>You seem to be holding on to a kind of romantic neo-Weberian
>farmers-as-precapitalist, or at least Smithian, remnants of independent
>family-labor-based "farming", that engages in ethnic- and
>sex/gender-intensive forms of super self-exploitation in the face of
falling
>prices due to overproduction based on the contradiction between individual
>farm strategies of increasing gross production to deal with net declines in
>income and the exacerbation of overproduction, all in order to maintain
>cultural commitments to "the land" and "community"...
Where do I seem to be holding to this? That is actually kind of funny because I really try to attack these notions. Take your insistence that corporate consolidation of seed, fertilizer and pesticide companies has squeezed farmers for example. I usually counter this by pointing to the actual data that shows a decrease in farm input costs for the past 30+ years. I know this is the line that one gets from McMichael, Patel and the Monthly Review: concentration, concentration, concentration. But have you ever read where they have talked about the actual effects of this concentration? The truth of the matter is that most US farmers are still petty commodity producers (the data shows the midwest as having a higher percentage of this than other areas by the way). I hold no romantic views about this but that does not make it not true.
>is your sense really
>that the majority of the people - in North America - involved in consuming
>the products of "the food movement" are really interested in reconnecting
>with the production and sources of their food? Do you really think the
>majority people who eat at Chez Panisse really care about Alice Waters'
>goals? Are the politics and dreams of Wendell Berry and Michael Polan
>actually representative of the intentions of the vast majority of organic
>consumers, of slow food, of suburban and rich urban farmers markets.
No, but it should be. However the whole talk of corporate control leaves activist with nowhere to turn but back to the land or to plant gardens in their yards.
>I don't know how things are where you are but all the scholarship I know on
>organics, agroecoloty and community supported agriculture indicates that
the
>movement began with the kind of synthetic dreams you write of but that
>organics got taken over by rent-seeking conventional producers (think
>California Certified Organic Farmers) and/or monopoly-seeking organics
>(think Horizon), etc. and, since the vast majority of the originators had
no
>political economic critique - beyond back-to-the-land Berry- and Rodale-ian
>populism (my parents' friends) or maybe cooperative-ism - they were
>largely/completely unprepared for this (just like the 1970s Gore-ian
>environmental movement was completely shocked and unprepared for the
>neoliberal reaction) .
>In terms of CSA's the dream was, usually, not to market monetary shares but
>to have subscribers work the land for the share of the food... the problem
>was that most people interested in subscribing to a farm (like my parents
>did to Walnut Acres in the 1970s) are too busy to and not interested in
>working someone's land
You don't need to tell me. I lived this nightmare as I mentioned above. I did have some really great families get involved and work really hard to build something (along with the rich people who thought it quite chic to get a box of dirty veggies every week) and that is why I still have some hope.
>I don't know what planet you live on sometimes... off-farm work by farm
>families wouldn't be counted by the USDA as farm labor... secondly if -
here
>in the mid-west - a farm manager hires machinery operators to till,
>fertilize, plant, spray herbicides on, and harvest the crops, usually some
>kind of corn, soy, wheat mix, across a significant number of farms, s/he
>wouldn't need that many people to cover lots of farms where the farm
>residents could still be being counted by the USDA - perhaps the source of
>the most corrupt and purposely inaccurate statistics collected by the
>federal government... I know, I worked with them extensively in CA and MI.
I live in the world where in the US most farms are still not capitalist. Not the one where I try to bend reality to fit my ideological presuppositions. Bad USDA, bad USDA. The definition of a farm when I was farming was everything over 40 acres, which we weren't so we had to pay higher taxes, insurance etc.. I don't know about in MA but federally those things you mention aren't farms and don't get the tax breaks you seem to think they do.
>But even with all this, do the hundreds of thousands of small farms that
>grow corn, or alfalfa, or blueberries, or apples, or milk cows for direct
>marketing, cooperatives, Kroger, Meijer or WalMart's "local" produce
section
>have any role in setting prices? Do the majority of them have any
>engagement with reconnecting consumption and production? Are anything like
>the majority of them even partially cosmopolitan families interested in
>diversifying their commodity mix, participating in alt-, slow- organic-food
>production/consumption and/or engaging their children in intellectual
>pursuits and travel experiences around the globalizing nation and planet?
>Does most alt-, slow- or organic food consumption get consumed in an
>alternative, slow or socially organic manner? Isn't the fastest growing
>sector of these production/consumption arenas been snack, canned, frozen
and
>prepared foods for the last 15+ years?
Don't know what you mean by set prices. You seem to really buy this idea that some evil corporations have taken over food production and are running a giant monopoly. The declining prices are the result of government support and the overproduction it creates (as well as the tendency for very rapid productivity advances arising out of the high relative surplus value extraction compared to absolute surplus value extraction of an industry that does not depend on wage labor). Yes, org, slo, alt food is lifestyle activism and nothing more than conspicuous lifestyle activism to boot. Why do you think this is my perspective?
Brad