More than Organic posted something pretty cool this morning. The post talks about the values that drive our society to feed itself in the strange ways it does, both in terms of attitudes toward food and in terms of food structures. The value at work here, according to the post, is quantity. As a society, we place tremendous value on quantity. When we assess our performance in an activity, it is most often the quantity of output that we judge. “How much have I done today?” “How many things can I accomplish this week?” We share a tendency, culturally encouraged, to view things and actions in broad categories and to fill those categories as much as possible.
More than Organic talks about how this desire for quantity has effected the way we eat. Because we see all food as a single category, we not only eat to satisfy a sense of a proper quantity of food, but we also produce food in great quantities regardless of its quality or necessity. More than Organic talks about how our perception of food as a matter of quantity has distorted our sense of “ordinariness” to the point where we essentially believe that all the food is the same and all the food is good. Foods like beef that, if they are of a high quality, can provide us with enormous amounts of energy are eaten as part of a normal, everyday diet, whereas they could be eaten only occasionally when the extra energy or nutrition is necessary. We eat chemically and genetically altered foods because we see the value of food as a question of nutrients measured in quantity, rather than more intuitive concepts like balance and breadth of diet, or quality in the production of food.
More than Organic makes some excellent points about our reliance on quantity rather than quality as a way of understanding food. In would also add that quantity affects the way we produce food as well. The goal in food production is most often quantity, and to this end we dedicate vast areas of land to produce a single food, and then we have to ship our food around the world to areas where it is not made. Rather than see food production as a matter of providing appropriate amounts of various foods for a small area, using networks of farms, we value a production system in which a single source must produce the greatest possible quantity of food, no matter what that food is or how it can be used. Our goal must not be to produce more food, but to ensure that a community has the means to feed itself good food.
