February 2, 2009
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Food in Post Industrial Iowa
“It is a shame to grow crops and run them through animals for food because that black Iowa soil looks good enough to eat as it is.” Robert Frost
Robert Frost was bothered about corn being fed cows and pigs. It‘s a good thing the gentle poet didn’t live long enough to see Iowans feeding it to their sports utility vehicles. That would have likely knocked him off his road less traveled. Despite the best efforts of the ethanol industry, the future of corn-eating Hummers frosted over this year. First Jean Ziegler of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council’s blamed ethanol farmers for “unconscionable” greed which, he said, condemns 852 million people to malnutrition and starves 8 million children to death each year. Iowa’s initial reaction to the eminent diplomat’s charges made Ramona Cunningham seem saintly by comparison. Editorialists responded by attacking the messenger, often making false assumptions about Ziegler’s nationality, politics and sexual preferences. Internet bloggers turned his work at the UN into the second coming of Hitler, ironically since Ziegler made his name retrieving financial assets that Nazis stole from holocaust victims.
Ethanol Fraud
One can understand the bitter reaction though. Industrial agriculture had not been kind to Iowa’s family farmers in the last half of the 20th century. In the new millennium, corn ethanol began looking like the savior of traditional values, rural lifestyles and state pride. We were going to feed the world AND free the nation from Arab oil dominion. Ethanol-driven corn prices would reverse a 60 year downslide for Iowa’s small towns and make us a wealthy state of proud producers again. It seemed to be working too. Local investors in some Iowa ethanol plants had already recouped their investments – just in dividends! Biofuel euphoria even convinced the Des Moines Register’s editorial board that ethanol could make Iowa “the Texas of the 21st century.” Ziegler was polluting that dream and he had to be discredited.
Unfortunately, more bad news followed quickly. The peer-reviewed journal “Science,” the University of Minnesota and the Nature Conservancy all released studies that exposed colossal accounting errors in previous reports about ethanol’s carbon dioxide emissions. None of those entities are known for rightwing, or pro-petroleum sympathies, so it was hard to discredit their studies. They project that greenhouse gas emissions from ethanol will actually be twice as much as from gasoline and that it will take 48 to 93 years to repay the “carbon debt” created by converting food grain into corn ethanol.
About the same time, food riots began breaking out on every continent as prices of all grains doubled or tripled. Because industrial corn is now diverted into so many links of our food chain, it’s hard to find a supermarket product that does not include some trace of it. So, expensive corn raised the cost of almost every processed food. Just when it appeared that the industrial food system was finally going to work in Iowa’s favor, our corn dream developed root rot.
That seems so unfair. When the 20th century began, Iowa was a state of mostly farmer-producers who proudly fed the nation. The market valued their labor enough to make us a wealthy state too. When that century ended, the majority of Iowa’s counties had peaked in population – at least 100 years earlier! We were a mostly urban and suburban state and the farmers’ share of the food dollar had shrunk to 18 cents. Middling marketers, packagers, transporters, wholesalers, retailers, advertisers and bureaucrats all skimming off what the chemical companies, seed manufacturers, equipment salesmen and mortgage holders left behind.
Scraps of Logic
Those middlemen created an industrial food system that defied logic. While the world’s population doubled since 1961, the tonnage of food shipped between countries quadrupled. Central American bananas became cheaper here than Iowa apples. Yet, the dysfunctional system worked for the USA in strange ways. The price of American food, as a percentage of income, became the cheapest in world history. Between 1960 and 2006 it declined from 17.5 percent to 10 percent, freeing disposable income for the pursuit of other American dreams. Our food became cheaper despite some really absurd choices too. For instance, a pound of potato chips costs two hundred times more than a pound of fresh potatoes, yet processed chips account for nearly half of all potatoes consumed in the USA. Throw in French fries and you have a super majority, big enough to pass another Farm Bill over Presidential veto.
Illogical systems have fatal flaws. The industrial food network depended upon cheap oil, government subsidies & tariffs, and consumers who remained willing to eat food that wasn’t really fresh. As the cover story of this issue of Relish shows, there’s a new anti-industrial food system in place now in Central Iowa. It allows us to eat logically, consuming fresh and local foods and beverages raised by farmers working outside the industrial complex. Other stories detail several mouth watering reasons why that makes sense. For an appetizer, here’s a philosophic reason: About the same time Robert Frost made his observation on farming, Iowa naturalist John Madsen defined Iowa as follows:
“A repository of traditional attitudes that are metered out through the root system in subtle but powerful ways. It is the region of the world whose soil base has lent the freedom and stability that men need to reach free and stable conclusions.”
Our free and stable conclusion: There’s no such thing as a cheap potato chip.
