338 animal, vegetable, miracleBut it’s also true what the strategists say about hearts and minds—you
have to win them both. We will change our ways significantly as a nation
not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when
we want to. During my family’s year of conscious food choices, the most
important things we’d learned were all about that: the wanting to. Our
fretful minds had started us on a project of abstinence from industrial
food, but we finished it with our hearts. We were not counting down the
days until the end, because we didn’t want to go back.
A few days after my momentary chest- deep-in-food fantasy, we had
dinner with our friends Sylvain and Cynthia. Sylvain grew up in the Loire
Valley, where local food is edible patriotism, and I sensed a kindred spirit
from the way he celebrated every bite of our salad, inhaling the spice of
the cut radishes and arugula. He told us that in India it’s sometimes con-
sidered a purification ritual to go home and spend a year eating everything
from one place—ideally, even to grow it yourself. I liked this name for
The Blind Leading the Blind
Critics of local food suggest that it’s naive or elitist, whereas industrial agri-
culture is for everybody: it’s what’s for dinner, all about feeding the world.
“Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn,” wrote Steven
Shapin in the New Yorker, “is what feeds the victims of an African famine, not
the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers’ market.”
The big guys have so completely taken over the rules of the game, it’s hard
to see how food systems really work, but this criticism hits the nail right on the
pointy end: it’s perfectly backward. One of industrial agriculture’s latest feed-
the- hungry schemes offers a good example of why that’s so. Exhibit A: “golden
rice.” It’s a genetically modified variety of rice that contains beta- carotene in the
kernel. (All other parts of the rice plant already contain it, but not the grain after
it is milled.) The developers of this biotechnology say they will donate the seeds—
with some strings attached—to Third World farmers. It’s an important public rela-
tions point because the human body converts beta- carotene to vitamin A; a
defi ciency of that vitamin affects millions of children, especially in Asia, causing
half a million of them every year to go blind. GM rice is the food industry’s pro-
posed solution.