Occupy’s Message to the Food Movement: Bridge the Class Divides

Occupy Wall Street is about nothing if not about class politics in America. Class has long been the submerged topic—it seems to make most Americans uncomfortable while at the same time defining many of our social structures and personal interactions. We often discuss race and gender inequalities, but discussions of class seem to be almost taboo outside of an academic setting. Sure, politicians will use code words for talking about class (“working people”), but there is no explicit mention of the strict class lines that divide and segregate people in this country. What Occupy Wall Street has succeeded at is opening up this dialogue and bringing the question of class to the foreground.

And from where I stand, nothing is a more deeply felt and lived indicator of class in this country than food—this is why the question of global food systems must be addressed within the framework of Occupy Wall Street.

For all the talk of Occupy having a vague message, I find the message quite clear and compelling: it is a dissection of American class politics rooted in calling out the corporate control of our democracy and our everyday lives. As such, dismantling our corporate-dominated food systems and replacing them with local, sustainable alternatives will play a crucial role in getting corporations out of our food supply. The challenge will be getting the majority of Americans to agree with this idea.

The food landscape and its correlation to class is complicated and rife with contradiction. This is partly because our modern-day American food system is brand new—it’s only been in existence for about sixty years. Compared to our agrarian past, which is at least 10,000 years old, sixty years is a blip. But the past sixty years of industrial food systems have come to define American food as well as the global food economy. Much remains to be seen about how this new global food economy and new food products will ultimately affect our world. But as the food movement has been pointing out for the past thirty years, many negative effects on our environment and our health are already quite clear. What’s less easy to identify and understand are the complex webs of social relations that have developed around our food and food systems.

To consider the real implications of our food system, we must first understand how deeply corporations control our food supply; at this point, there is a near monopolization. Just four companies—Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus—control 90 percent of the global trade in grain. In the United States, three firms process 70 percent of soybeans and 40 percent of wheat. Three companies now process more than 70 percent of all beef, and four firms slaughter and pack nearly 60 percent of all pork and chicken. By 2002, the USDA reported that four companies made 75 percent of breakfast cereal, 75 percent of snacks, 60 percent of cookies, and 50 percent of ice cream.

Farmers gather in New York in December 2011 to demand an end to fracking and factory farming.

Creative Commons/Mike Fleshman

This monopolization is taking the ultimate toll on our environment and our health. While large-scale industrial food production results in vast quantities of food, these systems are inefficient in managing their own waste. Long-term environmental damage is the consequence. Runoff from industrial agriculture is the biggest source of water pollution in the United States, according to the EPA. Likewise, the food produced in these systems is often of poor nutritional quality, resulting in an overfed but undernourished population. Currently, 75 percent of the population is obese or overweight, and many are chronically ill from diet-related diseases.

Michelle Obama harvests vegetables from the White House kitchen garden during a “Let’s Move!” event in June 2010.

Lawrence Jackson (Official White House Photo)

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