Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

More ramblings on the things that irritated me about Pollan’s book, _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_. In line with a lot of other “green,” “ecology,” and “animal rights” perspectives, Pollan tends to ignore the role of labor in food production. OK, so the point of his book was to trace food specifically, and not concern himself too much with labor.

But this is a concern because, if you’re going to talk about how “everything is connected” and you carefully study everything that goes into the production of a meal, how can you not, at the very least, mention the human labor. At least nod at it and point out that, while you get it, and you realize how important this issue is, this isn’t your task at the moment.

Anyway, having just been reading through about 1/3 of the book, my immediate reaction was: where *are* the people? Is this yet another in a string of “green” “eco-consciousnes” crappliotta where the label on food tells me all about what animals weren’t harmed, what part of the earth wasn’t ravaged, whatever … and where I rarely learn about whether the *workers* in said production were treated fairly, paid decently, etc. Save the Dolphins! Fuck the chicken factory workers!

Yeah, I know: so rude of me. Yeah, I know: there are people and products in this movement that do care about people and animals and the earth. I still think they are a pretty small percentage. I’m reminded, all of a sudden, of the rather misanthropic lyrics from Earth Crisis.

Anyway, here’s the exchange from LBO:

At 11:37 PM 10/10/2008, Dwayne Monroe wrote:

First off, I’m annoyed by the cutesy term ’sun food agenda’.

heh. i had to laugh as I started on chapter 9, “Big Organic” of Pollan’s _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_. It follows on the heels of a discussion of a “beyond organic” farmer in VA, Joel Salatin. Salatin was consulted, Pollan says, because he figured he’d get some juicy quotes; Salatin is known for railing against the Organic Food Industry.

As Pollan says, quotes he got. Salatin *is* one of those folks who goes on about the “‘innate distictive desires of a chicken’” and the impossibility of taking a ‘decidedly Eastern, connected, ohlistic product, and selling through a decidedly Western, disconnected, reductionist Wall Streetified marketing system.’”

So, Pollan opens the chapter with a chuckle at Whole Foods. Shopping there is more a “literary experience,” he writes:

“That’s not to take anything away from the foold, which is generally of high quality, much of it “certified organic” or “humanely raised” or “free range.” But right there, that’s the point: It’s the evocative prose as much as anything else that makes this food really special, elevating an egg or chicken breast or bag of arugula from the realm of ordinary protein and carbohydrates into a much headier experience, one with the complex aesthetic, emotional, and even political dimensions. Take the ‘range-fed’ sirloin steak I recently eyed in the meat case. According to the brochure on the counter, it was formerly part of a steer that spent its days “living in beautiful places” ranging from “plant-diverse, high mountain meadows to tick aspen groves and miles of sagebrush-filled flats.” Now a steak like that has got to taste better than one from Safeway, where the only accompanying information comes in the form of a number: the price, I mean, which you can bet will be considerably less. But I’m evidently not the only shopper willing to pay more for a good story.”
(p 134-5)

So, I had to laugh. Pollan is making the same complaint you are. And yet, what I’ve read of him so far is that Pollan doesn’t really disagree that it’s important to have a good story. Instead, what he does is let other people’s words make the case, and often carefully hides his opinion. Let Joel Salatin make the case, with his orientalist approval of Eastern connectedness and disapproval of Western disconnectedness. Mock it a little, arch your eyebrow at the overheated rhetoric, but do quote it at length and let it flow over the reader.

So far, it strikes me as what you get in church, only dished up with a little sophisticate irony. “*We* are too smart to be caught up in all the cwaziness of the foodies. *We* are soooo above all that. Look at how they talk, like koolaid drinkers (funny ha ha!)” And yet….

And no, 135 pages into this book, I’m seeing not one word of the people laboring fields at crap wages as something to take into account when we think about our “food system” and the way it ravages Nature. It’s all about the farmer, which is inevitable, according to Pollan, because he’s following the life of corn. And corn farming is all about getting rid of the labor once needed to produce it:

“For the radially simplified farm of corn and soybeans doesn’t require nearly as much human labor as the old diversified farm, especially when the farmer can call on sixteen row planters and chemical weed killers. One man can handle a lot more acreage by himself when it’s planted in monoculture, and without animals to care for he can take the weekend off, and even think about spending the winter in Florida.”

So, this section is about the loan farmer-owner, riding a tractor across his vast expanse while the sun sets across a corn field. In Pollan’s telling, no one else labors in the fields, at the elevator, on the cattle ranch except the farmer-owner-managers. I come from farming country in the northeast. To me, it would make sense to discuss the farm labor involved, labor other than that of the farmer-owner-manager. But it’s not here, not so far. That could be because corn farming in Iowa is not the same as corn farming in upstate NY. (one thing: it’s dairy country, so the corn was grown, along with rye and some other grasses, to feed cows that produced milk, not meat, and they grazed in open fields as far as I could tell.)

So, I’ll keep reading. I wonder if I’ll keep stumbling over the lament that the division of labor means that the farmer doesn’t see his consumer as anything other than the military industrial complex and the eater doesn’t see his producer as anything other than a supermarket?