute to such an endeavor.

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