Eating Well in a Time of “Food Security”

Over the weekend, I moseyed over to The Economist—I honestly don’t know why—and got no further than the first article to catch my eye: An expensive dinner. My fascination focused not on the tale of rising food prices, but some of the strange memes contained therein. Picking through the entire article, since it may disappear behind a subscriber-only button at some point ...

“The world’s most vulnerable who spend 60% of their income on food have been priced out of the food market,” is the alarming warning from Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP). As the price of wheat, maize, corn and other commodities that make up the world’s basic foodstuffs is soaring the poorest people in the poorest countries are the hardest hit. ....

For many years the least developed nations have worried about food security, especially countries at war and those battling droughts and other climatic hardships. Meanwhile the world’s richest nations have produced more than enough for their needs and spent more time and effort worrying about the problems related to an abundance of food. These range from the health risks associated with ballooning rates of obesity to subsidies for uncompetitive farmers ....

Food is scarcer now thanks to market liberalisation, which helped to cut excess production and lower stocks. At the same time demand for grains and other food commodities has shot up in China, India and other countries with rapidly growing economies. The biofuel industry is gobbling up an increasing share of the corn and sugar crops. ....

Concern about the cost of food is even spreading beyond the world’s poor countries. Last month Italians took to the street in Rome and Milan to protest against an increase in pasta prices. They are eating less too ....

Efforts to find solutions have been complicated by political manipulation. ....

And efforts to alleviate one problem, finding an alternative to oil, has brought strong condemnation from a proponent of another, feeding the world’s starving poor. Jean Ziegler, the UN’s independent expert on the right to food, calls the growing use of crops to replace petrol as a crime against humanity ....

Periods of high prices followed by times of low prices are common in agricultural markets. What makes the current cycle different from previous periods of high prices is the rise has hit nearly all food commodities. ....

Prices will probably remain high for the next year or two while the world is adapting to food scarcity. What happens next will reveal the resilience of the world’s food-supply system, predicts Ms Sheeran. .... Ms Sheeran refers to this as the post food-surplus era. The fat probably won’t get any thinner but the effects on the world’s poorest and hungriest could be devastating.

I suppose I should say first off that it was pretty hard for me to take this article completely seriously, when it lightly picks through a complex issue, oversimplifying along the way, and predictably offering a Russian example of “political manipulation”. But certain phrases from it linger in my head, as I have tried but failed to understand what was meant by them.

First, how does one get “priced out of the food market”? Methinkest this is another example of a distortion of the concept of “market”, because seriously, in many places humans live how can there not be possibilities for growing and/or foraging for food? And what about voluntary, individually-based charity? (Yes, I know these are vast oversimplifications.) I seriously wonder if that phrasing was deliberately used in an effort to strengthen the idea that food is strictly a commodity to be purchased at the local grocery store or megachain—after being shunted through the regulatory mazes erected by the various food nannies standing guard, of course. Yes, food must be dealt with at a remove ... it must be grown and harvested by someone else, then cleaned up and inspected and certified and standardized and bureaucratized before it is really safe and worth eating. “Making” food is just like manufacturing AA batteries or light bulbs, dontcha know; so of course, it must be marketed and sold just like them.

And that brings me to the real mind-boggler: “Food security”. Who else but some interventionist do-gooder or statist foodocrat could seriously contemplate that meme? Examined in a security-as-safety context, it makes no sense: as long as people like wild mushrooms or puffer fish or bleu cheeses or aged grain products or steak tartare or canned jams, eating will be an inherently (albeit very slightly) risky proposition. Examined in another context, it’s even more ridiculous: the watchers are doing an abysmal job, and more nannying will only raise prices further, with little real benefit (it’s called “the law of diminishing returns”, nannies). I do agree that a nontrivial part of the biodiesel push amounts to “unsustainable subsidized food burning”, with heavy emphasis on the subsidized element; but as I understand it, there are nonfood sources of biofuels that can be pursued.

I am not a primitivist; nor am I naïve enough to believe that “local” equals “trustworthy”. (The easier accountability certainly helps, though.) The issue of trust is what all this food safety talk comes down to; and yes, while the vast majority of the foodlike substances that get flash-cooked and dried and extruded and colorized and mixed and boxed and jarred for our consumption is “safe”, is it still food? Food that nourishes one’s soul as well as one’s body, because it was as fresh as possible, prepared by loving hands, and consumed in communion with others one cares for?

Last night I made pizza for dinner, and one of them was a veggie pizza, with a good portion of its toppings coming from my garden. Realizing that was the seed crystal for this ramble ... it doesn’t need to be enormously difficult, or expensive, or time-consuming to start to cut loose from the food-industrial complex. Doing so just might unearth a means for exchanging value with others, too. I’ll be writing more about my efforts to accomplish that separation here; and I would be gravely remiss if I failed to acknowledge our own Mama Liberty as being a wonderful inspiration for my recent explorations in gardening and food preservation. I hope that she shares more of her efforts as well, here or at her other blog; if anyone can green up Wyoming, it’s her!