Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [172]
The Blind Leading the Blind
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Critics of local food suggest that it’s naive or elitist, whereas industrial agriculture is for everybody: it’s what’s for dinner, all about feeding the world. “Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn,” wrote Steven Shapin in the New Yorker, “is what feeds the victims of an African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers’ market.”
The big guys have so completely taken over the rules of the game, it’s hard to see how food systems really work, but this criticism hits the nail right on the pointy end: it’s perfectly backward. One of industrial agriculture’s latest feed-the-hungry schemes offers a good example of why that’s so. Exhibit A: “golden rice.” It’s a genetically modified variety of rice that contains beta-carotene in the kernel. (All other parts of the rice plant already contain it, but not the grain after it is milled.) The developers of this biotechnology say they will donate the seeds—with some strings attached—to Third World farmers. It’s an important public relations point because the human body converts beta-carotene to vitamin A; a deficiency of that vitamin affects millions of children, especially in Asia, causing half a million of them every year to go blind. GM rice is the food industry’s proposed solution.
But most of the world’s malnourished children live in countries that already produce surplus food. We have no reason to believe they would have better access to this special new grain. Golden rice is one more attempt at a monoculture solution to nutritional problems that have been caused by monocultures and disappearing diversity. In India alone, farmers have traditionally grown over 200 types of greens, and gathered many more wild ones from the countryside. Every single one is a good source of beta-carotene. So are fruits and vegetables. Further, vitamin A delivered in a rice kernel may not even help a malnourished child, because it can’t be absorbed well in isolation from other nutrients. Throwing more rice at the problem of disappearing dietary diversity is a blind approach to the problem of blindness. “Naïve” might describe a person who believes agribusinesses develop their heavily patented commodity crops in order to feed the poor. (Golden rice, alone, has seventy patents on it.) Technicolor chard and its relatives growing in village gardens—that’s a solution for realists.
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STEVEN L. HOPP
Over the years since I first acquired children and a job, I’ve often made reference to the concern of “keeping my family fed.” I meant this in the same symbolic way I’d previously used (pre-kids, pre-respectable job) to speak of something “costing a lot of bread.” I was really talking about money. Now when I say bread, I mean bread. I find that food is not symbolic of anything so much as it is real stuff: beetroot as neighbor to my shoe, chicken as sometime companion. I once read a pioneer diary in which the Kansas wife postponed, week after week, harvesting the last hen in her barren, windy yard. “We need the food badly,” she wrote, “but I will miss the company.”
I have never been anywhere near that lonely, but now I can relate to the relationship. When I pick apples, I miss the way they looked on the tree. Eggplants look like lightbulbs on the plant, especially the white and neon purple ones, and I observe the unplugging of their light when I toss them in the basket. My turkey hens have names now. I do know better, but couldn’t help myself.
At the end of March, one of my turkey mothers found her calling. She sat down on the platform nest and didn’t get up again for a week. Then two, then three. This was Lolita, the would-be husband-stealer—the hen who had been first