Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Pick a little, talk a little, cheep!
The Music Man, 1957
Meredith Wilson
I say we’ve got trouble, right here in Big Ag City, with people talking about how food is produced we’re definitely on the road to perdition. Maybe it’s the deferential, almost reverential, way those often identifying themselves as - and I shudder at the word – 'foodies' speak about the who, what, when, where, and how their food is produced that makes them the easy butt of so many jokes and so much satire these days. Or it might be the fact that they always seem to be talking about the food they buy and eat. Of course, it also might be a subconscious fear by the vast majority who are not in this fraternity, a fear that they should know more about the way their industrial food chain works coupled with the fear of what this would mean. I recently sat through one of the first episodes of Fred Armisen's Portlandia, and Portland’s very vocal food community was sent up in an extended skit. This reminded me of my post responding to Tony's Baloney rant in last year’s episode on the food scene in Rome – according to Tony, Roman’s don't talk endlessly about where their ingredients come from, they just buy and eat them. Where do I begin…with the positive, or the negative?
Seventy years ago or more when a larger percentage of our population lived in the agrarian parts of this country, back when much of our food production was regional, people didn’t spend a lot of time discussing how the crops and livestock were raised since they were a lot closer to the sources, which were very transparent and roughly similar throughout a given region. It was common knowledge, even though their were literally hundreds more varieties of crops being grown and hundreds more breeds of livestock being raised. There was one significant exception to this, that is, the County Fair when everyone gathered to observe, taste, and judge the best of this or that for the season.
As the population migrated to the metropolitan areas to work in factories, this direct connection and knowledge was gradually lost, or better yet, traded for the time and money saving convenience of industrially processed and packaged foods provided in super markets and fast food chains. As a part of this transition quantity seemed to have supplanted quality for much of the consuming public. The principles of Economics, Industrial Efficiency, and Food Chemistry were eventually applied at every step of the traditional agrarian food chain with the intertwined goals of lower prices to spur demand and lower costs to spur profits. This has all led Big Food to ever more twisted machinations, taking lower and lower quality crops and livestock and a bigger and bigger chemistry set to make 'stuff' that appears to resemble traditional foods. They now fool the vast majority of the population, several generations or more removed from real food. Highly stimulated taste buds and ever expanding waistlines at a cost that seems to decrease year after year keeps the consumer from delving too deeply into the mysteries of food production - of course billion dollar advertising budgets bombarding them with the notion that our food is only getting better also helps. What they don't know, or can't remember, won't hurt them, or Big Food.
Given all the misdirection and misinformation provided on Big Food’s and Big Ag’s packaging and in their advertising campaigns, it is no wonder that the average consumer has little to no understanding of the means and methods used to produce their industrial offerings - that is, how the cheap and tasteless ingredients produced by Big Ag are turned into ‘appealing’ products by Big Food through the use of industrially produced thickeners, stabilizers, preservatives, ‘natural’ flavors, and of course plenty of salt and high fructose corn sugar. (Heinz’s "Grown Not Made" ketchup campaign is a perfect example of this.)
All of this food chatter that Tony Bourdain and others object to or openly mock is a form of self defense by individuals concerned with preserving what remains of our food heritage and reversing the dual trends of narrowing down our food choices and making food production processes so complicated that we become totally dependent on PhDs and secret industrial formulas, like adding ammonia treated slaughterhouse scraps to burger patties. Since real food cannot be produced in an industrially efficient factory, it is only by word of mouth that independent, small-holding farmers using traditional, sustainable methods can survive. The more often the uniformed hear about 'real' food from these incessant food talkers, the more likely they are to begin asking questions, and sampling the wares of 'real' farmers and 'real' food producers.
But there are even more fundamental reasons why all this food talk is a good for us...more to come
