66 animal, vegetable, miracletice when I’m consuming the United Nations of edible plants and ani-
mals all in one seating. (Or the WTO, is more like it.) On a winter’s day
not long ago I was served a sumptuous meal like this, fi nished off with a
dessert of raspberries. Because they only grow in temperate zones, not
the tropics, these would have come from somewhere deep in the South-
ern Hemisphere. I was amazed that such small, eminently bruisable fruits
could survive a zillion- mile trip looking so good (I myself look pretty
wrecked after a mere red- eye from California), and I mumbled some re-
served awe over that fact. I think my hostess was amused by my country-
mouse naïveté. “This is New York,” she assured me. “We can get anything
we want, any day of the year.”
So it is. And I don’t wish to be ungracious, but we get it at a price.
Most of that is not measured in money, but in untallied debts that will be
paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravel-
ings, and global climate change. I do know it’s impolite to raise such ob-
jections at the dinner table. Seven raspberries are not (I’ll try to explain
The Global Equation
By purchasing local vegetables instead of South American ones, for exam-
ple, aren’t we hurting farmers in developing countries? If you’re picturing Farmer
Juan and his family gratefully wiping sweat from their brows when you buy that
Ecuadoran banana, picture this instead: the CEO of Dole Inc. in his air-
conditioned office in Westlake Village, California. He’s worth $1.4 billion; Juan
gets about $6 a day. Much money is made in the global reshuffl ing of food, but
the main beneficiaries are processors, brokers, shippers, supermarkets, and oil
companies.
Developed nations promote domestic overproduction of commodity crops
that are sold on the international market at well below market price, undermin-
ing the fragile economies of developing countries. Often this has the effect of
driving small farmers into urban areas for jobs, decreasing the agricultural out-
put of a country, and forcing the population to purchase those same commodi-
ties from abroad. Those who do stay in farm work are likely to end up not as farm
owners, but as labor on plantations owned by multinationals. They may fi nd
themselves working in direct conflict with local subsistence. Thus, when Ameri-
cans buy soy products from Brazil, for example, we’re likely supporting an inter-