Viewpoint

Thinking about food support what you eat

First, agriculture ain't what it used to be. Gone are the days of small, family-run farms. Unregulated markets have pushed anyone who cannot keep up with technological and biotechnological "innovation" into debt and depression, decimating our rural communities. Those who "got big" instead of getting out turn profits of pennies on the acre, and are forced to compete with one another in a government-subsidized price-race to the bottom.

Second, farmers rely heavily on migrant labor, and their own concerns for remaining in the agribusiness, as well as cultural and personal prejudices, translate into poverty-level housing and wages. Workers are generally discouraged from organizing, sometimes violently, and they are exposed to levels of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that endanger their personal and reproductive health.

Third, animal products come from factory-modeled, large-scale operations that have little regard for animal welfare. High doses of antibiotics are administered to treat illnesses easily vectored in confinement. Manure once considered beneficial as fertilizer on small farms is regarded as "waste" and ends up in large, environmentally poisonous sewage ponds acres in size.

Fourth, while technologies have increased production worldwide, continuing justifications that new technologies and biotechnologies are necessary "to feed the world" are fundamentally flawed. Most hunger is not a consequence of lack of food, or of an "exploding" population - it is the direct result of faulty food trade policy and inequitable distribution of food and arable land. Nowhere is this more true than here in the United States, where massive overproduction facilitated by these technologies does not find its way to our hungry and our homeless.

Lastly, we implicitly trust in the food we eat - is this trust well-founded? U.S. regulatory agencies such as the FDA and USDA ought to be operating in the public interest, yet new, potentially unsafe and largely untested products are being filtered through the policy sector onto our plates. The USDA's endorsement of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) for dairy production has significantly elevated levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) in milk, which has been shown in independent research to be carcinogenic. Use of rBGH has been banned in Canada, Europe and Australia. Furthermore, the patent for genetically engineering seeds to be self-sterilizing (in effect guaranteeing that farmers must buy new seeds each year from seed manufacturers) is co-owned by the USDA. Such examples point to a mixed agenda, in which publicly-funded regulatory agencies have vested interest in private-sector profits as well as in the citizens they are meant to protect.

The danger of not knowing where our breakfast comes from is frankly more than spiritual. Buying local and organically-grown food is a good first step, but understanding how the food we often take for granted impacts social, economic and environmental spheres on a larger scale is also a means of understanding the inter-relatedness of many issues that effect our bodies, our campus and our world.

If you would like to know more about your food, or any of the issues mentioned in this viewpoint, please contact any or all of the following campus organizations: The Basic Food Group (jgroenke@umich.edu), Environmental Justice Group (amlabian@umich.edu), Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality (dolpho@umich.edu), Michigan Animal Rights Society (smccaul@umich.edu), Green Greeks (jkerekes@umich.edu), EnAct and the Environmental Issues Commission (havenb@umich.edu).

- This viewpoint was written by SNRE and LSA senior Joseph Groenke.

He can be reached over e-mail at jgroenke@umich.edu.

11-05-99