The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
was a diet of great variety, delivered via steamship and steam engine from the four corners of the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, as historian William Cronon suggests, “The Iowa farm family who raised corn for cattle purchased from Wyoming and who lived in a farmhouse made of Wisconsin pine clothed themselves with Mississippi cotton that Massachusetts factory workers had woven into fabric, worked their fields with a plow manufactured in Illinois from steel produced in Pennsylvania, and ended their Sunday meal by drinking Venezuelan coffee after enjoying an apple pie made on an Ohio stove from the fruit of a backyard orchard mixed with sugar from Cuba and cinnamon from Ceylon.” In a short period, local people learned to expect global trade that offered such delectable results that few people worried about any possible side effects.9
One of the significant side effects of the emerging American food system was distancing. Railroads overcame the vast distances of the continent, but at the same time they distanced urban consumers from the sources of their sustenance. In meatpacking, for example, the new system kept the killing of animals far from the ultimate consumers, who increasingly bought their meat in branded packages. “In the packers’ world,” says Cronon, “it was easy not to remember that eating was a moral act inextricably bound to killing. Such was the second nature that a corporate order had imposed on the American landscape. Forgetfulness was among the least noticed and most important of its by-products.” This forgetfulness was an essential part of the American food system, and of the moral ecology of everyday life. We still inhabit this moral landscape of ignorance and forgetfulness. And sometimes our ignorance is not just what we don’t know, it’s what we know and choose to ignore.10
The third revolution in the American food system occurred after World War II. Left with an excess of wartime manufacturing capability, scientists converted wartime research on munitions into research on chemical fertilizers and studies of nerve gas to studies of pesticide production. So the “chemicalization” of farms quickly complemented the mechanization of agriculture. The result was huge monocultures of crops and animals, planted and cultivated by tractors and other machines, protected from natural predators by chemicals, and refined and reassembled by processors into what we call food. The number of farmers declined as the size and specialization of farms grew, with destructive effects on rural communities and culture. In the process, Americans reduced the biodiversity of farms and the biodiversity of their diet, so that almost two-thirds of our calories now come directly or indirectly from four crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice. As a result, when we sit down to eat, we’re consuming several centuries of food revolutions, reflecting radical and largely unsustainable changes in our relationship with nature, from seeds and soil to the food we pile on our plates.11
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