By popular demand the gnome wrote a follow-up to his last post. In his book, The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne writes about bringing the garden into the city–Eden (with its perfect shalom) into Babylon, a spiritual metaphor that is pregnant with meaning and spurs the imagination. Here, the gnome wrestles with what it means for our lives and communities to literally bring together the garden and the city. It is a loooong post but read it because it is the best thing ever written on Nourish and is oh so nourishing. (plus, you’ll find out what is actually in McDonald’s food and meet an interesting character). I would only add the the city and countryside are inter-dependent. No matter how large an urban farm might be, it cannot support agriculture like a rural farm can (For instance, you can’t raise cows in the city). Clarence Jordan was helpful in showing the connection between healthy cities and healthy farms. Thus, we need to reconnect city folk and farm folk. Wouldn’t it be great to buy your milk from a dairy farmer just outside of town who you know enough to ask how his kids are? This means we must support both countryside and the city, which is only done through preserving urban density. We have to eliminate the toxic rings of sprawl that separate the city from the countryside (and which dissolve both). Read and comment.
_______________________________________
I talked in the last post about our new urban farming friend S.H. and (briefly) about the compelling case, from a Christian perspective, for eating locally and for growing yourself what you are able to. In the last few days, I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s wonderfully journalistic investigation of the American food industry, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, and I’ve discovered more arguments in favor of eating locally. It’s also challenged me to think about the sustainability of my new urban farming ideal.
Pollan begins his book rather bleakly, by cataloguing the abuses of the industrial food production and distribution system: the flat monocultures (i.e., single-crop growing, which tends to deplete the soil of nutrients) of corn and soybeans that it creates, the devastating effect it has on the farmers themselves (both psychologically and financially), the federal government’s irresponsible and artificial sanction and subsidization of the massive overproduction of corn and soybeans, which end up in literally everything grown or raised conventionally, and so on. The industrial food production system is a nightmare through and through. In an indictment of processed food generally, Pollan takes aim at one point at the Chicken McNugget: “Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstartch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and waters from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leaches out); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and critic acid as a preservative” (113). Gross! But it gets worse. Pollan goes on to describe, alarmingly, a number of purely synthetic ingredients in the Chicken McNugget, including tertiary butylhydroquinone (abbreviated TBHQ), which “is a form of butane (i.e., lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than .02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause ‘nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.’ Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill” (113-114).
Pollan also takes aim at the $11b industrial organic market. The organic movement emerged as a protest against the industrialization of the food market; a bunch of city-slicker hippie upstarts in the ‘60s, who had “exactly zero” farming experience began their own farms in an attempt to return to a pre-industrial, non-processed form of eating. The underpinnings of this movement were decidedly localist and communitarian, but an increasingly global market succeeded in turning organic food into another commodity in less than a quarter century. It’s a sad story that Pollan recounts. USDA organic standards currently allow a limited number of entirely synthetic ingredients to be used in organic food, and a distressing number of food additives in organic food are corn-derived (e.g., “natural raspberry flavor”). Moreover, at this point, two major growers harvest over 80% of the nation’s organic produce, which has produced a tendency toward monoculture that mimics the conventional food industry, and the organic feed lots on which “free range” chicken and beef are raised tend to be little better than the conventional feed lots with which they compete. Ultimately, Pollan thinks that organic farming may be qualifiedly better for your health, and that the food may in some instances taste better, but in terms of the environmental cost (use of fossil fuels, destruction of soil, and so on), the results are no less catastrophic than conventional farming. Industrial organic farming is ultimately unsustainable, which in Pollan’s words, means “Sooner or later it must collapse” (183).
In clear contrast to these two options, Pollan charts his experience with a local food grower in the Shenandoah Valley, Joel Salatin, who is a self-professed “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer” (125). Salatin is perhaps better described not as a libertarian but as a southern agrarian anarchist; someone who believes that government ought to be as ad hoc and local in character as possible. His problem is as much with behemoth multi-national corporations and the free market (whose principles, he argues, don’t work in agriculture) as it is with an invasive federal government. Salatin describes himself as a “grass farmer,” and what he means by this is that his entire philosophy of farming revolves around the protection, nurturing, and improvement of this lowest level of the food chain. This concern leads him to view the entire ecosystem of his farm, including the 450 acre forested area on its north end, as an integrative whole: what he does to one part makes a difference to the rest. His entire farm breathes simplicity and sustainability. He refuses even to ship his produce or meat anywhere: all of his customers must buy his goods straight from the farm or from the local grower’s markets in the D.C. and Charlottesville regions. Salatin and farmers like him are doing a really defiant, countercultural act—growing whole, local food responsibly—and he and his colleagues are routinely challenged in this endeavor by unwieldy, bureaucratic, pro-industrial governmental standards: “’When the USDA sees what we’re doing here they get weak in the knees,’ Joel said with a chuckle. ‘The inspectors take one look at our [chicken] processing shed, and they don’t know what to do with us. They’ll tell me the regulations stipulate a processing facility must have impermeable white walls so they can be washed down between shifts. They’ll quote me a rule that says all doors and windows must have screens. I point out that we don’t have any walls at all, not to mention doors and windows, because the best disinfectant in the world is fresh air and sunshine. Well, that really gets them scratching their heads!’” (229).
Salatin is an immediately likeable character, and someone who is obviously also very serious about the Christian faith as a complete worldview. I am so enthused by the beauty, the simplicity, and the sustainability of his project that I was distressed to see that his agrarian ethic included a general disdain for cities: “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?’” (245). Obviously, I don’t identify with this statement. I love cities; I love the smells, the diversity, the sense of a place being lived-in, the sense of enclosure, the sense of pride and hope possessed by a community that comes together to make something beautiful. But I’ve also come, very recently, to love the idea of interacting with the production of our food in environmentally sustainable ways.
Are these two visions mutually exclusive? I don’t think they are. Philip Bess, in his phenomenal book Til We Have Built Jerusalem emphasizes that the garden and the city are both central Christian images of the good life. He quotes architectural historian Norris Kelly Smith on the juxtaposition of these two settings in historic Christian theology and iconography:
“there is an order of goodness in the world that is best symbolized by the garden—a goodness that resides in personal freedom, in mobility, and in experiencing all the sensuous delights of Eden. But there is another ultimate goodness that has to do with membership, security, and above all with those products of human inventiveness, of the imaginative human spirit, that we gather together under the rubric of civilization” (96).
It is possible that the Christian urban farmer might possess the good captured in both the garden and the city. She retains the connection to the earth, the knowledge of where her food is coming from, and peace about the sustainability of her food. But she can also draw other like-minded urban denizens into her project and invest fiercely in a neighborhood, in the process gaining a sense of belonging. And if she manages to hold both of these together, she might succeed in committing a radically subversive cultural act, that of calling into question the consumptive character of our age.
Nourish Blog'zine 