The Food System and the Farm System are Not the Same

I recently wrote a series of essays about agriculture, food, and the road ahead. I will share them here, one per week, until the series is complete. Thanks for reading!

---

Sometime during the 20-aughts, it became unbearably sexy to work in the food system.

“You’re a chef?” *Swoon*

“You started a food company?” Amazing.

“You’re a buyer for a coffee roaster, an edgy little food co-op, or a cool granola bar company?” *Fans face and neck, blinking rapidly.*

“You’re a butcher/baker/farmers market seller?” When do you get off?

I get it. Food is delicious. In some ways, it’s a lot like sex, and in other ways, it’s a lot better than sex. After all, you never have to ask the scraps of a good charcuterie board, “do you, like, have work in the morning or something?” while looking insistently at the door.

The problem I had is that, like a lot of people, I bought into the idea that the food system was the whole thing– farm to table, inclusive of every stop from seed to stomach. I thought my work in the “food system,” namely in and around agriculture, would invite the same sexy vibes (and ideally, coworkers and fans) as these other jobs and sectors do.

I thought people would say, “oh, she’s an ag journalist?” the words slipping breathlessly from between slightly smirking lips. “That’s hot.”

Source: Stocksy

I feel like I spend a lot of time explaining to people why the act of walking into the grocery store, a farmers market, or a restaurant, dollars in hand, is not taking an active role in dictating the way American food is grown.

I start by explaining the fact that the vast majority of American farmland is not used to feed people (it’s used to make biofuels, ethanol, livestock feed, exports, and industrial inputs). It veers into explaining that great swaths of your grocery store– from the produce section to the organic food aisle to the seafood case and the flower department– is stocked with farm products that aren’t grown in America, the purchase of which has essentially no impact on what’s grown in this country. It generally makes a pit stop at the farmers market, where we talk about how most farmers lose money at markets and how it’s actually a wildly inefficient and inaccessible way to distribute food. Then we tackle restaurants, where I point out inconvenient information about failure rates and food safety requirements that compel most restaurants to buy from industrial-scale distributors that import the same ingredients the grocery stores do.

People don’t usually make it all the way to the end of these conversations. It’s unpleasant (and not at all sexy) to have the “I’m doing the right thing about this issue” systematically removed from where you’ve lodged it, to have it be replaced with a much less satisfying, “there’s not really anything you can do about this issue.” People don’t like that. Feeling powerful and righteous is sexy. Feeling weak and bereft is not.

On the rare occasions that people do make it to the end though, I like to make one particular point.

“The farm system is not the same as the food system.”

The food system is sexy. It’s about nourishing people in all the many places that people get hungry. It’s about trying to balance our desire to eat delicious, sweet, fatty things with our need to eat fibrous, proteinaceous, healthy things. It’s about the heat and the acid, the salt and the, whatever. It’s about getting human food from where it’s made to where it can be processed, then on to where it can be purchased and eaten.

That is not what the farm system is about though. The American farm system is, at its heart, about farmland rent. It’s not about growing “what people want to eat–” we have way too much farmland to only grow things we eat. The farm system is about maximizing the returns to capital at a given scale and with a given risk profile. On the vast majority of American acres, this means that the point of the farm system is not to grow food at all. It’s to grow fuel, feed, or fiber. Consider that among U.S. corn acres, the most planted crop in America, less than 1% is used for human consumption. Filling out the other top five spots for most planted crops are; soybeans (non-edible), wheat, hay and alfalfa, and cotton. Wheat acres, the only human food of the bunch, are dwarfed by the other four. These are the broad strokes of the American farm system.

That is, in short, why all the dollars you’ve ever spent on food in your life have had essentially no impact on the American farm system. It’s because the farm system is not primarily involved in growing food.

To me, this is not a hopeless message (unless you really, really bought into the idea of voting with your fork). This is a message about shifting tactics.

The draw to making change in the food system, rather than the farm system, is obvious. I too would prefer to hang out with sexy bad boy chefs all day rather than hard-nosed agribusiness people, no-nonsense industrial-scale farmers and ranchers, and ethanol manufacturers. But the reality is, the bad boy chefs have as little power to change the American farm landscape as any of us do. Those hard-noses, the farmers and feeders, the biofuel-makers and cotton ginners, those are the people with the power to alter millions of acres of corn, soybeans, cotton, or alfalfa with the stroke of a pen.

But those people are harder to work with too. They don’t feel public pressure as acutely as consumer-facing food businesses do. They tend to be mid-sized, not gigantic. They don’t have globally recognized brands or massive benches of shareholders to sway. That’s exactly how these middlemen have escaped notice, and pressure, for so long.

—

When I took my first official job in ag journalism, a mentor of mine told me he was sure I’d get a lot of propositions (for dates, I think) from farmers and ag people, given my new public-facing position. He firmly (and kind of inappropriately?) believed that people in the farm system would think it was hot that I was an ag journalist.

Alas, three plus years as a farm broadcaster did not lead to any cold calls or emails from would-be suitors who had fallen in love with me through my sub-three minute daily news stories. *Sigh.* And so I learned an important lesson, about the inherent unsexiness of the farm system, in contrast to its conjoined twin, the food system.

But I wonder too, based on all the gossip I’ve ever heard about working in kitchens, granola bar companies, and farmers markets, if the sexiness of the food system isn’t more empty lust than it is genuine desire. I’d believe that proximity to delicious food unlocks a kind of wanton hedonism in us, a kind of reckless hunger that demands immediate and overwhelming satisfaction, but that doesn’t go much beyond that.

Farms, farming, and farmland are a kind of antidote to this lust. Farming, by definition, is a slow burn, a season-long, chest-crushing wait to see if it’ll all work out, or all come to nothing. It demands a level of love and trust of land that can’t be born on the back of lust alone. It requires love– patient, forgiving, understanding love. It can be cold, harsh, painful, and unrequited. The stars are always crossing over farmland, condemning people and places to disaster. There’s less gorging, more belt tightening. Less satisfaction, and more betrayal. Comparatively, the food system is cozy, steamy, and conceivable, while the farm system sprawls, operating on a scale big enough to alter the weather and condemn us all.

So I guess what I have to say about it is, stop talking about the food system like the whole farm system is contained within it. It’s not. In fact, you could completely transform the food system, and have a negligible effect on the farm system. The farm system is a shark, and the food system is a remora fish attached to its belly, eating the scraps that fall from its mouth. If you want to change the farm system, accept that you’ve got to go head to head with a shark. Stop trying to change it through the food system, there is no leverage there. That path is the sexiest, but it doesn’t lead to anything that lasts.