Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

As an ethically and environmentally aware feminist vegetarian, I view food and politics as ineluctably joined. Robert Paarlberg’s Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know challenged some of my basic ideas about hunger, famine, and the scope of issues contained by the term food politics, yet the book ignores some of the ways in which food is always simultaneously personal and political.

Food Politics covers a wide range of topics connected to the way we eat as well as to our food’s impact on the world around us at local and global levels. Paarlberg examines population growth, food costs, politics of chronic hunger and famine, farming technologies, food aid, obesity, environmentalism, agribusiness, fast food culture, organic and local food, GMOs, and the overarching structures that govern the world food system. At times Paarlberg oversimplifies complex problems, especially in his chapters “The Politics of Obesity” and “Agriculture, the Environment, and Farm Animals.” Moreover, although he supports his points with statistics and logical arguments, he frequently flattens alternative positions, sometimes inconsistently. For example, he suggests that vegetarianism has little global impact on the food supply in one context yet acknowledges the consumption of less red meat as a better way to reduce the environmental impact of food than eating local produce.

Paarlberg recognizes the significance of women’s labor in third-world farming systems. He addresses the political disenfranchisement of women in these economies when he depicts the problem of chronic undernutrition in “poor and hungry communities” where women are prevented from political action because they are, first, overextended by their duties as farmers and as caregivers for the children and elderly and, second, their socially marginalized status. Feminists doubtless know this and would like to see Paarlberg push his points further, as I wanted him to, but his attention to the gendered politics of undernutrition is significant.

Paarlberg considers the work of Rachel Carson and Frances Moore Lappé in dialogue with Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, but he dismisses Frances Moore Lappé’s as a “young countercultural food activist.” Although Lappé was young when she published Diet for a Small Planet, she has created The Small Planet Institute and established a rich, innovative series of books, videos, teaching aids, and other resources about the politics and environmental impact of food. Although he supports some of Lappé’s points, he does so in a way that shifts their focus—he implies that her actions are good, but not for the reasons upon which she bases them, which is a partial, uneven, and reductive way to treat an argument.

The greatest flaw of Food Politics is Paarlberg’s oversimplification of other groups’ and individual’s claims. He provides useful and even groundbreaking information but only by suspending these fundamental components of food politics in a way that does not allow for the inextricability of belief or ideology from the way we eat.

Written by: Emily Bowles, August 7th 2010

Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa

admin — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:16:00 +0000

By Robert Paarlberg

Harvard University Press

As a mom who does what I can to buy organic food for my family, I completely understand the general distaste most of us have for genetically modified (GM) foods. The very thought of vegetables altered by scientists in labs seems creepy and somehow inherently wrong, doesn’t it? But when I read Starved for Science, I quickly realized that such a romanticized and emotional standpoint in such a critical debate as starvation is not only uninformed, it is just plain irresponsible. I also realized that, whether we like it or not, most of us are already eating GM foods on a daily basis.

In plain language and with plentiful sources to back up his positions, Paarlberg describes how in first world countries, where food is plentiful and obesity more of a problem than starvation, people can afford to pine for the days of small neighborhood farms - and can turn up their noses at the agribusiness and subsequent science that has allowed us to take for granted having not only enough to eat, but a wide choice in what and where we get our food. In Europe, the negative public opinion toward genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) has led to labeling and bans on imports suspected to be “contaminated” by genetically altered seeds. Greenpeace and many NGO’s are working actively to keep African farmers on small plots of land using techniques that date back thousands of years, but to the detriment and hardship of those very farmers.

Paarlberg describes how rich countries have come to fear and dislike GMO’s, stopping funding and support easily where food is in no shortage, and yet when it is convenient, still continue to fund their use in the pharmaceutical industry where a longevity benefit can be gained. And governments in African countries situated in urban areas that are highly influenced by European bias, both in cultural influence and monetary flow, follow suit. Therefore, they are not developing their own programs to find strains of seeds that could resist drought, and it isn’t worth enough money to anyone else to do so for them.

The majority of small farms in Africa are currently run by women, as men often leave to find other jobs in mines or more urban areas to supplement family incomes. Children stay out of school to help with the farming, and they do it all with wooden tools and poorly fed animal labor. Green movements in China and India have brought these countries to a position where starvation in no longer such a pressing issue; however, in Africa the problem is worse than ever.

Paarlberg admits to having kept his research a bit under wraps until now, knowing the reaction he would get from his own circle of friends and colleagues. It could be said that being ‘socially conscious’ has taken on certain assumptions (and presumptions) among the wealthier strata of our urban world with a borg-like uniformity, and in the case of poverty in Africa, maintaining a position of being purely organic could easily be likened to saying “let them eat cake.”

Written by: Jen Wilson Lloyd, June 13th 2008