Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 47

The system starts with agriculture, which is, simply put, an ecological strategy whereby Homo sapiens replaces native ecosystems with specialized fields in order to increase food supplies. A farm is, in ecological terms, a structured habitat in which humans take advantage of solar energy and the photosynthesis of plants to feed their families and others, and sometimes to feed livestock, which in turn feed humans. And farming works. In the last ten thousand years, human population has increased from a few million to more than six billion.

The American food system developed slowly, evolving from a wide variety of Native American methods practiced at the time of European contact to the full-fledged industrial agriculture of the present.

The first American food revolution came in the Columbian Exchange. When Columbus arrived in the Americas he didn’t “discover” the world that Indians already knew perfectly well. But he and his successors did find foodstuffs that they sent back to Europe, with astounding culinary and cultural effects. Potatoes sailed to Europe where they became a staple of the peasant classes. In Russia, they were distilled into vodka. In Ireland, they supported the population until the Great Famine, when the lack of food drove millions of Irish immigrants to North America. Tomatoes also traveled to Europe, where they became an essential part of southern Italian cuisine. Any college student who eats a pizza topped with tomato sauce is eating one of the results of this first food revolution.⁷

On this side of the Atlantic, the Columbian Exchange created a whole new world. It brought new crops like wheat, oats, and barley, and a barnyard full of domesticated animals—cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, horses, and burros. European colonists adopted maize, a native plant, and added it to their inventory of grains. More importantly, they also brought their assumptions about agriculture (that land wasn’t improved or productive unless it was under constant cultivation) and private property (that land could be owned by individuals instead of shared by tribes). Most devastatingly, they brought disease, which decimated Native American populations and ecological traditions. The result was a radical remaking of the American landscape, from cultivated wildness to cultivated domestication.⁸

The second American food revolution came in the nineteenth century, with the transportation revolution and the development of national and international markets for commodities like corn, wheat, beef, and pork. Chicago became the hub of a new food system that included ranches in the West, farms in the Midwest, grain elevators along everextending railroad lines, stockyards and slaughtering plants in the city, and a Board of Trade that stimulated the flows of commodities from farm to fork. For consumers, the result was a diet of great variety, delivered via steamship and steam engine from the four corners of the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, as historian William Cronon suggests, “The Iowa farm family who raised corn for cattle purchased from Wyoming and who lived in a farmhouse made of Wisconsin pine clothed themselves with Mississippi cotton that Massachusetts factory workers had woven into fabric, worked their fields with a plow manufactured in Illinois from steel produced in Pennsylvania, and ended their Sunday meal by drinking Venezuelan coffee after enjoying an apple pie made on an Ohio stove from the fruit of a backyard orchard mixed with sugar from Cuba and cinnamon from Ceylon.” In a short period, local people learned to expect global trade that offered such delectable results that few people worried about any possible side effects.⁹

One of the significant side effects of the emerging American food system was distancing. Railroads overcame the vast distances of the continent, but at the same time they distanced urban consumers from the sources of their sustenance. In meatpacking, for example, the new system kept the killing of animals far from the ultimate consumers, who increasingly bought their meat in branded packages. “In the packers’ world,” says Cronon, “it was easy not to remember that eating was a moral act inextricably bound to killing. Such was the second nature that a corporate order had imposed on the American landscape. Forgetfulness was among the least noticed and most important of its by-products.” This forgetfulness was an essential part of the American food system, and of the moral ecology of everyday life. We still inhabit this moral landscape of ignorance and forgetfulness. And sometimes our ignorance is not just what we don’t know, it’s what we know and choose to ignore.¹⁰

The third revolution in the American food system occurred after World War II. Left with an excess of wartime manufacturing capability, scientists converted wartime research on munitions into research on chemical fertilizers and studies of nerve gas to studies of pesticide production. So the “chemicalization” of farms quickly complemented the mechanization of agriculture. The result was huge monocultures of crops and animals, planted and cultivated by tractors and other machines, protected from natural predators by chemicals, and refined and reassembled by processors into what we call food. The number of farmers declined as the size and specialization of farms grew, with destructive effects on rural communities and culture. In the process, Americans reduced the biodiversity of farms and the biodiversity of their diet, so that almost two-thirds of our calories now come directly or indirectly from four crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice. As a result, when we sit down to eat, we’re consuming several centuries of food revolutions, reflecting radical and largely unsustainable changes in our relationship with nature, from seeds and soil to the food we pile on our plates.¹¹