I moved to Hawai’i from New York in large part because I wanted to be closer to the food I ate. Living in O’ahu, I imagined I’d be able to buy fresh local vegetables from farmers directly, or at least through farmer’s markets. Instead, I visited farmer’s markets that mainly sold prepared food, as well as chocolate bars and lemonade priced in the double digits, alongside stalls where struggling farmers sold avocados for more than three dollars a-piece—this, on an island where avocados literally grow on trees by the hundreds up in the mountains. When I first moved here, I went to a Whole Foods and spent almost $10 for a single local mango. Again, this is on an island where you can take a stroll through most neighborhoods and see mangos growing on trees. After reading Mark Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk, I realize that Hawai’i’s problems are like problems everywhere, the utopia I imagined doesn’t exist. Everywhere you travel, you’ll see the impact that large-scale industrial agriculture has had on smaller farmers, communities, and the world. Capitalism’s tentacles stretch everywhere—from the surfing lineup at Queens Beach to Times Square New York. Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk, which was released in early February, should be required reading for everyone who eats food, largely because Bittman’s storytelling abilities are stunning. His ability to tie together disparate threads like war, social injustice, and famine, and connect them back to the story of food is marvelous. Bittman sets a high bar, and his narrative exceeds expectations. The book is marvel of research and storytelling.
Bittman opens with strong words. He writes: “…if terrorists stole or poisoned a large share of our land, water, and other natural resources, underfed as much as a quarter of the population and seeded disease among half, threatened our ability to feed ourselves in the future, deceived, lied to, and poisoned our children, tortured our animals, and ruthlessly exploited many of our citizens—we’d consider that a threat to national security and respond accordingly. Contemporary agriculture, food production, and marketing have done all of that, with government support and without penalty.”
COVID-19 has forced us all to consider where our food comes from—especially as supply chains have neared collapse. But many Americans still don’t have a “daily relationship to soil” as Bittman describes it. In Hawai’i, as COVID-19 shut down the world, and as I watched the shelves of my local supermarkets go empty, my partner and I took to foraging in the forests above Honolulu. Bittman argues that we all need to establish, or re-establish our relationship with the soil, and with the earth; it will be key to changing the systems in place—systems which degrade the environment, poison the ground and water, and cause immense animal and human suffering.
Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk argues that the major issues of our time: racial injustice, the fight for indigenous rights, including land and water rights, economic injustice, the fight for a fair living wage, chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, healthcare, gender equality, and climate change can all be tied back to problems in our food systems. His argument is sprawling, and its sweeping scope is breathtaking in its execution.
Factory farming, big food, and industrialized agriculture play a major role in climate change. Mark Bittman argues that food production alone may be responsible for as much as 50% of the world’s total carbon footprint. In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, Bittman tells the story of how agriculture grew from small-scale local farming that was largely a community affair (he calls it peasant farming) into the global conglomerate and political force it is today. America’s style of large-scale monocropping is responsible for slavery and the removal of indigenous people from their lands. After the Civil War, subsidies that favored white men, locked people of color and women out of growing food. For a while now, I have suspected that the solution to climate change will lie in how we eat and how we change our eating habits. I didn’t realize how connected our food system is to the problem.
Bittman traces the rise of civilization itself to the development of agriculture. After all, if you suddenly find yourself spending a lot of time raising potatoes or corn, you’ll also need to spend some time building a wall to protect your potatoes or corn, and maybe even eventually, the community might need a soldier or two to keep out wandering invaders. Agriculture gave people the leisure time to create art, but it also created a host of unintended consequences, like slavery and war and poverty and patriarchy. Human hunter-gatherer diets went from being “supremely varied” to being comprised of more limited diets based on the few crops a farmer could grow. And today, industrial agriculture has us relying on fewer crops still that provide us with fewer nutrients. Bittman argues that white wheat and white bread is nutritionally useless, basically a cake that delivers a vitamin supplement, that most cereals and granolas contain the sugar equivalent to servings of candy, and that the ubiquity of ultra-processed foods makes it difficult for people to make healthy choices. I have struggled with this myself, choosing the easy processed canned soup over the elbow-work of chopping up kale.
Bittman writes: “You can’t talk about agriculture without talking about the environment, about clean sources of energy, and about the water supply. You can’t talk about animal welfare without talking about the welfare of food workers, and you can’t talk about food workers without talking about income inequality, racism, and immigration.” When I first read this opening argument, I didn’t believe Bittman would be able to pull it off—that is, show me how it all connects together. But Bittman does pull it off. He pulls it off beautifully.
There are many fascinating discoveries to be found in Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk. For example, did you know that we can thank the Black Panthers for school breakfast programs? The group started a free breakfast program that fed thousands of children in Chicago, and then expanded to other cities as well.
Food has always been political. Bittman argues that famine is the result of inequality and politics, and not natural disaster or crop failure. After all, if a country like Britain gets a colony to produce only one product like sugar cane, destroying small sustenance farming in the process, and then, when it is no longer profitable, leaves the colony, people left behind won’t be able to feed themselves and they won’t know how to grow food anymore, either. Incidentally, Hawai’i was a producer of sugar cane before it no longer became profitable.
Bittman explains how industrialized agriculture created the U.S. superpower that dominated the global economy through two World Wars. He writes about how blockades of Germany’s food supply gave the Allies an immense advantage. As industrial agriculture became ever more subsidized by the government, the need for more land left indigenous people dispossessed of their homes, and racist policies in the south during the New Deal locked out Black farmers from accessing the loans and government assistance that industrial farmers increasingly required to succeed.
Bittman writes eloquently about the rise of factory farms, the dangers of monoculture, the industrialization of pesticides, patented seeds, and the rise of fast food and processed food. In today’s economy, farming is tied up with debt, banking, and big special interests. His story about the sugar industry’s attempt to cover-up the dangers of sugar reads like an expose about Big Tobacco.
I’ll admit the Animal, Vegetable, Junk can, at times be a pretty depressing and distressing read. His section on the abuses animals face in factory farming is heartbreaking. The book is also a stunning critique of large-scale capitalism through the lens of agriculture. Capitalism assumes that growth can continue unchecked, but we have only limited resources of water, land, and soil. Bittman explains that in a purely capitalist system, war means profit, cutting down the Amazon means more jobs and production, and the healthcare consequences of unhealthy food and pesticides increase healthcare costs, which all adds up to more money spent. Capitalistic use of resources is not moral, we need policy and people to do otherwise.
Ecological thought holds that everything is connected and waste must go somewhere (there is no “garbage” that just disappears in a landfill without having an impact). These premises are exactly antithetical to capitalism, which holds that money is the only thing that connects people and things together (forget about the food web!), that we don’t need to worry about waste, only profit, and that nature’s services (in the form of things like the water cycle, for example) are free and don’t have to be accounted for. Ecology’s principles go directly in opposition to the principles of late-Capitalism. The thing is this: nature will win. We have seen this with COVID-19, already. We can live in denial, but eventually the limits of nature will check us; they are already starting to do so.
I have argued that people, once they form a large enough society, have no collective frontal lobe—the part of the brain that checks us, that stops us from doing stupid things. Humans when grouped into large-scale societies, don’t have a way to check their own folly. Capitalism’s free hand doesn’t see that it’s slowly wrapping a cord around its own neck.
There’s a story that keeps repeating itself in Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk. It’s a story about how unchecked depletion of natural resources eventually leads to the downfall of civilizations. The problem is that we now live in a global economy, with globalized monoculture and factory farming. Nature will always check us. I only hope we come to our senses before it’s too late.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
