Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture

Introduction

Introduction In June 2009, producers Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser released the film Food, Inc. in theaters across the United States. That this movie, an indictment of the U.S. food industry, played in mainstream theaters demonstrates that many people believe that we must rethink and rebuild our food system. In October 2008, prior to the presidential election , the New York Times published a letter to the president-elect from Michael Pollan that explained why we need what he called a Farmer in Chief. Pollan detailed the steep social, health, and environmental costs of industrial agriculture and urged that we must “put the interests of America’s farmers, families, and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s.”1 Perhaps the most dramatic change can be seen in the proliferation of farmers’ markets and demands for organic produce, to the extent that even Walmart carries organic lines. While we can attribute this growth to multiple factors, such as the perceived health benefits of organic produce and the desire to reduce our “footprint,” this growth of interest in organic food demonstrates a growing dissatisfaction with existing food choices and the search for alternatives. Articles detailing the proliferation of farmers’ markets and the miles traveled by our food appear almost weekly, and these stories acknowledge what many of us have recognized for some time: the costs of industrial agriculture to the environment, human health, animal suffering, and social equity are unbearable. The environmental degradation, hunger, and social instability produced by industrial agriculture demand that we expand our ecological imagination to develop new paradigms for agricultural practice. Expanding the ecological imagination in an agricultural context means 2 Growing Stories from India imagining agricultural practices that consider effects on the biotic community, which includes multiple human and nonhuman communities . By this I mean that we must recognize that the prevailing agricultural narrative, where fence-to-fence monoculture has taken over from smallholdings and traditional farms, where profit trumps preservation , where technology drives practice, and where the land ethic has been seriously challenged, is just one of multiple narratives. Contemporary agribusiness—industrial agriculture—relies on a narrative of “feeding the world” that entails images of prosperity and plenty. Exposing the narrative dimensions of agricultural practice reveals that multiple narratives exist and, more important, that we can choose among narratives. By asking “What stories do we tell ourselves about food?” we can, perhaps, revise those stories. The Urgency for New Stories The growing dissatisfaction with our existing food system is situated within broader social emphases on greening and sustainability. “Green is the new gold” seems to be the contemporary mantra, and products are increasingly touted as “green,” including SUVs, laundry soap, and dog waste bags. Green and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)-certified buildings and emergent technologies to harness wind and solar power indicate a growing emphasis on sustainable systems. Similarly, schools and universities have implemented sustainability programs that include curriculum reform as well as new policies to guide facility operations. At the same time, this proliferation of green foods, goods, and services allows for a level of “green-washing” because, amidst competing claims of sustainability, it can be difficult to make choices, despite trends that demonstrate that many people want to change how they eat and how they live. Popular books, such as Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Paul Roberts’s The End of Food, reflect and shape these trends by making explicit to readers the social and environmental consequences of food choices. Books, films, and farmer-scholar-activists such as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Frederick Kirschenmann educate consumers about the environmental and social devastation associated with indus- Introduction 3 trial agriculture, and this growing awareness produces a sort of cognitive dissonance as we recall the pervasive storybook images of farms populated with red barns and smiling cows. It has become clear to many that the narratives of industrial agriculture—of productivity and plenty—are incompatible with sustainable and ethical food choices; few people conjure up images of meat-packing plants while eating dinner. This dissonance between how we imagine—and would like—our food to be produced and the realities of conventional food production presents an opportunity to reimagine our stories about food. The ramifications of growing problems in our food system reveal the urgency of the situation. In August 2010, for example, an Iowa egg company recalled over 380...