Zilberman on the Slow and Natural Food Movment

David Zilberman, an agricultural economist at UC Berkeley, has an interesting blog post on the slow and natural food movements. The timing of his piece is impeccable given the long, aggressive defense of the food movement Michael Pollan just wrote in the New York Times Magazine. After a bit of praise for the movements, Zilberman gets to some critiques.

Here are the core criticisms:

“However, most of these bodies of thought emphasize advocacy and are short on analysis. In particular, they underemphasize several factors. First, they underemphasize tradeoffs and costs. There are tradeoffs on the demand side, where consumers choose food based on cost, taste, and convenience. Fast food is a huge industry for a reason. The development of ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat meals, modern equipment (electric stoves, refrigerators, and microwaves), and modern supermarkets have been contributors in enabling women to join the job market. At the same time, there are tradeoffs on the supply side between cost of production and technology. ”

and

“Second, the naturalized paradigms undervalue the importance of technology in production and distribution. Modern lifestyle is the result of immense innovations in medicine, biology, communication, etc. I am very aware of the risks that technologies pose, but when I see a poor farmer in Ivory Coast with a cell phone and bicycle, I realize the power of technology. ... The challenge is how to use it appropriately and spread its distribution broadly rather than giving up on it.”

and

“Third, the naturalist paradigm underestimates the importance of heterogeneity among people and regions. Differences in income lead to different food choices. ... There is a huge difference between farmers in Iowa that obtain more than 10 tons/Hectare of corn and farmers in Africa that may obtain 1.5 tons/Hectare. ... I don’t expect people to use the same techniques everywhere, and that different technologies are appropriate in different locations. ”

On his last point, I full agree:

“Heterogeneity brings me to a larger point. There is a place for both industrial and naturalized agricultural systems. The naturalization paradigm is leading to the emergence of higher-end restaurants and fresh food supply linking the farmer to the consumer, each of which have limited reach but are important source of income and innovation in agriculture. At the same time, the majority of people will be dependent on industrialized agriculture. The two can coexist and coevolve. ”

Large-scale farming good?

The New York Times is slated to run a piece I wrote in the Sunday edition.  

Here's a snippet:

“Large farmers — who are responsible for 80 percent of the food sales in the United States, though they make up fewer than 8 percent of all farms, according to 2012 data from the Department of Agriculture — are among the most progressive, technologically savvy growers on the planet. Their technology has helped make them far gentler on the environment than at any time in history. And a new wave of innovation makes them more sustainable still.”

Working with the Times editors, I pulled together the following figure to illustrate the great strides being made in agriculture.  

Here's the conclusion:

“There are no easy answers, but innovation, entrepreneurship and technology have important roles to play. So, too, do the real-life large farmers who grow the bulk of our food.”

You can read the whole thing here.

The Future of Food

In the last chapter of Unnaturally Delicious, I contrasted two issues of National Geographic about food and agriculture that appeared roughly 44 years apart.  The first story, written in 1970 by Jules Billard, was titled "The Revolution in American Agriculture."

Here's what I had to say:

“Yes, some futurists teeter on the edge of technological utopianism (where is that flying car we were promised in the 1950s?), and today’s farms may not have the modern architectural flare depicted by the artist. But the reality is not that far off. Soil sensors, drones, satellite images, soy burgers, contour plowing, efficient irrigation, chicken cages, and mechanical harvesters all
were discussed as the future of food nearly five decades ago, and they are now a regular part of farm and food practices on what are larger, more specialized, but still family-owned farms. GPS signals drive today’s tractors, and fertilizer applicators and planters distribute their payloads based on digital input from soil sensors and crop consultants. Farmers watch the evolution of crop prices and thunderstorms on their smartphones. Farmers apply livestock waste as fertilizer or use it in anaerobic digesters to create energy for the farm. Drones track crop yields, cattle location, and animal health. Farming innovators are moving high-value crops indoors under blue and red light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that give off precisely the wavelengths the plants need in environments that use recycled water, reduce water losses from evaporation, and prevent pests and thus the need for pesticides.”

“U.S. agriculture largely delivered on the hopes of the 1970s to satisfy the growling stomachs of a growing world, primarily through innovation and technological development. Yet, it seems
Americans are hardly content. While an abundant food supply sufficient for an expanding population remains a top concern, the 1970 and 2014 stories in National Geographic also reveal shifts in the food problems that occupy our attention as well as changes in how we envisions addressing them. The 2014 special edition of National Geographic argued that “agriculture is among the greatest contributors to global warming” and the “environmental challenges posed by agriculture are huge, and they’ll only become more pressing as we try to meet the growing need for food worldwide.” Other articles in that issue worried about corporate control, hunger, deforestation, nutrition, food deserts, waste, and more. Yet it’s not clear whether our cultural food pessimism is warranted.”

and

“Technological advancement and industrialization have been great food equalizers—freeing peasants and serfs from the demands of the land and letting them eat like the royalty they once served. [Rachel] Laudan correctly observes that “were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need.” What we need is a recognition of the ability of technology to help solve our food problems along with wisdom about how to ensure against
the risks that technology can create.”

I conclude the book by saying:

“I have no idea whether the particular products and technologies will ever make it to our farms and kitchens. But that’s not really the point. The point is the process. Experimentation and innovation are what will ultimately help address our food problems. If we’ll let them.”

Origins and Evolution of Food

I've seen a number of stories on the research of a team of people at International Center for Tropical Agriculture, the USDA, and elsewhere, some of which was published in a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and in another paper in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS).  The team aimed to identified where many of our crops originated and how our eating patterns have changed over time. 

Their website has a number of fantastic, interactive visualizations.  Here's one.  

What I like about the figure above is how it challenges our idea of what is "local" or "authentic."  It also illustrates how much we've gained from trading with people in different parts of the world.  

The folks at Scientific American put together this graph based on data in the PNAS article, showing the convergence of dietary patterns worldwide.  

While there might be a temptation to decry the "sameness" brought about by globalism and the loss of cultural foods, the reality is much cheerier.  First, as the initial figure showed, what we think of as "our" cultural foods are probably relatively recent historical constructs.  Second, one of the reasons people eat more similarly to each other across the world is that we are now all eating each other's foodstuffs.  We've taken the best from each country and culture and exported it everywhere, and as a result have more diverse diets.  Finally, this trade has forestalled the doom-and-gloom Malthusian concern, as there has been a near universal increase in calorie availability worldwide.

Here's from the abstract of the PNAS article.

“We assess trends over the past 50 y in the richness, abundance, and composition of crop species in national food supplies worldwide. Over this period, national per capita food supplies expanded in total quantities of food calories, protein, fat, and weight, with increased proportions of those quantities sourcing from energy-dense foods. At the same time the
number of measured crop commodities contributing to national food supplies increased, the relative contribution of these commodities within these supplies became more even, and the dominance of the most significant commodities decreased. As a consequence, national food supplies worldwide became more similar in composition, correlated particularly with an increased supply of a number of globally important cereal and oil crops, and a decline of other cereal, oil, and starchy root species. The increase in homogeneity worldwide portends the establishment of a global standard food supply, which is relatively species-rich in regard to measured crops at the national level, but species-poor globally. These changes in food supplies heighten interdependence among countries in regard to availability and access to these food sources and the genetic resources supporting their production, and give further urgency to nutrition development priorities aimed at bolstering food security”

The Economist on the Future of Agriculture

The Economist magazine seems to have taken a page out of Unnaturally Delicious.  Their quarterly technology issue focuses on agricultural innovations.

A few excerpts: 

“MICROBES, though they have a bad press as agents of disease, also play a beneficial role in agriculture. For example, they fix nitrogen from the air into soluble nitrates that act as natural fertiliser. Understanding and exploiting such organisms for farming is a rapidly developing part of agricultural biotechnology. . . .The big prize, however, would be to persuade the roots of crops such as wheat to form partnerships with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria. These would be similar to the natural partnerships formed with nitrogen-fixing bacteria by legumes such as soyabeans. In legumes, the plants’ roots grow special nodules that become homes for the bacteria in question. If wheat rhizomes could be persuaded, by genomic breeding or genome editing, to behave likewise, everyone except fertiliser companies would reap enormous benefits.”

More robots may hit the farm.

“A truly automated, factory-like farm, however, would have to cut people out of the loop altogether. That means introducing robots on the ground as well as in the air, and there are plenty of hopeful agricultural-robot makers trying to do so.

At the University of Sydney, the Australian Centre for Field Robotics has developed RIPPA (Robot for Intelligent Perception and Precision Application), a four-wheeled, solar-powered device that identifies weeds in fields of vegetables and zaps them individually. At the moment it does this with precise, and precisely aimed, doses of herbicide. But it, or something similar, could instead use a beam of microwaves, or even a laser. That would allow the crops concerned to be recognised as “organic” by customers who disapprove of chemical treatments.

For the less fussy, Rowbot Systems of Minneapolis is developing a bot that can travel between rows of partly grown maize plants, allowing it to apply supplementary side dressings of fertiliser to the plants without crushing them. Indeed, it might be possible in future to match the dose to the plant in farms where individual plants’ needs have been assessed by airborne multispectral cameras.”

There is a lot of other interesting discussion in the piece about CRISPR, indoor farming, drones, soil sensors, precision agriculture, improved photosynthesis, fish farming, animal welfare, lab grown meat, and more.