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Accountability, Traceability and a few
cloves of Garlic
Do you know
where just one ingredient of your last meal came from?
In a past issue of the American Slow Food magazine the
Snail August 2002 - there's
an article ( no longer online but archived
here as a PDF if you'd like a copy) that I recommend to anyone interested in food and
the future of agriculture. I've re-read and quoted it a
number of times, but don't be put off by its academic title,
'The incompatibility of Food and Capitalism'.
It is after all written by an academic,
Joan Dye Gussow who is a
former Emeritus
Professor at Columbia University, but she's a passionate
author and teacher of nutrition. You'll be sure to hear of
her if you haven't yet.
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In that article she says that when she asks audiences of
eaters the question above (about knowing where their food
comes from), they usually can't even guess the continent.
The point she makes is that..
"Growing food requires land,
and while capital can move feely, land
and labour can't. Much food production has therefore gone
to where land and labour are cheapest, which is not the
USA."
Or increasingly, Australia for that matter. In the article (which was a
speech to a group of 'non-profit institutional investors and
entrepreneurs' ) she offers a quote from Indian novelist and
activist Arundhati Roy. (Also someone you'll hear a lot more from.)
"When you go to Europe or America
for the first time, you arrive in a city where you don't
see any mud, and everything looks really nice, all the
cars and the steel and the glass. But I look at a car and
think 'somehow this came from earth and water and forest'.
How? I don't know. But you need to know - you need to know
what the connection is: who paid the price of what."
Joan Gussow argues ..."That's exactly what I would say
about the foods we eat. We need to remember that somehow
they came -- and must continue to come "from earth and
water and forest" and we need to know how and who paid the
price."
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