Go visit a farm, y’all.
The sun is beginning to set earlier and the green leaves that hug my 4th story balcony are turning yellow and dropping to the street below to let me know that fall is set to arrive soon. The food from the vegetable co-op that fills up my refrigerator is changing too. All summer long my kitchen was filled with the smell of strawberries; at times the aroma was so intense that I thought that they had macerated and leaked onto the floor. Soft mangos and rainbows of tomatoes are turning into sturdy brocolis and bright green bunches of string beans. I’m learning to make stews with beet leaves and herby sauces with fennel fronds and carrot tops.
My vegetable vendor, Adriana, sends me a message every Monday night with a list of fifteen vegetables and a handful of fruits that I can choose from. My order is picked from the ground on Wednesday and brought to me on Thursday. No more and no less than what has been ordered is harvested. When the season ends, that’s it; this week that meant no more peaches until next summer. This is how it should be because these are the rules of the Earth.
A few weeks ago, I travelled 100 kilometers outside of the city to stand on the land where my vegetables come from. I went with two friends and fellow cooks to meet Raquel and Primitivo, a couple that has spent their lives farming, in hopes of building a direct relationship with them to source ingredients for our different projects (and suggest, pretty please, that they plant some maiz so that I can make tortillas). We spent an hour with them plucking strawberries from their vines, pulling yams out of the ground and chewing on mustard leaves.
As we walked through the fields, I asked Raquel how long she’d been farming this way. She paused for a moment and explained that they had always rented land from large landowners to harvest produce and flowers that were treated intensively with pesticides and herbicides. After years of working in the fields, her daughter got sick with cancer that moved to her bones and killed her. They switched to a different model quickly after.
Argentina is amongst the globe’s most prolific users of the agrochemical glyphosate. Nearly 28 million acres of land are sprayed with an estimated 300 million litres annually. In addition to polluting waterways, depleting soil health and contaminating bee populations more than 13 million Argentines, or a fourth of the population, are exposed to agrochemicals that have led to increased numbers of miscarriages, cancers and congenital disorders. In rural towns along Argentina’s farmbelt, the cancer rate can be up to three times that of their urban neighbors. The fruit borne from these radical farming techniques are soybeans which makes up roughly 60% of farmed land. Nearly all of it is exported to make animal feed and edible oil.
And when the land stops producing, multinational farm companies simply move elsewhere. In her piece “Agrochemicals: A silent death”, Agustina Santoro writes in conversation with Agricultural Engineer Carlos Caballo: “The frontier of big ag is oppressive, look no further than the countries’ high deforestation rate, which is 4 times the global average. They [multinational ag companies] continue to destroy ecosystems that act as the globe’s lungs...and when the land is no longer profitable, they abandon them and look for new land. The land is exhausted, the soil dies. This is the environmental legacy that we are inheriting from this model.”
The more that I visit farms, the more radical my connection to food becomes and this is precisely why most people never visit farms. This isn’t to suggest the fault of individuals. Having the time to visit a farm is a privilege; having enough access to information to question the food system and the means to act on that information is a privilege too. The invisibilization of our food systems is part of the design, what Karl Marx defined as “commodity fetishism” in Das Kapital more than 150 years ago. In their article “Removing the veil? Commodity Fetishism, Fair Trade, and the Environment”, Ian and Mark Hudson extrapolate the theory for the modern consumer:
“Under commodity capitalism, the social, environmental, and historical relations that go into the production of a commodity are hidden. When a person wanders through the grocery store or shopping mall, what they see are the characteristics of the commodities themselves--the attractiveness of the packaging, the cut of the fabric, perhaps the lifestyle associations stapled on by the marketing departments, and of course, the price.”
Understanding the “social, environmental and historical relations” is the only way to work towards a more equitable system; we cannot respect the rights of the people, of the Earth, that we don’t even know exist. Hudson continues, “In this sense, the commodity has a life of its own, completely divorced from the process by which it was created. It becomes not a result of production on which people have worked under a wide variety of more or less acceptable conditions but an entity unto itself.”
I’ve been feeling particularly pessimistic about all this lately. How do we break the social conditioning that teaches us that food is cheap and ubiquitous? How do we begin to respect the food that we consume? When I visit farms, the answers seem so simple. Raquel and Primitivo harvest food, they set their price, I pay and we are all happy. When I think about how much humans have complicated the most basic of exchanges, I get really angry. When I realize just how complicated it will be to untangle ourselves from our own web and just how absurdly fragile the system actually is (re: a single boat blocking global trade in the Suez Canal), I want to throw my computer across the room.
Dr Sonja Vermeulen was recently quoted in Carbon Brief on how to the climate crisis: “there’s no single silver bullet – if we focus only on more plant-based diets, or only on improved agricultural practices, or only on the energy and transport sectors, we won’t get to where we need to be – we need all three.”
Much of this untangling is psychological. While I don’t think that this should be the responsibility of individual consumers -- our food should simply be ethically produced -- the reality is that it is up to masses of consumers to demand change and guide the culture of consumption. But getting the masses to demand a change is a challenge no matter where we are in the world. In Argentina, Buenos Aires’ Mercado Central, where 20% of the country’s food passes, 80% of the vegetables that enter the market on a regular month consist of just six varieties. In the United States, Instagram constantly reminds me that most food comes from a can, plastic bag or cardboard box — depending on what study you read, between 50 and 70% of the US-diet is processed food. In both countries, our relationship to food and the place it comes from is completely severed.
Must we all pull potatoes out of the ground to develop a militancy around the way that we consume food? I write this as I prepare for another piece about an emblematic Buenos Aires dish that includes breaded chicken, fried bananas and canned cream corn. I justified this to myself because I am writing about small family businesses that are culturally relevant to the history of Buenos Aires and particularly vulnerable to the pandemic. The truth is I wanted to write something gluttonous because after back to back pieces (for Life & Thyme and Anchoa) on the climate crisis, I needed a break from thinking about doomsday. What irony. Humans are complicated — even those who should know better (me) are vulnerable to nostalgia and pleasure.
For me, these are treats. a luxury. I am beginning to think of luxury less and less in terms of the things that I can acquire and more and more in what I am allowed to not acknowledge. At some point, we will all have to acknowledge the backwardness of this food system, the question is if we will be proactive while there is still time left or defensive once there is no turning back the wheels. Knowledge that the food that we eat is most often rooted in unjust and unsustainable practices and knowledge that, as people like Raquel, Primitivo, Adriana and Nazareno clearly demonstrate, there is another way, a better way, if we just prioritized the interests of people and not big business. And I assure you, just like the strawberries that made my summer, this way is much more delicious.