Feeling Organic

The New York Times has had a series of articles recently that touch on one of my sore points, the idea that organic food is somehow better for you and the planet than conventional agriculture. This is problematic, because A) it simply isn't supported by the evidence and B) it replaces critical thinking about food policy.

First, from September 3rd, 2012.

"[Stanford University Scientists] concluded that fruits and vegetables labeled organic were, on average, no more nutritious than their conventional counterparts, which tend to be far less expensive. Nor were they any less likely to be contaminated by dangerous bacteria like E. coli.

The researchers also found no obvious health advantages to organic meats.

Conventional fruits and vegetables did have more pesticide residue, but the levels were almost always under the allowed safety limits, the scientists said. The Environmental Protection Agency sets the limits at levels that it says do not harm humans.

“When we began this project, we thought that there would likely be some findings that would support the superiority of organics over conventional food,” said Dr. Dena Bravata, a senior affiliate with Stanford’s Center for Health Policy and the senior author of the paper, which appears in Tuesday’s issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. “I think we were definitely surprised."

This study prompted some self-doubt from the usual suspects I know on Facebook, but they rapidly recovered and decided that organic food wasn't about nutrition, or chemical exposure, but about sustainability and the environment.

Of course, organic agriculture is still agriculture, and used land, water, and other resources. From December 30th, 2011.

"Growers here on the Baja Peninsula, the epicenter of Mexico’s thriving new organic export sector, describe their toil amid the cactuses as “planting the beach.”...

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow crops. And the organic tomatoes end up in an energy-intensive global distribution chain that takes them as far as New York and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, producing significant emissions that contribute to global warming."

And then today, Nicolas Kristof got to the heart of the matter.

"Let me introduce Bob Bansen, a high school buddy of mine who is a third-generation dairyman raising Jersey cows on lovely green pastures here in Oregon beside the Yamhill River. Bob, 53, a lanky, self-deprecating man with an easy laugh, is an example of a farmer who has figured out how to make a good living running a farm that is efficient but also has soul.

As long as I’ve known him, Bob has had names for every one of his “girls,” as he calls his cows. Walk through the pasture with him, and he’ll introduce you to them."

This is what organic is really about, not any kind of health or environmental virtue, but the belief that you can have a personal relationship with your food, and thence the land by buying organic. Milk doesn't come from a store, it comes from Farmer Bob and his happy cows. The organic label on your granola bars and cage-free eggs are link to the Jeffersonian yoeman farmer of yore.

This is utter bunk. What percentage of organic consumer actually go back to the farm? How much of what is on organic labels is faux-folksy marketing verbiage from big business? Perhaps my favorite reductio ad absurdum of the local-organic food movement was an article I saw in a magazine (that I sadly can no longer find) about a service in San Francisco that dispatches hipster farmers on fixies to take care of your urban garden if you're too busy to weed, water, and harvest it yourself for the low price of ~$30/hour.

Why does this annoy me? Food is serious business, everybody on earth depends on agriculture to survive, and the fights over organic-vs-conventional are an elitist distraction that prevents progress on real issues relating to global food justice, sustainability in the face of climate change. There's a reasonable argument to be made that the 2009 Russian drought triggered the Arab Spring, as authoritarian regimes could no longer buy off their restive populations with subsidized bread. This year's American corn crop is pretty much also a write off, with unpredictable but not good effects.

I'm not a food policy expert by any means, (for that see www.shapingsciencepolicy.com), but tangling up naturalistic values with the basic infrastructure of survival is not a winning strategy. If you really care about minute levels of pesticide exposure, get the FDA to draft new rules based on solid studies. If you think that the food pyramid is bunk, and most food is toxic junk, develop a deep base of credible experts to run a more independent USDA. Politics is slow and frustrating, full of compromises and delays, but if your not involved, it'll be left to the hucksters and the sharks and the industry representatives.

I get that people feel lost and disconnected from traditional values and from the land, but guess what. You're not a farmer, and unless you spend a significant amount of time working in the dirt, you won't be. You're just another anonymous 21st century consumption unit like the rest of us, and putting different food in your maw won't give you the values you seek. Changing the world by buying the right stuff just makes new categories for the ad men to use to divvy us up.

The Bookstore is Dead, Long Live the written word

I've seen an article bemoaning the end of the book about monthly for as long as I can remember. The most recent one is from Curtis Wright, who argues that the only players left standing in books are Google and Amazon, and that everybody else is just waiting to go out of business. Literature is dead, Oprah's book club just pushes endless waves of trash, etc etc. But why do we even need bookstores?

As far as I’m concerned, the book business deserves to die if for no other reason than that its business model is something out of the 1930s: send a bunch of loser Willy Lomans out as “reps,” people who don’t read and don’t understand the books they sell, and have them place the books on consignment, just as if they were old chairs that you were trying to unload at the local consignment store. As far as the bookstores were concerned, they were mostly purchasing decoration for their stores, so that it at least looked like a place to buy books. The few books that actually made money—celebrity memoirs, confessions of failed politicians, moronic self-help tomes, and jokey piss-jobs about not running with scissors—were profitably located on a few tables at the front of the store. Everything else was just ambience.

Certainly, the bookstore as a business model is imploding. Independent bookstores have been in a persistent vegetative state for decades. Borders went bankrupt this past summer, and I can't remember the last time I set foot in a Barnes & Noble. But bookstores, at least for Wright, are not just about moving paper from publishers to shelves, it's about centers for local literary discussion, for elevating the people above the tedium and banality of life.

Wait, bookstores are essential to literature? When I think of the great bursts of literature from the likes of The Lost Generation, the Beats, Golden Age Science-Fiction, I think about cafes, bars, 5th floor apartments, and odd little magazines, not bookstores. Writers write, they aren't hanging around in bookstores absorbing the ambiance and swapping sentences, they're off in the world engaged in the messy process of translating experience into the written word. Bookstores sites of distribution, not of production. Literature is not written in a bookstore, and does not need a store to survive.

Now, how about the production side? White bemoans the loss of the learned clerk who knew everything about what was in their store, and who could perfectly recommend a book, or the serendipitous find. Now, I've gotten some profoundly good advice from clerks (thanks, Borderlands-SF!), but I've also wandered lost through endless heaps of indistinguishable books, unable to tell which ones were good or bad, ultimately landing on a trusted name I already knew. And not to be blindly technologically optimistic, but at this point, computers are really good at being recommendation engines. Pandora Radio has better taste and more diversity than my 250 GB music library. Amazon recommendations are often pretty spot on, and come with a host of reviews and opinions that you can't get in a bookstores.

If literature is about starting a conversation, we might be right to feel that we've lost something, not being able to see what books other people are reading on the subway, or have on the shelves in their house. This public space is lost. But what do we really get from this most mass-market of shared experiences? What use is it knowing that everybody is reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? White might not like, but the public sphere is data-driven, and these days data is online. For the past year, I've put every book I've read on Goodreads, crossposting perhaps a third of those reviews to Facebook. This is far more exposure than sitting out by the cafe reading some embarrassingly illustrated scifi novel word ever get.

White goes on to decry the potential of an Amazon information monopoly. But the idea that publishing can be monopolized in this day and age is absurd. A monkey can self-publish on Amazon, and get paid. Professional writers may have some valid concerns over the pricing structure, and their relative lack of power in this relationship, but then again, it would be hard for writers to become more destitute. And if you don't like Amazon, grab some web-hosting and throw up a pdf. Or just participate in the massive para-literatures around fanfiction. I'm not going to claim that fanfiction is art, but its certainly words, and more than that it is people engaging with a text, incorporating bits of it into themselves, and sharing stories in a shared universe. It is a literary conversation.

So perhaps literature is dying, if you define literature as something produced by writers, editors, publishers and critics for the good of the elite masses. But that incestuous cycle's artist failure is self-evident. How many books are both Nobel prize winners and best-sellers? Any guesses as to how many of these books will be read in 100 years?

The bookstore is dead. Fine, we don't need it. Literature is irrelevant, but it's okay because we have our own language and our own text. Long live the written word!