Farm Like a Factory, Eat Like a Pig

The industrial revolution and information age have not only transformed US society, including our food system, but have also fundamentally altered our understanding of ourselves and the natural systems that sustain us.

You can see it in the way we talk. Metaphors of machines, especially vehicles, and computers have come to dominate the way we refer to ourselves. We seem to be always "gearing up," "shifting gears," "firing on all cylinders," pausing for a "pit stop" or "running on empty." Our brains are "hard-wired" for certain things, our thoughts running on "circuitry" and taking up "bandwidth." When we don't understanding something, it just doesn't "compute."

Likewise, we talk about our food systems as mechanical "operations" that run on "inputs" to create "outputs." We no longer "steward" or "husband" the land but "engineer" it and its processes. Farming isn't even "farming" anymore, but "agribusiness" and many of our farms are in fact "factory farms."

Our embrace of mechanization and technology has been so complete as to render us unwilling — or perhaps unable — to conceive of the dictates of an organic reality, a perspective that is costing us not only the health of our environment but the sustainability of our agricultural system.

"By means of the machine metaphor we have eliminated any fear or awe or reverence or humility or delight or joy that might have restrained us in our use of the world,” wrote Wendell Berry in his 1978 book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

Due to this lack of reverence, he points out in his essay "Agricultural Solutions to Agricultural Problems," "we have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist. It is the good work of good farmers — nothing else — that ensures a sufficiency of food over the long term."

One of the few places we are still allowed to be organic beings is at the table, where we consume the outputs of the agribusiness with a gusto that harkens back to a messy agricultural truth. At the same time as we speak of growing food in terms of mechanization, we refer to eating via animal references — we are "hungry as a horse," we "pig out," we "strap on the feed bag."

Rarely in this country do we "eat like a bird." I guess if we are to keep up with the efficient machine our food system has become, we must gobble our slop with the abandon of animals. Otherwise we will be buried under a mountain of cheap corn, or excuse me, under an efficient output of commodity unit production.

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