American Sustenance

When I first set out to report and write about what we now call the food system, I ran into a brick wall with editors in New York.

This was in the late 1990s and early aughts.

I was chasing stories about the new genetically modified crops, the fight over the federal definition of organic , and the rise of gigantic factory farms—stories that would eventually find their way into my book The Omnivore’s Dilemma —but few editors seemed interested.

At first I was baffled.

I had read my Wendell Berry and had taken to heart his famous dictum, “Eating is an agriculture act.” Didn’t everybody know that? A century or so ago, the question of where our food comes from would have been too obvious to pose, let alone investigate and write a book about.

In 1900, about four of every 10 Americans were farmers, and everyone else was likely related to one.

But as the food chains that fed us grew longer and more intricate, they became invisible to most of us, to the point where urban Americans seemed satisfied with the answer “Food comes from the supermarket.” For cosmopolitan Americans around the turn of the millennium, the seemingly obvious connection between agriculture and eating was not obvious at all.

Maybe that was my problem! “Agriculture” was a distant and musty abstraction, something that happens in I states such as Iowa and Indiana, and was of no conceivable interest to urban readers.

I revised my pitches, dropped the word agriculture , which to the typical editor in New York might as well have been something that happens in Alpha Centauri, and replaced it with food .

Instead of pitching a piece about factory farms, for instance, I proposed a story about “how a prime cut of beef finds its way from a pasture in South Dakota to a steakhouse in New York.” It worked, almost like magic.

Who isn’t interested in food? It turned out that editors in New York were especially keen on it; many of them were foodies and, at least in those days, had healthy expense accounts. [ Read: The dark history of how coffee took over the world ] Mine wasn’t the only or even the first such book: Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) and Marion Nestle’s Food Politics (2002) had come out a few years before.

All three books sought to connect a series of far­-flung dots: between the way we farm and the way we eat, but also between industrial agriculture and obesity (and chronic disease); farm policy and the environmental crisis; the rise of fast food and the collapse of home cooking; monoculture farming and fossil fuels; concentration in the food industry and the hollowing-out of rural America.

Another concept you hardly ever heard about back then was “food politics,” as Marion reminded me recently.