Sustaining Cultivation 511to hunger is not to increase food production in the US. Rather, it lies in reducing
inequality here and abroad, in increasing food production within poor countries,
and in protecting the environmental base of food production.
Also, most of us don’t need more food. In the US there are perhaps greater
health problems from overeating than from undereating, as the recent national
discussion of obesity has underscored. We need better food. Given that we don’t
pay much for food to begin with; given that farmers don’t get much of what we do
pay; given that we currently spend our subsidies mainly to support high produc-
tion, with relatively less attention to quality production – given all that, better
food should be well within the nation’s capabilities, without a significant increase
in food costs, if any at all.
And we’ve been working on it, perhaps most notably through the recent growth
in the production of organic food. Once found mainly in the form of tired-looking,
expensive veggies in hippie co-ops, organic food is now big business. Some 39 per
cent of US consumers report that they use organic products at least occasionally.^23
However, organic products are typically significantly more expensive and generally
do not yet deliver on the promise of higher quality food with only a small price
increase, or even a price decrease. Nor is organic production necessarily helping very
many small farms to stay afloat, as organic increasingly becomes bought up into what
the writer Michael Pollan has aptly termed the ‘industrial-organic complex’.^24
The point is, as Patricia Allen and Martin Kovach note, organic ‘is simply not
enough’.^25 Organic agriculture in itself does little to reconnect eaters with the agri-
cultural conversation. In fact, it can be seen as largely a confirmation of their dis-
connection. What I mean here is that organic food retailing commonly trades on
consumers’ growing sense of unease with their disconnection from the agricultural
conversation, and their consequent lack of trust in what they eat. Organic certifi-
cation is narrowly based on production criteria. Buying organic food likely does
support environmental protection and probably animal welfare, too, but in itself it
has little to do with economic justice and bringing people back into the agricul-
tural conversation. The focus of the organic label and its associated inspection
system is on individual consumer health in an untrusting world – on what the
sociologist Melanie Dupuis has termed ‘not in my body’ sensibilities – more than
reconnecting eaters with a dialogic, practical agriculture.^26
We have become used to seeing agriculture as a realm out there in the beyond
that we have left behind, physically and culturally. This beyond and behind notion
of agriculture envisions it as a space, something that we enter when we leave, or
perhaps escape, the sprawling city and the artifice and ambition we sense there.
Agriculture now feels distant, something that we rarely see and that little impinges
on our daily activities. Agriculture feels like a product line – shall I have the Cort-
lands or the Fujis or the Granny Smiths? – not a relationship to other humans and
the earth. That feeling of the product line is part of the feeling of distance, for
disconnection is distance.
So why not bring agriculture back home, to everyone’s homes? The pleasures of
this connection are what Jack Kloppenburg, John Hendrickson and Steve Stevenson