The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [131]
Why should food, of all things, be the linchpin of that rebellion? Perhaps because food is a powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes, and biodiversity. When José Bové, the French antiglobalization activist (and Roquefort farmer), wanted to make his stand against globalization, he drove his tractor through the plate glass not of a bank or insurance company, but of a McDonald’s. Indeed, the most powerful protests against globalization to date have all revolved around food: I’m thinking of the movement against genetically modified crops, the campaign against patented seeds in India (which a few years ago brought four hundred thousand Indians into the streets to protest WTO intellectual property rules), and Slow Food, the Italian-born international movement that seeks to defend traditional food cultures against the global tide of homogenization.
Even for people who find the logic of globalization otherwise compelling, the globalization of food often stops them short. That logic treats food as a commodity like any other, and that simply doesn’t square with people’s beliefs or experience. Once the last barrier to free trade comes down, and the last program of government support for farmers ends, our food will come from wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply. The iron law of competitive advantage dictates that if another country can grow something more efficiently—whether because its land or labor is cheaper or its environmental laws more lax—we will no longer grow it here. What’s more, under the global economic dispensation, this is an outcome to be wished for, since it will free our land for more productive uses—more houses, say. Since land in the United States is relatively expensive, and our tolerance for agricultural pollution and animal cruelty is wearing thin, in the future all our food may come from elsewhere. This argument has been made by, among others, economist Steven Blank, in a book rather bloodlessly titled The End of Agriculture in the American Portfolio.
And why should a nation produce its own food when others can produce it more cheaply? A dozen reasons leap to mind, but most of them the Steven Blanks of the world—and they are legion—are quick to dismiss as sentimental. I’m thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing that your community, or country, can feed itself; the beauty of an agricultural landscape; the outlook and kinds of local knowledge that farmers bring to a community; the satisfactions of buying food from a farmer you know rather than the supermarket; the locally inflected flavor of a raw-milk cheese or honey. All those things—all those pastoral values—globalization proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth.
Though you do begin to wonder who is truly the realist in this debate, and who the romantic. We live, as Berry has written (in an essay called “The Total Economy”), in an era of “sentimental economics,” since the promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately demands an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time. As Lenin put it, in a sentiment the WTO endorses in its rulings every day, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Perhaps it is no accident that sentimental communism foundered precisely on the issue of food. The Soviets sacrificed millions of small farms and farmers to the dream of a collectivized