Future Food

It might all go very well.  

As global population heads towards 10 billion…  As desertification accelerates from North Asia to consume more and more arable land in the zones where disposable income is rising most rapidly…  As Gordon Ramsay and a hundred other food celebrities blithely encourage more and more of us to not only eat better but indeed to gourmandize the entire day long, from morning frappacino, to noon time beef wellington, to an evening of endless courses of meats and fishes and cakes…

You see, we’ve been led to believe that this feast of the wonderfully sweet future will end only once we’ve inhaled the last drops of the custard and hoovered in the final crumbs of delectably crumbly cobbler.

Memory is so short.

Most people live with a Presumption of Stasis.  It’s presumed that tomorrow will be just like this morning.  At worst, people believe that change will occur at such a slow pace that nothing significant will happen during the course of their lifetimes.  This is why war is always a surprise, why a market crash takes the breath away, and why most investors—like most gamblers—lose money regularly.

This failure to observe change, I think, is partly the product of the movies.  We expect to see the evolution of any really dramatic change over the course of two hours, from a crack in a sidewalk in scene 3 to the special effects of the City of Los Angeles falling into an abyss after, at most, an hour and 15 minutes into the flick.  Any progression of events so slow as to resist compression into two hours is deemed to be uncertain, ambiguous and therefore unlikely.

This is not the case.  The world is, in fact, evolving very rapidly along many fronts.  But if you say that it’s not so quick that a sinkhole will swallow Beijing within the next forty-five minutes, you’re absolutely correct.  But, things are still moving quickly against the metrics of history.  My personal impression is that food and agriculture are the subject of the most rapid and significant changes.  Most recently, Bayer—the pills and chemicals giant—has initiated a merger with Monsanto—the megalodon of seeds, herbicides and bio-modification.  The transaction is valued at approximately USD 66 billion.  

The consolidation is complex on many levels.  

The merger would shrink the number of providers of seed-stocks to agribusiness to just three globally while also creating new capacities in agro-chemicals and seed-stock genetic modification, which is often designed to facilitate sales of even more agro-chemicals.  The consolidation of capacities in pharmaceuticals and foods is also cause for great concern if the arc of regulatory evolution begins to mirror what is happening in the industry.  If food regulation and pharmaceuticals regulation begin to accelerate in their conversion to a single monolith, there could be severe consequences for small- and medium-sized food producers, especially of health supplements, as well as all ordinary consumers.  Following on the heels of the merger of Dow and DuPont, which was valued at approximately USD 130 billion, the centralization of power in food and agriculture is no longer incremental.  The change is immense and irresistibly tidal in its force.

So, recognizing that severe change is in the offing, how should an intelligent person respond?

Because we have been living for the past 150 years in an age of fun and easy food, most of us have grown somewhat lazy in our attitudes towards what we eat.  The connection between food and farming or other forms of food production has become inconsequential.  To the degree that concern and awareness have risen in recent years, the change in attitude has likely been restricted to fashion.  The interest in organic food has risen.   Food is viewed as a choice between the luxurious and the sensible.  Farm-to-Table has become a food service mantra, but one intended usually to supercharge earnings rather than to genuinely engage consumers with the methods and processes through which natural resources are husbanded, cultivated and “cooked” into that edible article on one’s plate.  

Beyond this, the concern for nutrition, whether personally or for one’s family, has rarely gone much past simply accepting the dictates of some governmentally supported body.  There are many good people who enter government with noble intentions, but in practice the constituency that is loudest and best organized is the voice of Plutocratic Mega Food; that is, Bayer / Monsanto / Dow / Dupont / Syngenta / Cargill, etc.  This is odd when it is assumed by so many that “democracy" has been the primary attribute and advantage of global modernization over the past 150 years.  It seems that we have forgotten that “democracy” is about participating in some mature, well-informed and meaningfully powerful way in how we are governed.  Shouldn’t this translate into more of us taking an interest in the content of the government’s recommendations and dictates?  And what could be more important than the government's recommendations concerning what we eat and what we offer as food to our families?

Maybe we won’t be building any new pyramids, but it’s not too great a stretch to imagine an international class society arising that mirrors the various levels of power based on access to and control over food assets.  It’s doubtful that we have ever achieved a classless method of social organization.  Instead—or so my thesis goes—we have been enjoying a reprieve from our natural tendency to annoy each other over who eats what and how much of it because Petroleum has both spawned a synthetic sort of abundance while also allowing those who are accustomed to exercising authority over us to do so from a great distance.  But because food and its production are distributed, the sources of future bureaucratic power are likely to be distributed as well: distributed and therefore in one’s face.

Oppression is a local phenomenon.  Any teenager dealing with their parents will understand what I mean.

This bodes less than well for the Future of Food.

It’s my surmise, in fact, that we’ve been living recently in a Golden Age of food.  Whether it’s been the gold of plumbing fixtures or the gold of something more sublime is a question of taste and opinion; but the lustre is beyond question.  By recently, I of course mean over the past 150 years or so, a period of time parallel with the dominance of petroleum as the unifying control asset of our planet.

But how exactly have the past 150 years been “golden”?  If one measures happiness from a condition of perfection, then of course every day is miserable.  However, if one measures against the bulk of human history, which has been characterized by hunger, want and disease, then the past 150 years look a whole lot better.  You could also measure against the Dystopic fiction of the past 50 years.

A few examples:  

Although processed foods have increased in variety and complexity over the decades, we never reached the stage of consuming cannibalistic Soylent Green.  Although refined sugars and other easy carbohydrates have catalysed a pandemic of chronic auto-immune disorders, it would be unfair to compare these conditions to the black plague of the Middle Ages.  And many of the products that have fulminated during this century-plus of cornucopia and marketing madness—like the space food sticks of the 1970’s—have permitted episodes (albeit brief and admittedly juvenile) of ecstatic liberation.  Consider, if you will, that If one were to give some Doritos to an ancestor from 1835, that highly-processed bag of corn, spice and mystery food additives would likely taste to one’s great great grandfather like freedom and love shaped into beautiful triangles.  

For every food fiasco—think, e.g., anal leakage from new fangled potato chips—there have been many moments of food happiness that would have been unimagineable in the early 19th century.  One can now wash down a well-buttered croissant with a steaming Americano in every major city of the globe, from Almaty to Atlanta.  General Tso’s chicken—though in China itself General Tso is quite obscure and completely disconnected from anything culinary—is today available for delivery by Uber Eats everywhere across America, quite often on a 24/7 basis.

Dystopic catastrophes such as hungry zombies, face-eating bacteria and global famine have been imaginary.  They have been science fiction, or at least restricted to limited geographic zones and short periods of time, to then be obscured and washed from common public knowledge.  For the most part, total apocalyptic disaster has been overdone and cinematic.  These forebodings have been false and fictional.

But…

Food wasn’t always this much fun. 

Before petroleum emerged as the asset that more than any other consumer product determined the hierarchy of governments, corporations and people, there was food and agriculture.  If this were the 15th century, the Pop Tart would not be merely a comfort food, it would be a medium for the creation and management of social and governmental power.  There would be a Duke and Duchess of Pop Tarts who would extract from you some tax as well as a sliver or two of your dignity in exchage for a carton of sugar-frosted strawberries in a casing of wheat, trans-fats and more sugar.

I’m not entirely joking.

(And as I review the post in June 2021, I’m sure some of you have read that Bill Gates has become the largest farm land owner in America and possibly the world, excluding governmental entities.)

Karl August Wittfogel was an obscure playwright and Sinologist from the mid-20th Century.  He's known primarily for a ponderous tome he titled heavily and dramatically…

Öriential Despostism:  A Comparative Study of Total Power.   

Can you hear the resonance of timpany and the chorus of trombones?

Across 449 pages, Wittfogel cogitates on the hypothesis that bureaucratic power results from the effective management of scarce but desperately essential natural resources.  He directed his fascination at water and the construction of water works in the ancient world, which for some reason he characterised as essentially Oriental.  However, the hypothesis that supreme power is the intended object of sophisticated and technically complex management of natural resources could easily be generalized to include not just water, but the secondary byproducts of water management; namely grains, fruits, various herd animals from which milk and meats are sourced and, of course, safe and healthful drinking water.  

To put it simply, the aristocratic power structures of the past were based on the control of food and beverages.  The Dukes and Princes, the Kings and Baronesses whom we've romanticized by tuning in slavishly to Game of Thrones were, in truth, the men and women who controlled who ate what, how much of it, and when.

During the past 150 years, authoritarian power structures have dissipated and retreated from view.  Petroleum, due to both the tight geography of oil and the capital intensive industrial methods required to make it useable, has been more or less centrally managed at very high levels.  Social and governmental power has become less personal and more abstract than in the pre-World War I era, due, I think in part, to the overwhelming importance of petroleum and the clever ways in which the power of petroleum was asserted, largely through financial methods so fundamental as to be almost invisible. 

The Petro-Dollar has been the background noise of our lives for well over a century.  Nations engaged in trade denominated in US Dollar to ensure that they could buy petroleum, which has been denominated for most of this period in US Dollars.  This central currency has been functionally equivalent to Petroleum.  And Petroleum, thus, has been, as Wittfogel would have argued, the Asset of Total Power.

But what happens when one moves from a single Asset of Total Power to a fractured and manifold set of Many Assets of Semi-Total Power?  Rather than a single Asset of Total Power that can be managed efficiently and invisibly, there is a sort of Basket Asset Portfolio of Passive-Aggressive, Aggregated and Affiliated Power that can never be Total.  And this Basket Asset Portfolio, in this hypothesis, contains food and agricultural assets.  Unlike oil, these food and agricultural assets are very well dispersed geographically, although there might be concentrations of valuable arable land, important processing, refining and (interestingly) modification facilities, and, finally, bureaucratic centers that monitor and channel the flows of power and money associated with this Basket Asset Portfolio from which every person on the planet indirectly feeds and drinks.

The thesis that I am trying to illustrate is this:  Petroleum as the Asset of Total Power permitted social and governmental power to work in the background.  The mechanisms of power retreated into invisibility, which created the illusion of personal freedom around the world. 

However, as Petroleum retreats, the older power structures based on food and agriculture will re-emerge.  And the rituals of power associated with food, agriculture and other absolutely fundamental natural resources have been bare-knuckled historically.  Indeed, Wittfogel in his tome uses the word corvée with a frequency and ease that is troubling.  And in case you didn’t know, corvée means forced labor, which has been a facet of world culture long before North Korea borrowed the method.

The past 150 years—despite the dispiriting competition spawned by urbanisation, the wars waged because of an excess of ambition combined with stunningly cheap funding capacity, and the occasional episodes even of famine that were the fallout of politico-philosophical wonkery gone wild—have been gentle compared to what is likely in the offing.  The number of victims of the new power structure of food and agriculture will increase.  Also, I think the contrast between those who have carved out corners of power for themselves and their families and those who through ignorance or carelessness will have fallen victim to the Future of Food will become more stark.

Few if any of us will be able to aspire to become the aristocrats of this harsh Future of Food.  Someone other than us will appoint himself as the Duke of Pop Tarts and the Prince of Genetic Modifications.  And there will be a King of Seeds, who controls where the Golden Rice grows and who must eat it for lack of any other choice.  

However, perhaps we can aspire to enter the new Middle Class in the Future of Food, a Middle Class who have if not total then at least some merely semi-permeable defense against oppression.  

Choice and freedom won’t disappear, but as is true today, there will be those who have for too long refused to choose anything and have never valued freedom seriously.  These unfortunate many will wind up in a condition in which even the illusion of choice—the storefront of freedom—no longer exists at all for them. 

To join this far luckier and much more powerful Middle Class likely won’t be easy.  One will have to begin to take seriously the truth that food is more than what emerges from a wrapper or a box.   And we must amplify our concern for nutrition far, far beyond a casual interest in weight-loss or fashion.

And beyond these changes in attitude and disposition, some concrete measures will likely have to be taken.  New businesses will certainly arise to serve this self-appointed and more enlightened and therefore obstreperous Middle Class.  If food is the medium of future power, then some of us must begin to write (then publish or broadcast) the stories of the lives of those who aspire to live intelligently in the quiet corners and cul-de-sacs located strategically at a safe distance from the dissonance and distortion waves of that new and very unforgiving power of tomorrow.  

But…

this turn in the story we leave for future discussion.

TrüSky

Singapore