Industrial Agriculture and the Future of Food and Health

We have discussed the Great American Food System (GAFS) throughout this series, most recently in review of What to Eat Now (2025) by Marion Nestle.  That the GAFS is productive, in both tonnage and profit (for some) is a given.  But a common view of its critics is that much of this production is misguided, with imperatives that diverge from the goal of having a food system that produces good, nutritious food for all in a sustainable manner.  Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg recently published Feed the People: Why Industrial Food is Good and How to Make It Even Better.  The book presents a discursive tour of the Great American Food System, and it is sure to attract attention, primarily because of its premise that industrial food is good and can be made better.

The analytical framework of Feed the People is sound.  The food system must be analyzed as a whole that includes its biological, economic, political, and social components.  At times “foodies,” such as Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, primary targets of Jan and Gabriel (this is how they refer to themselves), are assumed to forget the food system is complicated (they do not) while idealizing farming (they do not).  Nevertheless, Feed the People is firmly anchored in the world as it actually exists, and this is perhaps its best attribute.

One remarkable rhetorical and philosophical pillar of Jan and Gabriel’s view of the GAFS is something they call “democratic hedonism,” defined as:

(A)n approach to politics that sees moral value in the simple pleasures that people experience in their daily lives, and it favors political, collective, and institutional actions to expand access to those pleasures.  The goal of this approach is to figure out how to reduce harms and maximize pleasures for as many people as possible.  Pleasure, and it promise, is one of the things that defines a good life, and it can motivate and sustain political action…When it comes to food, pleasures may be personal and sensual, but they are also frequently social and communal and…reliant on other people (as well as plants and animals).

Their counter example of “solitary and selfish hedonism” is the “rich wino…(in)…a fancy restaurant…who has transformed their drinking problem into an expensive (and irritating) hobby, drinking only the rarest and most expensive wines, expounding on tasting notes, and paying closer attention to the vintages on offer than to their dining companions.”  Yes, we all have experienced this in one form or another.  It is irritating when it cannot be ignored. As Jan and Gabriel’s positive example of democratic hedonism:

Now consider the Waffle House, where the pleasure is accessible and you’re not going to wax lyrical about the terroir of the syrup.  You might, instead, fill up on calories and caffeine for your road trip, laugh with friends, or plot a book about the food system.  Let’s shift from the rich wino’s selfish hedonism to the democratic hedonism of the Waffle House.  Democracy is an ethos and system for sharing power and social goods broadly and equitably…Rather, making sure that everyone has abundant access to pleasure should be a social project that inspires collaboration, care, mutuality, and solidarity.

All true and rather commonplace as a philosophy of democracy and hedonism.  However, one might also add that no one will be discussing the terroir for Waffle House [1] syrup because it is “primarily composed of high-fructose corn syrup, natural and artificial flavors, and caramel coloring.”  Waffle House syrup most certainly did not come from a sugar maple forest outside of Quechee, Vermont, which is one of my favorite places in the world.  According to Jan and Gabriel:

(T)he delicious promise of democratic hedonism aligns with a key concept that scholars use to study food systems: food security.  Food security is at the heart of most progressive food politics, from local urban food programs to the United Nations’ global Sustainable Development Goals.

The layers of food security include (1) availability, (2) sustainability, (3) access, (4) labor, and (5) utilization.  In a functioning democracy, these five layers would exist across society.  That they don’t in the United States is an indictment of our politics, and Jan and Gabriel illustrate this very well throughout Feed the People.

Chapter 2, “Farming Without Sentimentality,” is quite good in its explication of the GAFS.  Jan and Gabriel really earn their “tough-minded businessmen awards” here.  But before continuing, it is worthwhile to distinguish between the technical and the cultural in the definitions of “farming” and “farmer.”  The technical farmer in Iowa, who is the exemplar of industrial agriculture, practices “conventional, industrialized agriculture of the sort that dominates American farming (sic) and creates both an abundance of readily available food for consumers and a mess of social, environmental, and political problems.”  Jan and Gabriel do not shy away from the mess, and this makes Feed the People particularly useful as a thorough critique of American society.

Eighty-five percent of the land in Iowa is “cropland,” and 60% of the total land in Iowa is devoted to corn (maize) and soybeans.  Neither of these crops are food for people.  Both are industrial inputs for industrial products that are used to feed animals in feedlots and CAFOs and to make ultraprocessed foods (e.g., corn syrup, corn oil, raw protein as a supplement/ingredient for ultra-processed foods).  Much of the corn is also used to produce ethanol as a gasoline additive, thanks to powerful corporations and their minions in Congress.  One inescapable outcome of industrial agriculture in Iowa is that more than half of its waterways are too polluted for fishing and/or swimming and perhaps 75% of Iowa’s lakes are in the same condition.  One might ask how this could ever be sustainable, when the toxic runoff from this part of the Mississippi River System (jpg; the Mississippi drainage extends from north Georgia in the southeast to New York, then west to Alberta and then back to Alabama next to Georgia) also produces a hypoxic dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi the size of Connecticut.

Jan and Gabriel give us three archetypes to explain American industrial agriculture.  The first is “Ron” the Earner, in this case the owner of century farm (i.e., one that has been in the family for at least 100 years).  Ron produces industrial commodity crops on several thousand acres and although he is wealthy, he is also at the mercy of Big Ag (e.g., ConAgra), Big Chem (e.g., Bayer/Monsanto), and Big Food (e.g., Nestlé) [2].  Ron is the technical farmer of modern American agriculture.  He is ubiquitous.  The second is “David” the Gentry, who is a wealthy landowner who has never produced industrial commodity crops on his own but rents his land to people who do.  David is not a farmer of any kind but undoubtedly calls himself one; if he lived in Virginia he would wax poetic in his tweeds about being a “faah-mah.”  The third is “Tom” the Noble Loser, who raises free-range pigs and produces “widely acclaimed pork.”  He is therefore “the sort of farmer that foodies adore and the media come to if they want to talk to a farmer who does things right.  Tom is the cultural farmer of American myth.  He is very, very rare.

Chapter 3, “It’s the Cow, Not the How,” makes the utterly conventional point that raising cattle and pigs and chickens in the modern industrial way is an environmental sin/catastrophe due the attendant greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention the cruelty to the animals and their human caretakers and processors.  This is undoubtedly true.  But this is also because “67% of all crops grown in the United States are used for animal feed.”  If cattle were raised on grass (which is what they are meant to eat as ruminants) where it rains (e.g., Florida, which at one time was a leading cattle producing state) instead of other, more arid, regions, and then “finished” in feedlot CAFOs that are torture chambers, the environmental impact would be a lot lower for the air and the land.  Grass-raised cattle and free-range pigs and chickens are possible.  Regenerative agriculture such as that at White Oak Pastures is the future or we will not have a future.  Thus, as presented in perhaps the best paragraph in the book (parentheticals added):

If we want American farmers (cultural as well as technical) to sell more fruits and vegetables (and meat) to Americans, more Americans will need to buy more American-Grown fruit and veggies (and grass-fed, free-range meat).  This might involve tools like incentivizing healthy food purchases in schools (see the Lunch Ladies) or through programs like SNAP.  It could mean extending programs like crop insurance and other subsidies beyond corn, soy, and wheat.  It might help to introduce value-added taxes that would make fresh produce less expensive relative to processed foods.  But ultimately it means creating demand that farmers (cultural and technical) can supply at a profit.

Indeed.  But while Jan and Gabriel did mention “a farm bill” in Feed the People, they did not include substantial discussion of the Farm Bill.  This is the governmental apparatus that primarily supports industrial commodity crop production to the neglect of actual human food, vegetable and animal.  If the subsidies are changed to prioritize food production instead of the production of industrial feedstocks for Big Food with the assistance of Big Ag and Big Chem, the quantity and quality of good, nutritious food available to the people will increase.  The political barriers to this remain tall, however.  And that is the problem.

Techno-foods and genetically modified crops are included in Feed the People, with considerable enthusiasm and appropriate realism.  Techno-foods (e.g., the vegetable Impossible Burger spiked with plant heme protein to give it the metallic tang of real meat) are unlikely to ever become significant parts of the American diet.  Lab-grown chicken is in the same category, with the additional complication that energy requirements of bioreactors are large.  It is cheaper to just grow true free-range chickens.  They are too expensive now, but not if the subsidies for corn ethanol and Roundup Ready commodity crops were redirected to their production.  There is little discussion in Feed the People that GMO (genetically modified organisms) crops are generally not more productive than native crops produced by hybridization and selective breeding.  They are effective at selecting for herbicide-resistant weeds, however.  GMO commodity crops are basically a lazy, scientistic, technical fix for a problem that does not have to exist.  And while Jan and Gabriel are impressed with Golden Rice, the scientific premise that “spiking” rice with the genetic apparatus that produces beta-carotene (the compound that makes carrots orange and serves as a precursor of vitamin A) will alleviate serious vitamin A deficiencies in rice-growing regions (see here and here) remains only a hypothesis.  The better approach is to diversify traditional agriculture in these regions while using Alfred Somer’s approach to vitamin A deficiency in the meantime where necessary.

As expected, processed foods are the subject of Chapter 9, “In Praise of Processed Food.”  Jan and Gabriel begin with the fact that canned pumpkin is actually canned squash of a different species, plus a few supplemental ingredients.  They imply that no one makes pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving.  This is not true.  My aunts grew their own small pumpkins for just that purpose and canned them.  They did not raise the nutmeg and allspice, or the wheat for the flour in the crust.  While they could render lard for the crust, they later bought it at the local independent grocery.  Yes, they were cultural farm families or farm adjacent.  But to Jan and Gabriel’s main point:

Mainstream food writing and food media, including social media have trained us to think of particular food as good or bad, or even noble or sinful, and it derides industrial foods, like those that are processed or canned.

Actually, no.  Here Jan and Gabriel conflate food processing with the production of ultra-processed foods (UPFs).  The latter are formulated by food scientists who work for Big Food (e.g., Nestlé) to produce food-like substitutes that are convenient, calorie-rich, hyper-palatable, and habit forming if not outright addictive.  This is old news, going back at least to Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013) by Michael Moss and the earlier reporting of Gary Taubes on dietary changes that led to our current obesity epidemic.

In the Nova classification of foods pioneered by Carlos Montiero at the University of Sao Paulo, Group 1 foods are edible parts of plants, animals, and fungi; they can be frozen.  Group 2 foods are processed culinary ingredients such as cheese, butter, and maple syrup.  Group 3 foods are canned vegetables and the like without a lot of added salt, salted nuts, and cured meats.  They are what got people through the winter in the old days.  A balanced diet of Group 1, 2, and 3 foods would be a healthy diet.  Jan and Gabriel do refer to the work of Kevin Hall [3] at NIH, who showed that a diet of UPFs led his subjects to eat 500 more calories per day that subjects on a diet that lacked UPFs, resulting in significant weight gain over the short course of the study.  Group 4 foods (UPFs) are “formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes that require sophisticated technology.”  This was discussed at length two years ago here, along with the classification of UPFs in Ultra-Processed People in an Ultra-Processed World.  UPFs are hyperpalatable industrial products, the food-like substances sold in the center aisles of supermarkets and at poor food market substitutes such as Dollar General.  After their fair description of Kevin Hall’s research, Jan and Gabriel add:

And it’s here that we get to the problem with UPFs: It’s mostly not the “ultraprocessing” itself that’s the problem as much as the fact that ultraprocessed foods can be extremely tasty, easy-to-eat, convenient vehicles for unhealthy ingredients.”

The circularity here seems obvious.  It is the ultraprocessing that makes UPFs “extremely tasty, easy-to-eat, convenient vehicles for unhealthy ingredients.”  That is the point and the process!  Think Doritos, which are mentioned early in the book as a hedonic pleasure, and are the epitome of UPFs.  If they are not addictive by the strictest clinical definition (e.g., the development of tolerance), they might as well be.  It is distressingly easy to eat a whole bag of these delightful food-like products; their sugar/salt/fat content targets the human bliss point perfectly.  UPFs are not benign, except when consumed (“eaten” grants them too much legitimacy) in small quantities as the treats, and only treats, they should be.  UPF consumption is often a form of exceedingly maladaptive democratic hedonism.  But this maladaptive hedonism is very profitable for Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Chem that underlies Big Ag.  And that is the point. [4]

The message of Feed the People is that industrial foods are just fine, that they contribute to culinary democratic hedonism, and that in their absence we would starve.  This is all probably true as far as it goes.  But there is another, largely unrecognized problem with industrial foods that is also very serious.  This is the decrease in nutritional content of foods since the beginnings of industrial agriculture in the years after World War II.  This has been recognized slowly, with one of the first scientific papers appearing in 2004.  In Changes in USDA Food Composition Data for 43 Garden Crops, 1950 to 1999 (paywall), the authors showed that protein, calcium, phosphorous, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2), and ascorbic acid (vitamin C) levels decreased in these crops.  Their conclusion, which has been confirmed in further studies, is that “any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content.”  The rise of industrial agriculture that has become the GAFS can be reliably dated to 1950-1999.

Various studies also support soil depletion as one mechanism as industrial agriculture has become dependent on yearly chemical inputs to maintain productivity (the current Ramadan War in West Asia demonstrates that chemical fertilizer supply chains are essential).  There has also been selection for carbohydrates and biomass over nutrient density in these crops.  This has been called carbohydrate dilution, the process by which the increase in carbohydrates in modern cultivars is not matched by increases in protein, minerals, and essential micronutrients such as selenium, zinc, manganese, and iodine.

Fruits and vegetables have also been selected for transport durability (e.g., peaches, apples, citrus, and tomatoes), shelf life, uniformity/aesthetics (such as with alar [5] that was used to make red apples redder and crisper) and sweetness at the expense of distinctive flavor and nutritional content.  Then there are the losses in quality during transport due to temperature cycling, oxidation, and enzymatic degradation.  One need only eat industrial California broccoli in California and compare it to the taste of industrial California broccoli eaten in Georgia (n = 1, but the difference is real).  As those of us who teach medical students have begun working on nutrition as something more than biochemistry, these matters have become a subject of concern. Additional research comparing industrial produce that travels far after harvest with regional produce that gets from farm to store to table in a few days is in the pipeline.

So, what is the solution to this mess?  There can be no one answer, but nothing will be fixed unless the economic and political imperatives of industrial agriculture change.  Industrial agriculture is a category error.  As Wendell Berry has written and spoken in my presence, “Eating is an agricultural act.”  Good food cannot be produced using the rules, procedures, and conventions of industrial production.  The “agriculture industry” used in the Georgia Farm Bureau ads (underwriter self-congratulation) on the local public broadcasting network is a contradiction in terms.  But this is not to say that modern agriculture cannot be changed for the better, and this is the point Jan and Gabriel make in Feed the People.

Still, unless and until the Farm Bill is reoriented to support local and regional agriculture rather than far-flung industrial production of inputs to produce industrial foods, with UPFs making up the greater part of that production, nothing can change for the better.  But if the Farm Bill were changed, local and regional regenerative agriculture could replace the current maladaptive mess we have made of the Great American Food System.  There is no reason that vegetable and berry farms, some with large greenhouses for cold weather production, cannot be as common as data centers.  They would certainly produce something useful and would be much less expensive that the latter energy hogs.

Let us return now to the first chapter of Feed the People, where Jan and Gabriel lay out their indictment of those who question the wisdom and positive utility of our mightily productive Great American Food System.  Their bête noire is the aforementioned Wendell Berry, the novelist, essayist, poet, culture critic, historian, and farmer from Kentucky.  What seems to have gotten Jan and Gabriel started is praise of Wendell Berry from foodies such as Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley where the prix fixe menu runs to $175 per person.  Jan and Gabriel compare the elite hedonism of Chez Panisse with the democratic hedonism of Doritos and the Waffle House.

However, their understanding of Wendell Berry and his work is seriously defective and seems to be based on a cursory reading of The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (originally published in 1977).  This book is an informed and well-founded polemic against what Berry saw as the loosing of Joseph Schumpeter’s (and Werner Sombart’s ) so-called  “creative destruction” on rural America in general and farming in particular [6].  Whether the destruction is creative depends on who is the destructor and who is the destructee.  The regrettable Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz was the man with the whip hand at the time.  Nevertheless, Wendell Berry was correct, and things have only gotten worse since.  A debate in 1977 between Wendell Berry and Earl Butz has been preserved by Appalshop here.

Contrary to Jan and Gabriel, Wendell Berry has never advocated that every man and woman become a farmer.  Yes, he recommends that people know where their food comes from and what it is.  However, he does not expect that everyone should become a farmer, and contrary to Jan and Gabriel, he did not inherit his farm.  Although his father was a lawyer and a farmer, it is my understanding that when Wendell Berry and his wife Tanya left the literary and academic life of New York to return home to Henry County, Kentucky, they bought Lanes Landing Farm and have lived there since.  Berry’s idea (and ideal) of a local economy extended to a regional economy is the only thing that is likely to allow for a human and humane life in the coming era of political, economic, and climate disruption.  There is no place in the impending inconvenient apocalypse for the current Great American Food System.

Getting back to democratic hedonism as opposed to the elite hedonism of Chez Panisse, it is clear that Jan and Gabriel have not read deeply in the work of Wendell Berry.  The have no conception of the world of Port William, Kentucky, which is based on a real place, that exists in the fiction and nonfiction of Wendell Berry, beginning with his first novel Nathan Coulter (1960).  There is nothing hedonistic in Port William, but the hedonic life of Port William is a constant – in family, community, farming, food, business, and politics – even in the midst of conflict and tragedy.  This is a very human community.  The vacant anhedonia that characterizes our current world is most uncommon there.  And while there were no Doritos or a Waffle House in Port William, food was a primary hedonic pleasure in Port William.  One need only consider the dinner (midday meal) that was a central theme in the short story The Solemn Boy, about a father and his son traveling cross-country on foot while poorly clothed in the cold of the Great Depression.

The real Port William now has a half-dozen Dollar General stores selling UPFs within ten miles of the reduced village.  This is viewed as development but it is not progress.

Finally, Feed the People is well worth the read, both for its perspective on food and our relationships to it and for what is wrong with the Great American Food System and how it might be fixed, at the margin.  Jan and Gabriel are very good at explaining the place of labor in the GAFS and the injustice of a rich nation such as the United States having so many hungry people who are at the same time often obese but malnourished.  My problem is that fixing the GAFS at the margin is only kicking the figurative can down a real pothole-filled road to nowhere.

Notes

[1] Waffle House is frequently used as an example in Feed the People, both positive (as a seat of democratic hedonism) and negative (abysmal treatment of employees, which is standard operating procedure across the GAFS, from Waffle House line cooks and waitresses to meat cutters at the slaughterhouses next to the feedlots in the Great Plains, the same essential workers who were put in harm’s way during the height of COVID-19).  As an aside, another reason for going to the Waffle House at 2:30 in the morning is the folk belief that carbohydrates and fat (both good components of a balanced diet) will lessen the coming hangover.  The now disappeared Waffle House a mile walk from campus during my relative youth was thus essential at times.

[2] Marion Nestle (pronounced “ness-ul”) covers this very well in her Food Politics.  Her latest, What to Eat Now, is a good place to begin.  Each of her other books is worth reading.

[3] Kevin Hall was forced to retire early from NIH after running afoul of the priorities of the current Secretary of Health and Human Services.

[4] Regarding the obesity epidemic resulting from a recommended maladaptive diet, which in retrospect may also be a consequence of the increased consumption of UPFs, Jan and Gabriel mention a “promising medical solution to chronic obesity and type 2 diabetes, a class of drugs called GLP-1 agonists, such as Wegovy and Ozempic.  They work by injecting a ‘glucose-like peptide’ into the bloodstream that moderates blood-sugar levels and, essentially, tricks your brain into feeling sated.  That, in turn, weakens the pull of impulsive and risky eating.  In short, people desire to eat less, so they do, and that causes them to lose weight.”  Or, even better, UPFs could become rare treats provided by the GAFS (Oreos and Pinwheels).  I will add one not so minor editorial suggestion for the paperback version: GLP-1 is the abbreviation for “glucagon-like peptide 1” instead of “glucose-like peptide.” The latter is a contradiction in terms.  This matters, and confusing glucose the sugar with glucagon the peptide is the equivalent of Mark Twain’s (and apparently Josh Billings’s) difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

[5] Alar probably was not harmful, but it was also not necessary, except for industrial apples shipped across oceans and continents.  And even then it was only a marketing ploy.  Anyone who has eaten an apple or orange from a noncommercial tree knows that the fruit will not be the outwardly pristine specimen found in the local supermarket.  It probably tastes better, though, and is very likely better for you.

[6] It was Sombart who noted there would never be socialism in America because of apple pie and roast beef.  Werner Sombart may have been partially correct at the time, but that was a long time ago.