The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [49]
I think it was at General Mills that I first heard the term “food system.” Since then, I’ve seen in the pages of Food Technology, the monthly bible of the food-processing industry, that this term seems to be taking over from plain old “food.” Food system is glossier and more high-tech than food, I guess; it also escapes some of the negative connotations that got attached to “processed food” during the sixties. It’s probably as good a term as any when you’re describing, as that magazine routinely does, new edible materials constructed from “textured vegetable protein,” or a nutraceutical breakfast cereal so fortified with green tea, grape seed extract, and antioxidants that it’s not even called a cereal but a “healthy heart system.”
Exactly what corn is doing in such food systems has less to do with nutrition or taste than with economics. For the dream of liberating food from nature, which began as a dream of the eaters (to make it less perishable), is now primarily a dream of the feeders—of the corporations that sell us our food. No one was clamoring for synthetic cheese, or a cereal shaped like a bowling pin; processed food has become largely a supply-driven business—the business of figuring out clever ways to package and market the glut of commodities coming off the farm and out of the wet mills. Today the great advantages of processing food redound to the processors themselves. For them, nature is foremost a problem—not so much of perishable food (though that’s always a concern when your market is global) as of perishable profits.
Like every other food chain, the industrial food chain is rooted at either end in a natural system: the farmer’s field at one end, and the human organism at the other. From the capitalist’s point of view, both of these systems are less than ideal.
The farm, being vulnerable to the vicissitudes of weather and pests, is prone to crises of over- and underproduction, both of which can hurt business. Rising raw material prices cut into profits, obviously enough. Yet the potential boon of falling raw material prices—which should allow you to sell a lot more of your product at a lower price—can’t be realized in the case of food because of the special nature of your consumer, who can eat only so much food, no matter how cheap it gets. (Food industry executives used to call this the problem of the “fixed stomach” economists speak of “inelastic demand.”) Nature has cursed the companies working the middle of the food chain with a recipe for falling rates of profits.
The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products—CDs, say, or shoes—there’s a natural limit to how much food we can each consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year—1 percent being the annual growth rate of the American population. The problem is that Wall Street won’t tolerate such an anemic rate of growth.
This leaves companies like General Mills and McDonald’s with two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: