Wait — is the food system broken? Or are we?
Issue 184: Taking time to consider whether a common refrain is the best way to diagnose the issues with the food system.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a whenevertime-ish food newsletter.
Read yesterday’s dispatch: What would you do if your girlfriend served you mayo-stuffed peppers?
Today I’d like to talk about the phrase “the food system is broken,” which has become a sort of baseline statement for food studies and advocacy. I’ve seen a few interesting writings lately that suggest rethinking this phrase, so I wanted to take a moment to consider them. I’m still working through my own thoughts on this — today’s Nosh Box is a work in progress! Join me, won’t you?
Versions of the phrase “the food system is broken” are ubiquitous. Commonly deployed by journalists, activists, and scholars; prominently featured on the websites of food organizations like Food Tank (who, disclosure, employs me); etc. — it’s a natural assumption, I feel, for many who think about food systems regularly. Why do we do the work we do? Oh, because we need to fix the food system; it’s broken.
On Instagram recently, the organization A Growing Culture raised an interesting point: Maybe this misses the mark…
Another reason to stop saying that the food system is broken: it allows us to externalize the issue, to acknowledge that there is a problem but to continue to ignore that we ARE the problem.
This is similar to critiques leveled against the term “food desert” — that it naturalizes the problem and obscures the agency behind its creation. Deserts are natural phenomena, but people create zones of inequitable food access through policy and discrimination. A Growing Culture is pointing out that the food system didn’t just happen to find itself broken one day after a long time of everything being hunky dory.
Along this same vein, the writer Sarah Mock suggests in a Medium post that maybe the problem is not that the food system is broken — the problem is that it’s working as designed, inequities and all.
The problem isn’t that the machine that chugs along, producing the biggest harvest the world has ever known is stalled out, that there’s a broken bulb or some crossed wires. It’s that the machine was built to prioritize just about one thing — cheap food. And it’s working like a charm.
The food system isn’t broken. It’s working. There are no little fixes, only radical ones. Small adjustments won’t change the fact that the system is still trying to deliver the cheapest food possible. The likes of Whole Foods still wants to lower prices, bring more customers in the door, and increase their margin by narrowing it. They want to be the most competitive seller of organic food, and in the US economy, competitive means the least expensive. Eating plants, eschewing meat, eating local, “farm to table”, those things are not going to be the future of the food system. That’s just twisting a dial on the same machine.
The culinary historian Rachel Laudan also argues that the food system isn’t “broken,” per se, but comes at it from a completely different angle. In a recent blog post, she questions not only whether the food system is broken but whether it’s even a system at all. (The question of whether our food system is really a system is a topic for another Nosh Box — I disagree with her, I think.) But here’s an excerpt of her comments on brokenness:
First, food supply is sufficiently complex that some parts may be in trouble while other are working just fine. The meat supply has been showing signs of severe strain, not a great surprise because supplying fresh meat to mega cities has always been a messy and difficult business, and is being constantly rethought and reworked. Talking about the whole system being broken diverts attention from specific problems.
Second, food supply is changing so fast that fixing is a constant, not a one-time event. The food supply is constantly being tinkered with, new things tried, old problems solved, new problems emerging. Changing consumer preferences, shifting global food production, government regulations, climatic variations, crop pests, and pandemics are further causes of constant adjustments to the food supply.
… Unless you really to redesign the food supply from scratch as some activists want to do, an enterprise that I find unimaginably daunting, the blanket declaration the food system is broken does nothing to guide action.
In another post on her blog, she writes:
Many, probably most development specialists, agricultural economists, food policy specialists, farmers, food scientists and technologists among others believe that for all its problems, the “conventional food system” as opponents call it, is not broken but has succeeded against all odds at feeding an increasing proportion of an exploding world population. They believe that contemporary agriculture, food processing, distribution, and development are best improved, not abandoned.
She finishes the post by saying, “I’m in the camp of improvers, count me out if you want to start over.” I think this illuminates her point from the first excerpt and also the fundamental differences between her view and that of A Growing Culture.
Personally, I’m still thinking this one over. I wanted to share these perspectives because the question of whether it’s accurate to call the food system “broken” has been on my mind lately, but I don’t necessarily have a clean answer for you.
Honestly, I’m not swayed by Rachel Laudan’s line of argumentation (and I don’t entirely agree with her viewpoint on food waste, either). I understand she’s writing a blog post and not a comprehensive paper, but I think she glosses over, rather than engaging with, many of the reasons advocates call the food system broken in the first place. If I were to sign on to the idea that “the food system is broken” misses the mark, I would be much more sympathetic to the perspective of A Growing Culture/Sarah Mock. No attempt to “fix” the food system can exclude a reckoning with how racism, classism, and sexism were built into it and persist to this day.
I suppose the metaphor of brokenness assumes that, one day, functionality could be restored relatively directly, whether by repairing the broken item or replacing it. I can see why certain organizations would want to rally followers around “the food system is broken,” rather than “the inequities in the food system are an intentional outcome of the design of structures we’re all complicit in,” and I can also see how the latter more accurately diagnoses the problem here.
But I do wonder if those phrases aren’t mutually exclusive. Can we acknowledge both that the current system was, in many ways, intentionally designed by wealthy white industrialists to prioritize corporate interests over the well-being of workers and eaters AND that that fact makes it fundamentally broken? I think it’s possible for both the food system AND ourselves to be broken. And I do like to think these problems are solvable, though certainly not easily or quickly or painlessly.
At the end of the day, I come back to the exceptionally well-phrased call to action from A Growing Culture’s original Instagram post:
There's no way around the fact that solving the greatest problems of our time — feeding the world, climate change, inequality — requires a new social modeling based on inclusive freedom and equity for all. It requires that we — those who have benefitted from being in positions of privilege in the food system — hold up a mirror and look at ourselves, examine our roles, privilege and biases in the systems that we exist in, and it involves engaging in a lifelong process of learning and unlearning the beliefs that we have inherited.
Instead of focusing on technology fixes to social problems, let us summon deep reflection and imagine a better world for all.
I’ll leave it here for today. But I’ll keep thinking about this, and I hope you will, too. Please let me know how you’re approaching this question in the comments! Do you think I’m coming at this wrong? I’d love to discuss this more:
Rather than saying I want to fix a broken food system, instead I say that I want to build a resilient, sustainable and equitable food system. Because the current food system mostly works fine if you are a big agribusiness and even works fine on a smaller local level for some part of the system. In many ways, the pandemic has shown how robust the food system is; even if not everyone is safe or getting access to food; the majority of us are able to get most of the food we need.
I would argue that the current food system was never designed! It evolved into what it is today mostly because of what worked. That is what is so fascinating of food system change - are we able to design a food system from scratch? If so, what would that look like.
I would love to share my blog with you. I write about food safety, food systems and the fact that food science and food systems need each other to building a stronger food system. Please let me know if it is all right to share the link!