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Eating local food reconnects us to the hands and lands that feed us
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OVER the weekend the dominating news was, of course, the fatal gaokao (college entrance examination).
If you have a copy of Monday’s Shanghai Daily, you will probably be impacted by a picture of a test-taker in Guiyang who, muscle-flexing and fist-clenching, issues a war cry in the front page photo titled “I’m going to college!” Over the weekend 9.4 million test-takers sat for the decisive examination.
For urban test-takers, going to college is necessary for them to avoid being perceived as “failures.” For rural candidates, it affords them one of the few chances for upward mobility, i.e. to stop being peasants.
Do we still have young peasants at all? I mean pristine peasants who do not double as migrants, who are not kept along by small businesses, and who do not feel ashamed in being called a peasant.
Well, some of my colleagues, weary of the daily grind in an overcrowded city, from time to time talk about one day retiring to the countryside to live a hands-to-mouth existence.
While success in examination has always been held in high esteem, previous Chinese regimes invariably encouraged farming as a fundamental state policy. Three decades ago, a peasant could still pronounce himself a peasant without the fear of being stigmatized.
After three decades of soaring growth — fueled by peasants-turned-migrants — we are now confronted with a very unsettling question: Who will feed us tomorrow?
As Vicki Robin observes in her “Blessing the Hands that Feed Us: What Eating Closer to Home Can Teach Us About Food, Community, and Our Place on Earth,” most people don’t know who provides their food, and they have no connection to the hands and lands that feed them. They are confident that their food needs can be satisfactorily met via a complicated, industrialized and anonymous system. In the mechanical age, our faith is first in machines, not soil.
Occasionally we are concerned about the food chain, and that’s generally as a result of reports of food scandals. Otherwise our attention rarely goes beyond a dainty meal at a fashionable restaurant, takeout food, or packaged food at a supermarket.
In this interesting book, sustainable-living activist Robin gave herself a month-long challenge by eating only locally farmed food produced within 10 miles of her house in Washington state.
At the beginning, she wondered if she could live on vegetables for a month without the fat- and sugar-laden foods she craved. The 10-mile periphery meant she could still have meat and dairy.
But it’s not easy. When Robin asked a local dairy farmer for milk, the response was, “Sorry, no, can’t do ... Unpasteurized milk is illegal to sell.” Laws require farmers to pasteurize any milk sold to the public.
Many benefits
It also raises questions about how local is local. According to one definition in 2008, “the total distance that a product can be transported and still be considered a ‘locally or regionally produced agricultural food product’ is less than 400 miles from its origin, or within the state in which it is produced.”
By the second week, Robin began to miss snack food. She became resourceful and creative. Cookbooks proved useless, because she couldn’t work with flour, sugar, baking soda, rice, wheat, corn and a variety of other ingredients.
But she became closer to her farming friends, felt more connected to her community, and by the end of the experiment she had lost six pounds.
There were intangible benefits too.
“If you cannot grow your own food, if you don’t know any farmers whose food you can buy, if you are ... dependent on supermarkets and takeout ... you are a prisoner of the industrial food system,” she observed.
She became aware of relational eating, where food is in season, fresher, tastier and healthier.
By supporting local community producers, she was also advocating protected farmland to inhibit construction of subdivisions and malls. Fast food has accelerated the malling of the global landscape and spread the epidemic of obesity in the US, and now in China.
In China there is a strong perception of traditional Chinese farming practice as backward, because it involves less industrialized process, and less use of chemicals. Food thus created, being less efficient, is necessarily costlier.
By signing agricultural trade protocols with developed countries, some of our policy makers have, in a matter of a decade, brought traditional farming to its knees. It does not stand a chance before industrialized Western farming imports.
Here I find it tempting to ask, as Robin does, “How do we wean ourselves from utter dependence on food that seems to come out of nowhere, produced by nobody we know?”
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