It’s grading season and I’m reading the portfolios from my introductory food systems class. I’m finding them encouraging. They show me that my students have actually been reconsidering lots of things they thought they knew: that we need industrial agriculture to feed the world, that we can solve food waste and save the environment by buying dinged-up fruits and vegetables, that local food is inherently better than something that comes from a long way away.
They’ve started to recognize that you can’t think clearly about the modern food system unless you’re willing to think critically about capitalism. And they can see more of the links between colonialism and racism and industrialism and a lot of other “isms” that have shaped our whole modern world. Digging into this big pile of portfolios is always a good moment in the end-of-semester grading rush.
And all of this collective effort to rethink and reconsider feels miniscule alongside one opinion piece in the New York Times (may be gated, sorry) that is bound to get a whole lot of other people wondering whether industrial ag is, in fact, our only viable option for the future of food. It’s written in that “inconvenient truth right back atcha, go ahead and hate me” bad-boy voice that has sadly gained ascendancy in so much of our public sphere.
There are lots of questionable arguments in the piece (here’s Adam Calo’s really smart take on how it co-opts the whole “land sparing” argument in defense of continuing to pillage the land already being used). But most people don’t have enough critical knowledge about the food system to ask those questions. In the author’s LinkedIn feed you can see lots and lots of people just nodding their heads and saying “yep, makes good sense.”
Like my students, most people have a built-in set of assumptions that feel intuitive and that get reinforced at every turn by the rhetoric of all those corporations and policy-makers and other actors with a stake in propping up the bloated, extractive, consolidated, manically overproductive system that an awful lot of the world’s population now relies on for subsistence. Unlike my students, they probably don’t have someone assessing the rigor of their own thinking about all this. That article will just sink in and simmer in the rich and maddening stew of mystification that surrounds the system that feeds us.
This is my final time through that food systems class on the Tufts campus, because retirement is on my horizon. Partly I need to be commuting less and writing more. But part of the “writing more” is that I also need to find other platforms for continuing to try to counter all the mystification, ones that somehow reach beyond a single classroom of 50 students once a year. I hope and believe that my teaching has had an effect on a lot of young minds. But it’s feeling like not enough in the present moment, not with all the bad boys out there continuing to stir the pot.
