Next time you walk amidst the green spaces on Columbia’s campus, try this exercise. Envision every tree, shrub, vine, and flower as a food-producing plant. Soon you will realize that the quad’s potential to transform into an Edenic paradise blanketed by delicate peach trees, bulbous heads of cauliflower, voluptuous maroon tomatoes, creeping strawberry vines, leafy carrot tops, and, for the adventurous among you, giant pumpkins nesting in verdant garden plots. A far-fetched image, you say? Perhaps, but our current food landscape presents an equally absurd reality, one in which animals prepared for slaughter are so sick they can barely stand, farmers live in constant debt, and your apple is more likely to have traveled from Washington state than upstate New York.
If the facts of our industrial food system don’t strike you as flawed, consider the problems facing any large industrial operation: quality control, lack of social responsibility, abuse of power, and homogenization. Now apply those concerns to everything you ate yesterday, and you will begin to understand the weakness of a food system in which the person who planted your tomato inhabits a world alien to you, the consumer.
As a healthy, content diner with the ability to distinguish between eggplant and asparagus, why should you care whence your tomato came or, for that matter, whether Columbia grows ornamental shrubs instead of squash? As my classmate bluntly phrased it, “Some people care about organic food, but I think it’s for the rich people who shop at Whole Foods. I care about international poverty.” Her statement illustrates how the sustainable food movement is failing to reach a large part of the population due to misconceptions about what sustainable food is and why it is important.
First of all, sustainable food, meaning minimally processed food that is grown locally in an ethically and environmentally conscious manner, is not only for the elite. No just system is sustainable that relies upon the pocketbooks of a well-funded sliver of the population. Second, sustainable food is not a vegan or vegetarian movement aimed at rescuing chickens from the plates of omnivores or promoting a diet of raw broccoli and sunflower seeds grown on a commune. While you can find plenty of either—my favorite example being my immediate family, which has fed a vegan daughter while simultaneously raising steer for slaughter—the heart of the sustainable food movement resides in a category of its own that is neither a mediation of extremes nor an independent entity disconnected from other food systems.
Concerning my classmate’s suggestion that international poverty is a problem independent of food issues, I contend that no problem lies beyond the scope of food. The necessity of eating denies it. In fact, international poverty is one of the easiest problems to link to the ills of industrial agriculture in light of the horrendous wages paid to farm workers, an international aid system that discourages investment in agriculture among starving populations, and the concentration of food production in a small, corporate elite.
Beyond international poverty, food touches nearly every discipline. Besides the well-documented environmental and health effects of food production—such as deoxygenated ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico resulting from farm nitrogen runoff and the international rise in obesity—the problems of our food system affect immigration, international security, cultural and social activities, the economy, and education, as illustrated by the astrophysics major who can calculate the circumference of the planets but can’t cook spaghetti.
You needn’t look far to see the difficulties of producing and purchasing sustainable food today. Small-scale farmers in the U.S. work in a system set against them, one in which certification, processing, and distribution channels pander to economies-of-scale rather than enable a decent living. The consumer fares little better, but problems of the producers are problems of the consumer, as the recent recall of more than 143 million pounds of industrially produced beef demonstrates.
The size of the beef recall illustrates the fundamental problem with the current state of sustainable food: not enough of it. Although it is appealing to imagine we could solve the problem by converting all farms to organic production, the fact that you can now buy “organic” honey produced in Argentina at Westside Market illustrates how far the organic label has drifted from the philosophy from which it originated. The development of a sustainable food system requires changes in government policy, institutional behavior, and consumer participation in cooking, growing, and purchasing sustainable food. The benefits of a just food system abound—most notably better tasting, higher quality food—but will only develop through a cooperative effort from the cornfields of Nebraska to the concrete jungle of Manhattan.
When next skimming the grocery store aisles, or better yet, visiting the stalls at the farmers’ market, consider how your actions can contribute to the growing sustainable food movement. Knowing where your food comes from is the first step to promoting a healthy food system. From there, imagine how you and others can help develop mechanisms that allow sustainable food to take root. As you walk around campus reflecting on Columbia’s potential for growing food, bear in mind that endemic problems require creative minds... urban chickens on campus, anyone?
The author is a Columbia College sophomore. She is the president of the Columbia University Food Sustainability Project.