This, Here, Now, Is Literally The Whole Point.
First they came for our iceberg lettuce. Then they came for all our lettuces. Then they came singularly for our shredded lettuces. Soon thereafter we were assured it was only shredded lettuce, only at Taco Bell, coming only from farms in Mexico. It wasn’t long before all of this was proven to be irrefutably imaginary and we were assured by what is left of our noble Fourth Estate that no vegetables are safe anymore. We were quietly normalizing this new reality—that with vegetal nutrition came explosive diarrhea. Inundated as we were with novel systemic apocalypse bylines day by day, it was easy enough to relegate this health crisis to the back pages of our newspapers and minds. But then they came for the eggs. And they’re still coming for the eggs. And this isn’t the first time they’ve come for the eggs. Now they’re coming for the jalapeños too, reminding us in doing so that no vegetable has been safe for months now, but also confusing us by telling us one vegetable is particularly dangerous and therefore implying that other vegetables are now safe, which, frankly, they are not.
This is why it is a good idea to grow your own food, and why it’s a good idea to buy locally-grown produce, and why it’s a good idea to support small farms across the country, even across the world, and why supporting organic farming is a good idea. And while knowing the name of the cow whose meat you’re eating may be taking it a step or three too far, we’ve leapt so many miles in the opposite direction that taking things a step or three too far backwards might not be so wild at this point.
In better times, when we could still see danger on the horizon and in our midsts, but before it was the omnidirectional everpresent fog it is today, we were growing food to do our small part to make the world a better place. We were doing it to feel better about ourselves, to slow down and commune with the world, and to lightly combat industrial agricultural systems, for our health, maybe just maybe a little for our wallets, and for the betterment of the planet. In my decade-plus of loudly preaching “grow food” it has never been with the notion that every one of us can sustain ourselves individually with our gardens. It has been about knowing that the Agricultural Industrial Complex is not sustainable and never has been. And while stepping outside of it can be a privilege and a pleasure, to do so is becoming more and more a necessity day by day, as logistical systems begin to collapse, as governmental oversight begins to collapse, as the global ecosystem begins to collapse.
What is happening to our food right now is a direct result of the ongoing dissolution of the FDA. Say what you will about the government in practice; in theory it exists specifically to do things that benefit and protect us as a whole in ways that we cannot actualize individually. We pay into the government so that it supports us. Duh. Infrastructural repair, social safety nets, self defense, food safety, and so on. In practice, things are not nearly so (also duh), but so much of what has remained of the government, so much of it that was still for us, has been actively dismantled, and we are seeing where it affects us directly left and right now. From lettuce to eggs to jalapeños and back.
So much of the idealism around buying locally or growing your own food comes not from the lesser environmental burden—created not just by the logistics of capitalism and the marketing of it all—but from the accountability contained therein. That whole “knowing where your food comes from” part of shopping at the farmer’s market isn’t a feel-good slogan: It is a promise that if something does go wrong, you will know how, where, and why. The broader community will know as well, and you will know when it has been fixed.
The odds of a cyclospora or salmonella outbreak occurring at a small farm, even one that uses organic practices where fecal matter is part of the process (it’s always part of the process, it’s just convoluted in different ways depending on scale and methodology) are about nil.
The massive agricultural operations that account for most of the food we end up eating have crazy mechanized cleaning, watering, and fertilizing processes, unfathomable webs of distribution along the industrial and commercial processes, obligations to their shareholders rather than the customers who consume their products, and far less governmental oversight than they’ve ever had (since operating at anything even kind of close to this scale).
Smaller farms, yes, even those that use conventional farming methods, even “large” ones that may balk at your ethical concerns around animal rights and environmental sustainability, are very conscious of keeping their product safe, clean, and healthy. They are held to a more rigorous standard, even if they don’t care about you and your opinion, because the larger Industrial Agricultural Complex is eager to swallow them should they make any wrong turn. And their food processing still involves layers of exactly that, processing, but you can follow this to source their ends and means. Their obligation is to their own stability and to you the consumer, directly. Also, machines that are not designed to account for warning signs in food are far more prevalent in larger food systems, as are severely underpaid and overexploited workers who are too exhausted to notice when issues arise.
And if you are growing food yourself, well, you will know when you’re spraying your crops with fecal water (I hope), and if you’ve chosen to do so, you will know when you’ve rinsed them off effectively. And you will know when your freshly-laid eggs are still covered in cloacal miasma, and you will wash them off accordingly, and you will wash your hands accordingly as well. Global food systems have worked wonders for this (human) world, but they have rendered horrors as well, horrors that may soon eat themselves alive. So, now more than ever, get to that local market and grow yourself some food, OK?
illustrations by Rachel Speck
