The Quiet 20th Century Revolution

What many people of my generation or later don't realize is how much change occurred in the last century.  Without the fanfare that accompanied Google or Microsoft, a quiet revolution took place in our society.  Except for the grumblings of our parents and grandparents, and a few folks that we in the Midwest would consider hippies, it also came about virtually unnoticed.  I'm talking about the change in the way the food is produced. 

From my days working on agricultural policy in Washington DC, I kept a 2005 report from the USDA's Economic Research Service titled, The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy.   Like most bureaucratic reports it is full of statistics that only a policy wonk would love.  Viewed in its proper context, however, the report dryly explains that in less than a century agriculture in the U.S. has changed drastically.  People are no longer physically close to or knowledgeable about their sources of nutrition but far removed and disinterested in their food.   An excerpt:

American agriculture and rural life underwent a tremendous transformation in the 20th century. Early 20th     century agriculture was labor intensive, and it took place on a large number of small, diversified farms in rural areas where more than half of the U.S. population lived. These farms employed close to half of the U.S. workforce, along with 22 million work animals, and produced an average of five different commodities. The agricultural sector of the 21st century, on the other hand, is concentrated on a small number of large, specialized farms in rural areas where less than a fourth of the U.S. population lives. These highly productive and mechanized farms employ a tiny share of U.S. workers and use 5 million tractors in place of the horses and mules of earlier days.   

 A few other interesting tidbits from the report include that in 1900 41% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture, but by 2000 that number was reduced to a little less than 2%.   Considering that the U.S. population in 1900 was approximately 76 million and in 2000 it was about 273 million, and you quickly realize that we actually have less people today than we did in 1900 producing our food.  Some might consider this a good thing.  Americans released from the hard labor of producing food are free to pursue other interests and of course to recreate.  But is it really a good thing?  In the story, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean says, "If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to catch a fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him."   The same could be said for what we eat.  If you have never seen where a potato, a tomato, a bean, an egg, a chicken or a beef comes from, why would you put it in your body?   I would also add that if you can't appreciate that an animal had its life taken so you can eat, you should not disgrace animals by eating them.  I think everyone who eats meat should spend at least one day of their life helping process meat of some kind from the killing to the disassembling.  I believe that is why my grandmothers used to describe to us in painstaking detail the way they would dispatch chickens when they prepared them for dinner. (One used a cleaver the other the old neck wring method.)  They wanted us to appreciate that what we were eating was once a living thing, and that we could live because it died. (Sound familiar?)   That is also why one of the worst things you could do in front of my grandparents was to waste food.   They knew the toil and sacrifice it took to bring that food to the table. 

But even more sinister than this lost appreciation, is the lost knowledge of the makeup of our food.   How was that tomato grown?  Where was it grown?  What was used to keep pests off?  Who was the person who plucked it from the vine, and was he or she being exploited because of their immigration status?  When was it shipped?  Why does it taste like cardboard? 

Should everyone grow their own food?  Of course not.   But in this day and age of a communications revolution that gives us instant access to information, what excuse is there for not knowing about your food?