Richard Manning: “Against The Grain”

“Archer Daniels Midland, conduit of food and images of food, with fifteen thousand owned railcars, two thousand barges, a hundred oceangoing vessels, and a leased network of five million trucks and five hundred thousand railcars moving wheat, corn and soybeans to 269 processing plants.  Woven amid the rails and pipes is an integral web of effectively owned and leased politicians and news organizations.

Archer Daniels is not alone in this picture; it is just the standard-bearer.  Still, the list of food processors is not terribly long.  Five companies – Cargill, Incorporated; Continental Grain Co. (recently renamed ContiGroup Companies); Louis Dreyfus; Andre & Cie; and the Bunge & Born Group – control about 75 percent of the corn market. Four companies – Archer Daniels; Cargill; Bunge ; and Continental Grain – control about 80 percent of soybean processing, both in the United States and globally.  A single co-op, Ag Processing Inc., accounts for another 5 to 10 percent in the United States.”

Tom Philpott: “It’s The McEconomy Stupid”

Well, I just discovered Tom Philpott blogging about food and politics over at Mother Jones.

It’s the McEconomy, Stupid — By Tom Philpott| Thu Jun. 9, 2011 10:40 AM PDT

I alluded to it in my intro post, but this is worth highlighting:

Up to 30,000 of the 54,000 jobs created in May were the result of a hiring spree by the hamburger chain, analysts at Morgan Stanley told Market Watch on Friday.

So hiring at McDonald’s accounted for about half of the nation’s job growth in May. What lessons can we draw from this? One, obviously, is that the economy is anemic and lurching toward a “double dip”—which isn’t some new dessert concoction at McDonald’s. While unemployment hovers at 9 percent, job creation has slowed to a trickle—and what jobs are on offer tend to be of the burger-flipping, minimum-wage variety.  As CBS Market Watch Washington Bureau Chief Steve Goldstein put it, “There’s a case to be made for the benefit of fast-food restaurant employment, but it’s obviously not the foundation for sustained economic growth.

The second lesson is that McDonald’s itself obviously sees opportunity in this crisis. It made 25,000-30,000 net hires in just one month. That’s a pretty big bet that its “dollar menus” and other cheap calorie blasts will remain popular among a cash-strapped populace having to work ever harder to stary in place. That’s good news for Mikky D’s shareholders—and bad news for public health in a nation besieged by chronic maladies caused by an excess of low-quality calories.

Charles Darwin

“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a diety.  More humble and, I believe, true to consider him created from animals.”

David Abram: “Becoming Animal”

“Darwin had rediscovered the deep truth of totemism – the animistic assumption, common to countless indigenous cultures but long banished from polite society, that human beings are closely kindred to other creatures, and indeed have various other animals as our direct ancestors.  Here was a form of totemism transposed into the modern world – the totemic insight now translated into the language of “descent by natural selection from a common ancestor.”  This modern version no longer saw different persons as descendants of different totemic animals, but recognized all humankind as derived from a common lineage of creatures.  In the wake of Darwin’s bold insights, we have learned to consider all humans as members of a common family.  But the wild, animistic implication of Darwin’s insight has taken much longer to surface in our collective awareness, no doubt because it greatly threatens our cherished belief in human transcendence.  Nonetheless, it is an inescapable implication of the evolutionary insight: we humans are corporeally related, by direct and indirect webs of evolutionary affiliation, to every other organism that we encounter.“

Richard Manning: “Against The Grain”

“America’s Northeast was once U.S. agriculture’s major force, with farms supplying the country’s densest clusters of population.  The Northeast now does very little farming, and most of the agricultural lands have gone back to forest or suburbs, an odd transition in that these are in some ways the nation’s best agricultural lands.  Unlike the western grasslands, the Northeast gets enough rain to grow crops.  The decline came as a result of a particular form of subsidy: federal irrigation projects.  Beginning at the height of the progressive era, the nation set to work on making the western deserts bloom, investing billions in dams, canals, tunnels, and drains to bring nine million additional acres under cultivation.  The historian Donald Worster has shown that this figure exactly parallels the acreage of abandoned farms in the Northeast – land that already had water – during the same period.  What industrial agriculture abandons is opportunity.”