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Can Americans Save the Foods They Love?

This article is more than 8 years old.

Simran Sethi, author of Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love (HarperOne, 2015), feels every food we care about is under threat. We’re so busy fighting GMOs and worried about calorie counts and the sugar content in our waffles that we’re losing the very foundation of food. Real food. She feels the discussion more of us should be having around the dinner table is the loss of agricultural biodiversity.

We can blame big ag but Sethi adds that we’re just as much the problem (and solution). Before we can reclaim our rich agricultural bounty, we first need to understand what’s at stake and what we’re losing.

We continue our monthly series of speaking with women changemakers that began last month with a Q & A with Lynnette Marrero. This month, we asked Sethi why agricultural biodiversity needs to be part of every family's kitchen table discussion.

Megy Karydes: Why is agricultural biodiversity important now?

Simran Sethi: According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 95 percent of the world’s calories now come from 30 species. Of 30,000 edible plant species, we cultivate about 150. And of the more than 30 birds and mammals we’ve domesticated for food, only 14 animals provide 90 percent of the food we get from livestock. The loss is staggering: three-fourths of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and five animal species.

This is a terrible way to build a system that we require for our very sustenance. No investment advisor would suggest we put all our money in one stock, or five, and then hope everything will turn out okay. But that’s exactly what we’re doing to food, even though we know better. This is, in part, why 1 million people died during the Irish Potato Famine when a disease wiped out potatoes—and why Guatemala and Honduras recently declared states of emergency when coffee leaf rust decimated the countries’ coffee crops.

Right now, we’re at risk of losing the one banana we see on store shelves as it succumbs to a variation of the same fungus that killed off its predecessor.

Add to this, the wild card of climate change. This loss of agrobiodiversity—the reduction of the diversity that’s woven into every single strand of the complex web that makes food and agriculture possible—has resulted in a food pyramid with a point as fine as Seattle’s Space Needle, making it harder, and less pleasurable, for us to feed ourselves.

But all is not lost. A lot of these changes have occurred in the last few decades, which means they can change again. That is, of course, as long as we maintain the diversity found in the wild, on farms and in stored collections that contain the traits we might need now or in the future: immunity to a disease, greater adaptation to a changing climate, the possibility of higher yields or greater nutritional value—and delicious taste.

Karydes: In the book you write: "No country is self-sustaining when it comes to the range of diversity needed to develop improved varieties of crops. We feed each other." How can we, and our neighboring countries, explore options to help each other when it comes to offering a range of diverse crops without jeopardizing our current crops and economic reliance of specific crops?

Sethi: The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Treaty for Food and Agriculture and Convention on Biological Diversity gets to the question on benefit sharing across countries (you can read more about that here).

We actually help each other all the time, as our store shelves indicate: apples from New Zealand, wheat from China, rice from India and so on. But what happens when we stop growing what could be easily grown closer to home? U.S. fields are full of crops grown to feed livestock and full gas tanks (in the form of biofuel). We can only grow a diversity of crops if we recognize why diversity matters. It's our insurance system, our backup.

If one of the crops we grow in monocultures fails, we need to be able to reach back into the genetic pool and find traits we might be looking for: pest resistance, drought tolerance, improved yield or nutrition, whatever. Our economic reliance on a few crops is not sustainable and, many times, isn't even economically viable without the tariffs and subsidies that make it so.

Karydes: According to Colin Khoury, whom you interview for your book, the scale of production favors sameness. Khoury says, "our industrialized food system was designed for efficiency and yield - not nutrition, taste or diversity." How can we move the needle from being efficient to providing flavorful, nutrient-rich foods when our country's default is fast and cheap? Is it possible to return to a time when we could afford nutritious, flavorful and diverse foods or is it financially inaccessible to the average American?

Sethi: As I detail in the book, "For the past 20 years, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world produces more than one and a half times enough food to feed everyone on the planet, which is also enough to feed the population of 9.6 billion we anticipate by 2050. This matters because a lot of the changes we see in food and agriculture have been made in the name of feeding hungry people. But the challenge isn’t simply an issue of availability; it’s one of access. Food and the resources required to buy food aren’t efficiently or equally distributed. That’s why the hungriest people in the world are smallholder farmers—the over 500 million people responsible for feeding the majority of the world’s population."

To the point of affordability: 'The idea of good food has been reduced to foods that grow abundantly and stand strong in the field—and can sustain long journeys and continue to stand strong on supermarket shelves. And while these qualities are important, they give short shrift to the many reasons we choose one food over another, regardless of our budgets.

“They also inform the steady refrain from various players in the food industry that the reason we should settle for inexpensive, marginally nutritious food is because we can’t afford anything better.

“Some of the nonprofits, government officials and businesses that maintain these views mean well: hunger is real and people need to eat. But others, especially those profiting from cheap food, use poverty as an excuse to keep feeding us food of lower quality, sowing fields full of nutrient-poor monocultures and glutting shelves with processed foods chock-full of an addictive combination of salt, sweeteners and fats that keep us coming back for more.

“The refrain of affordability also obscures deeper challenges around why people aren’t paid enough to spend more money on food. Why is this all we can afford? And why isn’t food a bigger priority?

“We Americans spend less of our income on food—6.7 percent, with an increasing percentage spent on snacks—than almost any other country on the planet. Less than what we spent on food during the Great Depression. No one should be underfed. Those who are should have greater support in not only being fed but being fed well. And those of us who can afford more might do well to reconsider why we pride ourselves on cheap food. That bargain means that someone (a farmer or factory worker, not the CEO) or something (such as safety or environmental standards) was likely compromised."

Karydes: Soil doesn't get enough play and yet it's probably one of the most important (the most important?) piece of the farming puzzle. You state that it's impossible to grow good food in bad soil and that people should care about soil. How can we, as consumers, improve the soil in which our food grows? How can you explain the importance of soil to someone who feels they're already supporting local agriculture through buying at farmers markets, in-season, etc.?

Sethi: How would I stress the importance of soil? Gosh, it's vital. It's the environment in which foods grow.  I write, "...soils, like people, are transformed by the company they keep. They develop slowly, over time. Top soil, the upper, most productive layer of soil, takes over 500 years to form. That precious inch—and all remaining layers of soil—evolves in response to the climate, terrain and organisms with which it comes in contact. So while we may think of soils as static and constant, they’re not. Soils are living entities: They are born, they breathe, they age and they can die. They are dying.

"The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates over one-third of all soils are degraded, meaning they are eroded, compacted, polluted or less fertile. This is due to a changing climate and the relentless pressure we put on our land; heavy-tillage agriculture with limited, if any, crop rotation is one of our biggest problems."

It's hard for consumers to know how soil was treated but we can start by purchasing food from places where we can actually ask the question, "How is your soil?" Or maybe even growing food ourselves. I don't do this - I travel way too much, but I do purchase most of my produce and all of my meat from local and farmers markets.

The latter has grown exponentially in the last two decades. We have more opportunity than ever before to connect with producers of food. We have more opportunity than ever before to spend our money - or, in a growing number of places, SNAP benefits - in those spaces where the distance between producer and consumer is reduced, where we can spend our money supporting the food systems that nurture and sustain what we care about.

Sethi's book takes us on a journey to six continents as she seeks out delicious and endangered foods and discovers how severe the loss of biodiversity, from soil to plate, is affecting our access to foods we love. But food doesn't just nourish us. As Cary Fowler, senior advisor to the Global Crop Diversity Trust and author of Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, "When we taste, we taste history - the interplay of crops, livestock and even wild things - with our own human cultures, And we taste diversity. Simran Sethi's book opens the world to a new generation by focusing on these foods we think we know, but don't. Bread, Wine, Chocolate helps us understand the richness of these foods and others, and why it is essential to preserve the diversity if we wish to appreciate and fully benefit from such foods in the future. Readers of this book will both enjoy and be enlightened; many will find their taste buds subtly changed by a new awareness of what they are really eating."

I'm not a book critic but I appreciate food and what goes into preparing meals. Sethi's book isn't a quick read but it's a great resource for those of us who care about what we eat and how it makes it to our plates.

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