Mother Jones magazine has an ambitious article by Paul Roberts in its online edition (I’m assuming it’s also in the print edition) discussing the many varied difficulties in converting from industrial to sustainable agriculture. It’s quite a good article in its entirety, but I wanted to focus on one particular part: the use of relatively easy, recognizable methods for identifying “good” food over the standard industrial based “bad” food.
In the article, the author rightly condemns the use of tags like “organic” or “local” as a quick way to identify truly sustainable food. Increasingly, we use words like these as checklists of sorts to determine what’s sustainable. While I believe selecting organic or local food is better than selecting the standard agribusiness product, the problem with these tags is they are not, standing alone, very reliable methods of really ensuring that our food choices are sustainable. For example, the author points out that other social costs, like underpaid farm laborers and the travel miles associated with trucking manure to organic farms, are present even when producing organic or local food and are not taken into account when consumers employ a tag like organic or local in their purchasing decisions.
I agree that using these types of easily recognizable checklists can be bad in the long term (or at least do not solve the entire problem of sustainable food choice). But, I think their use is essential right now as a way to get people thinking about food alternatives and sustainability. Sustainable food is one of the most complex and diverse environmental problems I think we are facing right now. I rank it right up there with global climate change. There are so many factors, on so many different levels of justice, that identifying workable solutions is not easy.
But, I think that checklists are, right now, probably a good thing because they help people evaluate their choices and reconsider their eating habits. I think perhaps the biggest challenge to adopting a more sustainable food production model is for people, on an individual or family level, to change how they have been purchasing, consuming, and thinking about food for generations. In my view, checklists are a beginning, not an end. Once people begin to think about choosing organic or choosing local, they begin to think about why those choices are better. The challenge will be to ensure that those checklists do not become entrenched and limit the next steps in the progress of food sustainability.
