Rachel Laudan

For the next five weeks I shall be in one place with all my books and my better kitchen. Whew.

So, finally, more of the promised articles on servants, experiments with ensaimadas, the barley family of aguas frescas, and lots of other long-promised posts and follow ups on comments and suggestions.

I missed this op-ed in the New York Times by Dan Barber when it appeared on Sunday. Sunday was our day for the Mexico City to Guanajuato run and thus not a day for sitting at the computer perusing the papers. I’m glad I missed it because I’d have spent the whole day running through counter arguments and ways to expose its wrong headedness.

Luckily Joe Pastry did spot it and here a link to his reply with which I totally agree. You may have to scroll through his other entries until you come to More Free Range Derangement on May 13th. You can enjoy his custard pieces while you’re at it.

But really, what is it with the New York Times on food and agriculture? For every article on, say, fertilizer shortages, they publish one chatty piece after another on produce from urban gardens or how we only have to go back to the good old days of small farms and grandma’s cooking (which I have not bookmarked). At a time when the world’s food stocks are at their lowest point in ages and when food prices are rising, it is criminal that the US paper of record should have such one-sided and irresponsible articles.

The Argentine paper La Nacion, for examples, has a weekly section dedicated to agriculture. Now it is Argentina’s major industry. But agriculture is a major industry in the US too. I find much more informative articles based on serious reporting, not top-of-the-head opinions, in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Economist.

An interesting side effect of the “food crisis” (I’m still not sure I like that name) is that the hunt is on for agricultural land outside the nation state. The New Zealand dairy cooperative is looking to rent or buy land in, say, Brazil. The Chinese are looking for farm land in Africa and South America. And American farmers are renting land near where I live in Guanajuato, Mexico. They want reliable labor but it is still a case of the globalization of land.

I haven’t figured out where I stand on this yet, though I know which way I lean. Self sufficiency in food is a hopeless goal for most countries. The Romans couldn’t do it. The Dutch became the most prosperous country in seventeenth century Europe partly by abandoning that goal. The British haven’t been able to do it in a couple of centuries and haven’t a prayer of doing it now.

Given that, this is a trend that is not going to disappear. It’s also not so different from factories on foreign soil. It’s just that the area is much larger. And given what we’ve learned about how to farm more efficiently, this could boost world food production enormously.

In any case, it’s not hard to predict that who has access to agricultural land and how that maps on to political boundaries is going to be a hot topic in the next few years.