Slow Food, say its advocates, takes gastronomy to another and higher level. Somewhere between a latter-day religion and a political program, this version of gastronomy will save us from the widely-recognized problems associated with modernity. Slow Food is founded on the purported revelation that pursuing pleasure protects the environment, creates a sustainable agriculture, preserves culinary patrimonies, increases the good, the true and the beautiful, and has the potential to save us from ourselves.

Corby Kummer, one of America’s leading food commentators, tells us that signing of for Slow Food is a win/wine move: by eating well we can do good. Albert Sonnenfeld, professor of French at Columbia University and editor of a distinguished series of books on culinary history, explains that the table is an “altar” that offers “the template for the preservation of human rights and the environment.” Alice Waters, revered founder of the restaurant Chez Panisse, say that Slow Food teaches us “compassion, beauty, community, and sensuality.” Mario Batali, of the famed Babbo restaurant in New York, praises it as “far more spiritual, nay religious, than any club (or religion, for that matter) I have been asked to join.”

And Carlo Petrini, the entrepreneur who founded Slow Food and whose book under review here lays out the history and agenda of the organization, leads the chorus. “Faced with the excesses of modernization, we are not trying to change the world anymore, just to save it.”

In the half-dozen years since I published this excerpt as part of an essay review of Petrini’s Slow Food a lot of the shine has gone off the movement.  In recent days, though, I have had several requests for a pdf of my review “Slow Food: The French Terroir Strategy, and Culinary Modernism,” so here it is.

And here is the full reference. Rachel Laudan. “Slow Food: The French Terroir Strategy, and Culinary Modernism.  An Essay Review of Carlos Petrini, trans. William McCuaig.”  Slow Food: The Case for Taste (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).  Food Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 7. 2. (2004), 133-144.

Mr Keys* and his Spanish friends located in the United States dedicated themselves to promoting the benefits of a [Mediterranean] diet that was only strictly followed in Crete and that . . . with the passage of time . . . became transformed into the Mediterranean “style of life.”

In the first half of the twentieth century, what quality did the famous olive oil, the basis of our dietetic panacea, really have?  What quality of red wines from the jug were the ordinary people consuming in that Mediterranean? Kilograms of vegetables, yes, but surrounded by huge hunks of anti-dietetic bread and hefty portions of bacon . . . succored the insatiable stomachs of the Spanish. . . .

Dietary evolution  . . . in the second half of the century diverges absolutely from the Mediterranean diet . . . However such divergence and perhaps the noted increase in the ingestion of proteins, parallel an increase in life expectancy, in height,  . . .  and also . . . in gastronomic enjoyment.  This poses a serious problem for Mr. Keys and his mariachis.

*Ancel Keys, the American nutritionist who studied starvation, publicised cholesterol, developed the K ration, and promoted the Mediterranean diet in the 1950s.

From Líneas maestras de la gastronomía y la culinaria españolas (siglo xx) (Outlines of Spanish Gastronomy and Cooking in the Twentieth Century) by Francisco Abad Alegría and a number of associates. Abad Alegría, when not writing on food history, is Head of the Neurophysiology Clinic of the University Hospital of Zaragoza in Spain.  Here’s an interview with the author (in Spanish).

Title page

Among the other topics he tackles.

• The major cookbooks of the twentieth century, the professions and aims of their authors. This includes an analysis of the relation between the Sección Femenina del Movimiento Nacional and Franquismo.

• Analysis of menus of different social classes at the beginning, middle and end of the century (including home cooking, restaurants and fast food).

• Changes in kitchen technology, particularly the sources of heat, refrigeration, and the pressure cooker.

From Líneas maestras. Title page of A. Simmons. 6th edn. Buenos Aires. 1951

• Changes in foodstuffs, particularly the increase in the use of chicken, frozen foods, and stock cubes (for a separate post).

• Spanish cooking in the last third of the century.

I appreciate the tables, surveys, and numbers.  Invaluable if you want to understand the evolution of Spanish cuisine in the twentieth century, especially if you want to get behind the restaurant hype.

Threat to the supply of basic products

The ad was posted by the National Chamber of Industrialized Maize, which it turns out is the association of enterprises that turn maize into edible products: masa for tortillas and tamales, snacks, and animal food.  Since the half dozen points where these robberies occur are well known, the Chamber is demanding that the government do something to stop this “leakage.”

It’s well known that large quantities of gasoline and crude ($2-4 billion’s worth) are stolen from Pemex, the national company and sold nationally and internationally (including the US).

Now Mexico’s other fuel, the raw materials for the tortillas and meat that keep humans going,  is being ripped off.   Assuming the facts in the ad are correct (and I can hear the conspiracy theories beginning to buzz) here are a couple of thoughts:

• It’s not clear what kind of maize is being stolen, imported maize (largely for animal feed essential for the rapidly growing consumption of meat, poultry, and eggs) or national white maize (for tortillas).
• Few people grind their own maize in Mexico.  Processors of some kind must be buying this (I think even if it’s imported maize). This quantity may be tiny in terms of total Mexican production. It’s quite enough to need some sophisticated logistics.
• I can’t help thinking of the poem in the Confucian Book of Songs composed by Chinese peasants several hundred years before Christ in protest at the way the aristocrats took substantial portions of their harvest by force. The refrain is:

Large rats! Large rats! Do not eat our grain.

Who are these large rats?   And where do they fit in the Mexican economy in all its shades from white through gray to black?

Now they are honored.  But which farmers?  Here’s the incredulous response from Food, Mommy, from a farming family in Kentucky (I love to follow blogs from working farmers).

Apparently to many of the visitors to the Incredible Food Show in Lexington, Ky. this past weekend [a farmer] is someone who is growing their own food in their backyard or selling at a “Farmer’s” market.

it really shocked me that every time I mentioned to someone that we were there on behalf of farmers to encourage conversation about how food is produced, the instant response was, “Oh, I love that. I visit the Farmer’s Market all the time.” Or, “My sister has a garden. That’s great.”

Food, Mommy is saddened and puzzled that productive large farmers are dismissed as practising industrial agriculture.

The produce farmer in Ohio, or even California, who is large enough to service several grocery stores in our state now has a big “X” on his/her face. Some folks are just convinced that since the farm is not “local” and is producing food on several hundred acres instead of two, that the product is bad, industrial food. At what point does a farmer or farm become “industrial?” And when did “success” become a bad word in agriculture?

I’m with her.  How did farmer become a word only for tiny, unmechanized startups?

Steve Jobs creates cool technological devices, has them produced in China, and is a candidate for sainthood.  American (market or truck) farmers create cool ways of delivering asparagus and lettuce year round, employ people in the United States (Mexicans if Americans don’t want the jobs), and are relegated to the outer circles of  politically unacceptable hell.

Isn’t there an inconsistency here?  How is it possible to wait breathlessly for Steve to improve on the tablets of Moses while shunning farmers who move beyond Cain’s farm and Abel’s pasture.  And even Cain and Abel needed more than the 3000 square feet now often described as a “farm.”  3000 square feet is, after all, only 7/100ths of an acre, neither enough to feed a person nor to make a living, valuable as it may be in teaching children about growing plants.

Edit.  This quote from Russ Parsons of the LA Times puts it well:

Agriculture is a business. Farming without a financial motive is gardening. I use that line a lot when I’m giving talks, and it always gets a laugh. But it’s deadly serious. Not only do farmers have expenses to meet just like any other business, but they also need to be rewarded when they do good work. Any plan that places further demands on farmers without an offsetting profit incentive is doomed to fail.

By arbitrarily removing salt and sugar from their rightful place as chemical compounds, the USDA eliminates hundreds of products that are traditionally cured with one or both of these chemicals. So, in the obfuscating terminology of the USDA, an Iberico  ham that is so well-preserved with salt that it can hang for two years is not cured while one that has added nitrite but can’t last a week in the open air (e.g. Virginia ham) is cured ham.

From Bob del Grosso’s post on the oddities of US food regulation of cured meats.

Mexican peasant walking to town with a donkeyload of firewood for sale

The New York Times a couple of days ago had a long and well researched article on the slowing of Mexican migration to the United States. Yeah.

Mexican is getting wealthier.  In fact Mexico is now 80% urban, something that has a lot to do with this.  Peasants eking out a living on the land are disappearing. Instead they are taking jobs in towns. Just this morning the newspaper Reforma reported that in the last eighteen months, Mazda, Volkswagen, Pirelli, and Proctor and Gamble are opening huge new plants in Guanajuato, the state in the center of the country where I used to live.

Many might think this sad.  But life as a peasant is not a bundle of fun.

So I thought it might be worth linking to earlier blog posts about Mexican peasants, maize, farming, and migration to the United States.

Why it’s not worthwhile for Mexican peasants to go north.

How Mexican peasants are escaping rural poverty.

Why Mexican peasants don’t want to grow maize.

Mexico’s maize production and importation (2008).

How Mexican peasants came to be growing maize in the twentieth century.

Of course, the great unknown in all this is how much drug money is contributing to prosperity.

Wikipedia has a short and clear article on agribusiness, contrasting two ways in which it is used. The first is neutral.

Within the agriculture industry, agribusiness is widely used simply as a convenient portmanteau of agriculture and business, referring to the range of activities and disciplines encompassed by modern food production.

The second is not.

Among critics of large-scale, industrialized, vertically integrated food production, the term agribusiness is used negatively, synonymous with corporate farming. As such, it is often contrasted with smaller family-owned farms.

Whether you use the neutral or the negative meaning of agribusiness, the fact is that British farming has been agribusiness for a long time, at least since the enclosures of the eighteenth century and in many cases back beyond that.

1% of the population owned 80% of British land in 1900, according to the fine historian Chris Bayly, I don’t know the current figures but my strong suspicion is that this hasn’t changed much. Maybe you could find out here.

This 1% did not actually farm, of course, nor did they manage their farms.  Their “home farm” of perhaps a thousand acres was run by a salaried manager and used for keeping their horses, developing specialty breeds, and providing nice vistas to be seen from their country house.

The estate agent managed the rest of the estate. His job was to collect rents that maintained the owner’s lifestyle. These estate agents played a key role in the industrial revolution which was largely funded (as it had to be) by the large landowners. Men like Thomas Davis, agent to the Marquess of Bath at Longleat, was up to his neck in schemes to find exploitable mineral resources (coal), build canals, put in hydraulic schemes  (water meadows, land drainage) to improve land productivity, use steam engines for agricultural tasks, etc etc.

The large tenant farmers worked large farms (1000 acres or more) and (until after World War II) employed large numbers of farm workers. I know a bit about this because my father’s family have been tenants on the Pembroke estate for a hundred years (perhaps longer but things get murky around World War I). They negotiated their leases every five, ten or twenty years with the estate agent.  Provided they paid their rent, these farmers chose how they farmed.  And need I say that the farming was a business.

Now I am quite happy to see farming as a business.  I am quite happy to see corporations running farms (though not so happy when these are royal or aristocratic corporations) if it ensures the long term commitment necessary to good land management.

But what of all those who take a dim view of agribusiness, who want to get rid of corporations, who want small farms farmed by the owner, who see this as a way to social justice, who proudly call lots of one acre a farm, who want artisanal foodstuffs?

Surely they cannot contemplate the long tradition of agribusiness in Britain with equanimity? It’s quite at odds with the small family farm tradition (real or not) so cherished in American political thought. And surely they should be wary of one of the largest magnates of all, Prince Charles.

Prince Charles inherited 135,000 acres, much of it excellent land in the south and west of England.   His manager farms the Home Farm, the organic bit, 1000 acres where he in time-honored tradition raises rare breeds.

His tenants are not required to farm organically, without doubt use as much of the latest agricultural technology as they can afford, and accept farm subsidies. His estate agent Smiths Gore I presume collect the rents and handle the accounts.

Like corporate agribusiness, Prince Charles has integrated vertically by producing a line of food products,  Duchy Products. These he sells not in farmers’ markets but through the large grocery chain, Waitrose. (True, they pay some royalties  into his charity, but that is in trouble at the moment, having to bail out some land investments made by the Prince).  He advertises these industrially-produced foodstuffs by appeal to tradition (a technique pioneered by big wine in late nineteenth-century France).

In 2008, rents from tenant farmers (and presumably from sources such as The Oval cricket ground and holiday rentals in the Scilly Isles) provided him and his family with an income of $26.4 million.

So when I read rave reviews of Prince Charles at the Future of Food conference going on in Washington, D.C., I have to wonder.

Is Prince Charles’ decision to farm 1/135th of his land organically really so compelling?  How can his admirers, most of whom I suspect, distrust agribusiness (and by any standards, Charles’ landholdings have more in common with large corporate landholdings than small family farms), overlook the scale of his operation?

Because of a sneaking deference to royalty?  Because he claims as his own, standard British agricultural practice, such as dung spreading?

Whatever the reason, I find the deference amazing. Prince Charles is, in my view, agribusiness personified.

Prince Charles–Not Your Typical Radical – National Geographic Magazine.  Worth reading.

As the chart below shows, while it’s true the largest dollar amount of farm subsidies go to the largest farms (as you would expect, since subsidies are typically tied directly to production, and production is tied directly to gross sales), looking at the microeconomic effects of subsidies on individual farms should correctly lead you to an entirely different conclusion.

For 2007 (the most current statistics) farms that received government payments and grossed less than $25,000 per year — that is, the small, part-time darlings of the authentic farming movement for which the Times Food Section reserves its most lavish praise — took in an average 75 percent of the value of the crops they raised in the form of government subsidies. For the smallest farms — those grossing less than $1,000 yearly — the percentage skyrockets to nearly 300 percent. In other words: The smallest farms that took payments from the federal government earned three times more in subsidies than the typical farmer in the size category earned in crop sales.

Compare that to farms grossing more than a million dollars annually. Farms taking government payments in that size group received two pennies in government aid for every dollar the average farm earned from crop sales. And in the largest, giant corporate farm category, that government largesse falls to less than half a percent of gross sales.

A few comments.

1.  I am assuming that Mike Smith has his arithmetic right.  And his graph is obviously only for farms that receive subsidies.  It does not address the concern that many small farms do not get subsidies.  It does however suggest that subsidizing small farms is a pricey business.  And given the lack of economies of scale that is not too surprising.  What is surprising to me is the huge differential between large and small subsidized farms in terms of proportion of subsidy to market value of the food produced.

2.  I am strongly of the opinion that we need to seriously consider the economics of small farms before we endorse them. They have rarely been the source of food for large urban populations–and that’s what we have today–and there is surely a reason for that.

A suggestion for starters.  Land is expensive, especially around cities. A farmer needs to be able to make enough to pay for that land or to offset the loss of income from investing his money elsewhere if he already owns it.  And he or she needs to be able to make enough to live and put the kids through college. That is, the small farms in this example don’t come close to meeting these criteria.

And it’s very hard to see how you could  on a small acreage unless you have a very high-value specialty crop.  And we can’t live on high-value specialty crops alone.

3.  And if you are tempted to write Mike Smith off as part of the agricultural establishment, well, isn’t it worth considering that those of us who have grown up in cities might learn something from those who have who know farming economics first hand.  No reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

A quintessentially American meal is perhaps more appropriate than a Chinese feast with dishes like shark’s fin and bird’s nest, and Hu’s chefs certainly know better than the White House chefs about how to prepare that kind of food.

Besides, some Americans would find such fare distasteful, not only politically but also gastronomically—after all, these were the kind of foodstuffs that 19th-century Anglo Americans strongly disliked and mocked the Chinese for eating.

For others, such a Chinese feast would have too much a flavor of Orientalism.

But the all-American menu was still less than ideal. Despite the saying “as American as apple pie,” even most Americans do not eat apple pie more than a couple of times a year. And meat and potatoes are not just that special any more.

The large-scale consumption of meat used to be something distinctive about America—the young and fast-expanding nation’s abundance in meat, especially beef, attracted millions of immigrants and visitors to the New World—but those days have passed.

Meanwhile, while the potato, a New World native, was once new to China, it is now a staple food there. And both meat and potatoes are readily found in American-style restaurants, which are doing very well in China these days.

Would you volunteer as overseer of a state dinner?

[The British] want their fruit and veg to be the best quality, available year-round, British but in season, cheap but with growers paid fairly, and ideally produced without any use of pesticides or artificial production methods.

Hmm.  I’d like that too.

This according  to a consumer survey carried out for FPJ by England Marketing.  FBJ Fresh Info (UK), august 27, 2010 Full text at http://www.freshinfo.com/index.php?s=n&ss=fd&sid=52059 (need to register). Thanks to Dr. C.S. Prakash of http://www.AgBioWorld.org/