“FOOD IS NOT JUST PART OF OUR PHYSICAL FABRIC. It’s part of our growing up and family life. We engage with it, usual- ly in a group, at least a few times every day,” notes Spanish pro- fessor and cultural scholar Viviana Rangil. From body-mass index to tastes and taboos, our very identity is shaped by the food we eat.
Pour on some politics, global trade, and high tech, and it’s no wonder we devour news headlined “‘Pink slime’ served in school lunches,” “Drought threatens nation’s wheat crop long term,” “Health secrets of the shopping cart,” “Food-borne diseases rising,” and “Helping cities feed themselves.” Every budget cycle, legislators wrangle over federal farm subsidies, even though two-thirds of Ameri- can farmers never collect one, according to an OnEarth magazine article. From 1995 to 2012, OnEarth estimates, nearly 90% of agricultural subsidy money went to just 20% of farms—the biggest holdings, owned by megacor- porations like Monsanto, Cargill, and ConAgra. Subsidized or not, much of what’s grown in America’s breadbasket we never see on a plate. Corn goes for sweetener, cattle feed, and ethanol fuel; a lot of wheat is exported; soy is pro - cessed into additives as well as chow for farm animals from hogs to chickens to salmon. Nearly all corn, soy, and
canola is now grown from genetically modified seed, and the growth hormone administered to dairy cattle is itself genetically modified.
Is this food system intensive and efficient, or a rapa- cious agro-industrial monster? Several Skidmore minds, on campus and off, are helping to lead new thinking on such issues, and Scope asked a few of them for insights.
More and smaller
Economics professor Mehmet Odekon has guided students in collaborative summer research on food-chain market sectors. They found that between 1997 and 2007 just 10 companies shared 56% of the seed market; in agrochemi- cals, the top 10 firms had an 89% share. And those top 10s add up to less than 20, since firms like Monsanto and DuPont are in both oligopolies. The project’s conclusions recommended policy changes to diversify the markets and support smaller-scale farming.
Lauren Mandel ’05 is documenting the role of urban agriculture on rooftops. A landscape architect and green- roof designer, she reports, “Some colleges and schools are planting their roofs with edibles. Restaurants are too, grow- ing heirloom vegetables that are hard to find elsewhere. Urbanites are beginning to realize that you can’t get any more local than your own roof!” Mandel covers this trend
in her new book Eat Up: The Inside Scoop on Rooftop Agricul- ture. She says large warehouse roofs are even hosting “com- mercial-scale farms, some with a few chickens or rabbits (for meat as well as manure), and some with bee hives” to help ensure pollination so high off the ground. Hydroponics, using liquid nutrients rather than soil, is ideal for roof-mounted greenhouses. Mandel writes about greenhouse farms on Montreal roofs, and she says the Whole Foods chain buys from “a New York operation like this to get fresh year-round produce at competitive prices.” Hydroponics, she suggests, “can feed a lot of people with very little labor, because it’s often highly mechanized.” Biology professor Monica Raveret-Richter agrees that “high-input methods of agriculture are not the only route to high yields.” Raveret-Richter, who has researched foraging behaviors in social animals from insects to birds to humans, teaches a popular course on the ecolo-
gy of food and is currently writing a book on it. She says, “Understanding how the environment and evolution in- fluence your choices really changes your way of approach- ing the food landscape.” Raveret-Richter’s advice is to eat less meat, since raising animals is an extremely high-input enterprise. But with any food, she says, “eating close to the source” directs more of the price to the grower, reduces shipping and stor- age, and shortens the production line from farm to table. She also calls for policy-level action, to cut back support for monocultured commodities such as corn and wheat and to boost it for “diversified, low-input, organic farms.” She says data show that “we can feed people this way. Our challenge for advancing agriculture should be in produc- tivity and sustainability, not just output.” Such farming, she adds, also “improves resilience in times or places of food insecurity.”
Journalist and food blogger Mary Nelen ’79 points back to Skidmore as “a good example of local food in action.” Student advocacy for more locally raised products in the dining hall led to deals with area farmers and spurred the creation of the campus garden that now supplies hun- dreds of pounds of organic produce to the College’s dining service. Nelen was impressed that the students weren’t taking agriculture courses or getting academic credit but
g SPRING 2013 SCOPE 19
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