The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [125]
“Why is it that we exempt food, of all things, from that rule? Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can’t really be true. But it’s downright un-American to suggest that one egg might be nutritionally superior to another.” Joel recited the slogan of his local supermarket chain: “‘We pile it high and sell it cheap.’ What other business would ever sell its products that way?”
When you think about it, it is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price. The value of relationship marketing is that it allows many kinds of information besides price to travel up and down the food chain: stories as well as numbers, qualities as well as quantities, values rather than “value.” And as soon as that happens people begin to make different kinds of buying decisions, motivated by criteria other than price. But instead of stories about how it was produced accompanying our food, we get bar codes—as inscrutable as the industrial food chain itself, and a fair symbol of its almost total opacity.
Not that a bar code needs to be so obscure or reductive. Supermarkets in Denmark have experimented with adding a second bar code to packages of meat that when scanned at a kiosk in the store brings up on a monitor images of the farm where the meat was raised, as well as detailed information on the particular animal’s genetics, feed, medications, slaughter date, etc. Most of the meat in our supermarkets simply couldn’t withstand that degree of transparency; if the bar code on the typical package of pork chops summoned images of the CAFO it came from, and information on the pig’s diet and drug regimen, who could bring themselves to buy it? Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring—to the carelessness of both producers and consumers. Of course, the global economy couldn’t very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the rules of world trade explicitly prohibit products from telling even the simplest stories—“dolphin safe,” “humanely slaughtered,” etc.—about how they were produced.
For his part, Joel would just as soon build local economies in which bar codes are unnecessary rather than attempt to enhance them—to use technology or labeling schemes to make the industrial food chain we have more transparent. I realized with a bit of a jolt that his pastoral, or agrarian, outlook doesn’t adequately deal with the fact that so many of us now live in big cities far removed from the places where our food is grown and from opportunities for relationship marketing. When I asked how a place like New York City fit into his vision of a local food economy he startled me with his answer: “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?”
If there was a dark side to Joel’s vision of the postindustrial food chain, I realized, it was the deep antipathy to cities that has so often shadowed rural populism in this country. Though when I pressed him, pointing out that New York City, den of pestilence and iniquity though it might be, was probably here to stay and would need to eat, he allowed that farmer’s markets and CSAs—“community supported agriculture,” schemes