Season 2, Episode 7: A Conclusion of SOrts
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
It's time to admit that I came to the season with some firmly held beliefs that I expected to confirm. But what I learned was far more storied and complicated than I had assumed.
In this episode of Was Is Could Be: An inconclusive conclusion.
With Special Guests:
Michael J. Lansing is Associate Professor of History at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. A historian of the modern United States, his current book project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism—a history of factory-processed grains and the hidden logic that drives contemporary food systems. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as commentaries in MinnPost, BillMoyers.com, and Zócalo Public Square.
Chris and Sarah Ficken are the farmers behind New Moon Farm. Whether it is milking the cows, cutting hay, weeding the garden, or balancing the checkbook, you will find one of them behind each and every task. The day after their wedding, they put an offer in on the farm, and a few months later it was theirs. Since December of 2012, they’ve been working hard to rehabilitate the land and the buildings. Whether it is jacking up the old barn by hand, building their milking facility from bare ground, pounding posts and running fence for their cows, or reclaiming old fields with a chainsaw and some good friends, they strive to mold their farm to fit their dream of environmental, social, and financial sustainability. Check out NY Farm Basket to buy some amazing goods from Chris and Sarah!
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Liz Russell:
Do you think that those industrial food systems are being unfairly vilified?
Liz Russell Narration:It's time to admit that I came to the season with some firmly held beliefs that I expected to confirm. Most specifically, I believe that industrialized food was inherently terrible for everything from human health, to the environment, to food security. And I wanted to talk about how we used to eat to prove that the smaller food chains, the local farming, the subsistence level living was better for us in the long run, despite the many inconveniences. But what I learned as you heard in each episode was far more storied and complicated than I had assumed.
[🎶Theme music🎶]
Liz Russell Narration:
I suspect that many people make my same mistake. Assume that the story and the solution is easy. But with every interview, I was learning that the world was never more simple. It was just as complicated, but in very different ways. I often ask my interviewees to reflect on my assumptions.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
I think it's really complicated. I think it is true that for many people, food that is fresh, and remember freshness in 2020 is largely dependent on mechanical refrigeration, it's technology that allows for fresh food. It's not some kind of back to nature thing. It's really important to understand that that freshness is actually a signal of modernity. It's a marker of the ways in which we live in a profoundly technological and modernized world. But fresh food, food that is healthy, food that is grown or made without chemicals or with less processing, may indeed be more nutritious. The notion of whole foods, not as the name for a supermarket chain, but as a kind of philosophy of food, it may indeed be true that some of that food is better for us. It is also true that food that is fresh can be harmful.
Well, I mean, we go back to that story from before the end of the 19th century and, you know, food has to be processed, um, unless you're on a raw foods diet, of course, food generally is processed one way or the another. So the question is how is it processed and who is it processed for and who benefits from the processing? And so I think it's really easy to critique industrial food. I think a lot of people critique it in terms of nutrition, in terms of human health. I think the, the broader critique that could be made of much of the industrial food system is who's making money off of selling this essential human need. You know, all the organizers and activists that became really worried in the 1990s about water and the fact that large corporations were selling water, which is another vital element for human life.
The same thing has been happening with food, a vital element for life for 150, 175 years. So if you wanna be critical of industrial food because of the large profits made, and because of the number of people that go to bed hungry every night in the United States, it seems to me that there is some really important exploration that could be done on that topic. When you start to think about the quality of the food itself, I think it's more complicated. So for instance, people like Michael Pollan, and there are a number of food writers that are at the center of this food movement, they've done really incredible work. They often talk about individual choice, like, as a consumer, you should go to the farmer's market instead of your local supermarket. And that's all well and good except individual choices aren't going to change whole systems, even if you and I decide to participate in a local food movement and we maybe make a special trip to the farmer's market, or we go and we get our chicken at a very specific place, or we only buy organic local eggs or so on and so forth.
All these kinds of individual consumer choices we make, we're actually not changing a system or a structure we're kind of just opting out of it. It's also a form of privilege, right? You have to be middle class or upper middle class to be part of the food movement and people who do work in food justice and environmental justice will be among the first to point that out. There is one scholar that's even suggested that the food movement in the 1990s, in the 2000s and 2010s is largely a movement about class anxiety, about how wages have remained stagnant in the United States. Since 1970, costs have continued to expand, the middle class is shrinking, what better marker of being middle class than saying, Hey, have you been to that new Vietnamese restaurant lately? They use only local purveyors. It's really tasty food and it's authentic, whatever authentic means.
These are all kinds of forms of enacting class and class relationships. So it's really complicated. It's really complicated if it were possible to imagine industrial process foods that served more people in better ways and healthier ways. And we could kind of harness who is profiting from the sale of that food, maybe industrial food wouldn't be so bad. So what is the critique about? Is the critique about the quality of the food? Is the critique about the scale? A person who says, well, corporations are the problem. So I don't like industrial food because it's made by corporations. That's a different critique than, I don't like industrial food because, because it's not healthy for me because they add all these chemicals. Both might have some validity, but it gets really complicated very quickly.
Liz Russell:
Is there anything that individuals can learn from the history of food that they can apply to their lives to make sure they are critiquing accurately and kind of making the best choices for themselves based on their set of values?
Michael Lansing (Historian):
I don't think that there's a set of guidelines, but I think there are things that a person can think about as an individual that might help them navigate this very complicated terrain, regardless of who they are or where they come from. These guidelines would include, what do you want to be like health wise? They would include, what do you want the rest of society to be like? And what do you want the rest of society to look like health wise? In other words, I would encourage people to think about food and the kind of consumer choices they make about food in ways that make them think systemically about food. So instead of local food, what if you think about it in terms of food justice? It's a slightly different framing. It's a slightly different lens, but it's a really important shift that a person can make is food justice supporting this local farmer who's trying to start an organic farm in a suburb that's an hour away from where you live in an urban area. Is food justice about ensuring that people who are on federal support programs for food have access to fruits and vegetables on a regular basis. Is it about letting other people make choices that are culturally specific to them to let them do what they want, even if we might judge them as problematic.
These are the kinds of things that I think people really need to dig into and think carefully about is not just food and relationship to themselves, but food and relationship to the broader society and who wins and who loses. And if you see a certain group of people winning in the food system and a certain people, a group of people losing in the food system, think about why that is. So I wanna say like, yes, these individual experiences and choices are really important, but we need to think about it in these broader terms, in these deeper terms, that the one consumer choice I might make tomorrow, when I go to my local food, co-op may not be producing the change that I think it should, or that I actually want.
How does that help the person who can't afford to shop in that food co-op because food is tied to all these other things. Food, as I've suggested in the last hour is tied to factories. It's tied to demographics, it's tied to human health. It's tied to chemistry. Food is tied to profitability. Food is tied to trust. Food is tied to values. And so anytime we make a choice about food, we need to remember that we're part of a system and that's a system that's not just ecological, but a system that's also about economics and a system that's about, or should be about, I would argue questions of justice.
Liz Russell Narration:
Justice became a common theme in some of my other discussions as well.
Sarah Ficken (Dairy Farmer):
I think that broadly, the challenges and issues with the food system cannot be addressed without also addressing the drivers of inequity in our country. I really feel like we need to address the larger picture. There should not be food deserts. There should not be as many hungry people as there are in the midst of plenty. And I think it's really important going forward, thinking of the food system or the issues in the food system, both as symptomatic and as a product of these larger questions and thinking as we're trying to solve broader societal issues, whether it's healthcare or systemic racism, figuring out the ways that the food system both supports white supremacy, systematic racism, as well as also figuring out ways in which we can use the food system to dismantle those things.
Liz Russell Narration:
I ask Sarah to expand on this relationship between farming, our decisions as a consumer and the issues in our country today.
Sarah Ficken (Dairy Farmer):
I don't think that we can, you know, dismantle systemic racism tomorrow, but I do think that we can all take little steps today that slowly build our equitable world. And I think that both how we think about our food and how we source our food are really key players in dismantling the larger issues that our country faces. If you know your farmer and you know where your food is coming from, you know how they're treating their employees, you know whether or not they allow their employees to send their kids to school, whether or not they're paying their employees fairly. And you can get just a general gestalt of the farm, and you can decide if there's someplace you wanna spend your money. And in that way, you can sort of reward people who are doing the right thing and not reward people who are doing the wrong thing.
And when, you know, when you know your farmer, you can make that decision. Whereas when you are just going to the supermarket and buying a generic tomato or generic eggs, or milk, you're sort of just supporting the whole system, both the good players and the bad players. We have a lot of issues. We, the big we, Chris and I don't have any employees, but broadly speaking ag has a huge issue, both with land ownership and historical land ownership, as well as actions that the federal government has taken through lending practices through FSA that have really wound up with black people who have lost their share of land significantly over the last hundred years.
Chris Ficken (Dairy Farmer):
In 1906, 14% of land owners were black, and it's less than 2% now.
Sarah Ficken (Dairy Farmer):
And a lot of that has been driven by really some predatory lending practices on the part of the farm services agency. The challenge around land is…
Chris Ficken (Dairy Farmer):
It's twofold in that when there's ways to drive black people out of business. And then when a black person applies to FSA for something, if their application goes in the circular file, then you just eliminate them that way.
Sarah Ficken (Dairy Farmer):
The 1619 Podcast, I think from the New York times is a really good read on that. And then, I mean, there's just issues with the fact that this land didn't originally belong to us. We're all farming on indigenous land and how the citizens of the United States of America came to own that land is not nice. It's not a good history. I mean, and I'm not necessarily saying, oh, well, we should just disappear from the land. I don't necessarily know that that's a viable option, but how do we make that right? And I don't know how we do that. And I also think that there are labor issues, there are land access issues, and then there's also just food access issues. It's not necessarily profitable to go sell your product into communities that have been redlined, and it's not necessarily even possible to send your food into communities that have been redlined because many of them are also food deserts. And so trying to think through like on the farm level, well, how can we make, food more accessible? How can we… you know, New York Farm Basket isn't going to solve all of the inequities that there are within the system, but how can we make a deliberate effort to not just profit off of them, I think is a big part of the question as well.
Liz Russell Narration:
So what does this all mean for you and I? I think Michael Lansing gave me the brightest outlook.
Liz Russell:
A world that's black and white would be a lot easier, but if that's the right answer, that's the right answer, you know?
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Oh, it sure would. And by the way, what I've found over the last three or four years of studying food and the history of food closely is that in this realm, whenever any American starts to talk about food, no matter who we are or where we come from, things fall into these black and white categorizations very quickly. There's a lot of good and evil in food. And of course the real world is just more complex than that. And food is no exception. And I think just trying to be more complex when you are thinking about, and living in and entering into the world of food is a huge step to kind of reject black and whites and say, yeah, that might be true, but what about this? Not as a point to like, you know, ruin your friends night out to dinner. <laugh>
Not to kind of make you feel completely depressed every time you go to the grocery store, right? You don't want it to become paralyzing, but to say, well, there are upsides and downsides to this particular choice or to this particular structure, just like it's true of any aspect of human experience. So getting away from binaries of good and bad, and this is black, and this is white. And that's that I think if we could just do that as a society in the United States, we'd be moving towards a much better place in relationship to food and bodily health.
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Liz Russell Narration:
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to season two of Was Is Could Be. This season felt impossible at times, and would've never survived without some help. So many thanks to my editors at Sound Advice Services who edited all of this audio, which made this whole thing possible. Many thanks to Mia Sutton at Mia Management Co., who's my business manager, and makes all things possible and really is more important to me than my right hand, frankly. To every single interviewee who took time out of their lives to share their knowledge with me, please support them in every way you can. You can find their info and individual episodes on my Instagram. To every person who I didn't interview, but tried to, thank you for putting up with my emails and for putting up with a terrible schedule that I have and for at least pointing me in new directions when you could. To Alice Patterson and Loving My Company, who creates all of my photos and has followed this journey every step of the way with tons of support, thank you. To Brad for being willing to buy this farm and do probably more than half the work if we’re being honest. To every supporter and fan who asks about this podcast, hits like on Instagram, et cetera, you make this exciting. And finally to Jen Liddy, who's working with me on another business adventure, but has been my sanity through all of this, including helping me prioritize, getting this done.
So thank you to all of you for being here, for listening, for supporting in your different ways. This would not have been possible without you. If you're still interested in learning more and watching this food journey, stay tuned for some bonus episodes. And if you wanna learn more about my food journey or continue to follow it after the season is over, follow me at @itslizrussell on Instagram, or check out https://www.itslizrussell.com/podcast-blog-transcripts/. You can also check out all my writing there. Thanks everybody.