Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink

7 The Less Perfect Story: Diversity and Farming Strategies

7 The Less Perfect Story Diversity and Farming Strategies LOOKING AT CONSUMPTION, part 1 has shown that milk drinking is as much a product of cultural ideas as it is of material needs. It became the perfect food for the creation of perfect bodies. By questioning the idea of perfection, especially the representation of certain forms of food and certain bodies as perfect—that is, universal and complete—we found that the consumption of milk was a creation of social and political relationships. It is only natural, then, when we turn to the rise of the fluid milk production system, to question concepts of perfection here as well. To tell a less perfect story of dairy production, we must take into account the diversity of dairy practice in the United States. The question of diversity in the sociology of agriculture is a long-standing one. For more than a century, social theorists concerned with agriculture have tried to answer the agrarian question: Why do small agricultural enterprises —either peasants in Europe and the Third World or family farmers in the United States—still exist? While some agriculture does resemble the factory assembly line, as a whole food production has remained widely diverse in scale and structure.1 Rather than simply trying to explain why agriculture hasn’t industrialized , sociologists have recently become more interested in explaining the many different ways farmers practice the art of food production. These sociologists are paying particular attention to agriculture in marginal and low-resource regions in order to discover the “adaptive strategies” by which farmers in these areas produce food.2 Rather than considering small and marginal farmers a remnant of a static past, sociologists of agriculture are realizing that less industrialized farmers practice a dynamic set of adaptive strategies that are embedded in strong social networks. These networks include both economic influ144 ences, such as the neighborhood processing plant, and social influences, such as ethnicity, religion, or family relationships.3 Sociologists dealing with farmers in the less industrialized world have been particularly interested in the wide variety of ways a single food can be produced. Accordingly, in working with local farmers, these sociologists often focus on understanding the specific “farming systems” prevalent in a region.4 Once again, the tendency is to focus on local institutional contexts, from markets to farm households.5 In addition , researchers interested in “agroecology” or sustainable agriculture have adapted farming systems research methods to understand how farmers can produce food without depleting local resources.6 In addition, a number of U.S. sociologists have reexamined agriculture in the light of the new “turns” in economic, historical, and political sociology, each of which emphasizes the diversity of practice and the social embeddedness of particular economies.7 Some of these sociologists have focused on dairy farming, rediscovering regional differences in economic structure.8 Other sociologists are paying particular attention to the social and institutional networks in which actors in the food system—from farmers to consumers—practice. This approach emphasizes the “polyvalence” of these networks and their potential as “alternative organizational patterns of production and consumption.”9 A number of studies taking this “actor-network approach” emphasize the social construction of food systems and the interlinkages of production and consumption.10 In Europe, due to an immediately pressing set of concerns, sociologists have turned to the study of agricultural diversity. Europeans have noticed that the European Union’s “Common Agricultural Policy” has threatened to homogenize farming practices across member nations. European citizens treasure their regionally and nationally distinct ways of using the land and producing food. As a result, the decline in regional differences in farming practice is widely viewed in these countries as a tremendous social loss. In response, the European Union is now attempting to create agricultural policies that will retain some of the diversity of regional practice.11 To explore more closely the historical relationship between institutional context and strategies in dairy farming requires data that capture the diversity of dairy strategies over time and link these strategies to alternate institutional networks—particularly alternate market institutions —beyond the farm gate. Data linking particular farms to particular THE LESS PERFECT STORY 145 market networks would, of course, be ideal. As noted earlier, the Cornell management surveys in fact recorded a great deal of diversity among dairy farms and their institutional networks, even while projecting diversity’s disappearance. However, historical and geographic information linking...