Another Post-Industrial Revolution

During my last inter-company fallow period I read Michael Pollan’s brilliant Omnivore’s Dilemma, which Publisher’s Weekly summarized like this:

Pollan examines what he calls “our national eating disorder” (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It’s a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You’ll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.

All true. It had a big and enduring impact on the way I think about food, and a dramatic if short-lived impact on what I actually put in my mouth.

I bought Mark Bittman’s new book last week, after seeing his persuasive TED talk on the subject:

I love Bittman’s blog for the Times, and his approach to the sustainable food problem as someone who – like me – clearly loves to eat. My wife and I have been making a conscious effort to eat more vegetarian meals, and this time the change appears to be sticking.

So what does this have to do with social marketing?

The problems in our food chain present another illustration of how our 20th century efforts to maximize industrial economies of scale had unintended consequences we must now address. As with the manufacturing economies that drove the ascent of mass media, the application of industrial management principles to our food chain resulted in hidden costs for our society and  global economy that seem to have come into focus all at once. We’re left making hard choices in unfamiliar territory; trying to sort out what a new, more enlightened and sustainable model will look like.

Mother Jones has a thoughtful piece explaining the hard choices we’re confronted with in making the transition to something better. It’s diagnosis:

Nearly everyone agrees that we need new methods that produce more higher-quality calories using fewer resources, such as water or energy, and accruing fewer “externals,” such as pollution or unfair labor practices. Where the consensus fails is over what should replace the bad old industrial system. It’s not that we lack enthusiasm—activist foodies represent one of the most potent market forces on the planet. Unfortunately, a lot of that conscientious buying power is directed toward conceptions of sustainable food that may be out of date.

Think about it. When most of us imagine what a sustainable food economy might look like, chances are we picture a variation on something that already exists—such as organic farming, or a network of local farms and farmers markets, or urban pea patches—only on a much larger scale. The future of food, in other words, will be built from ideas and models that are familiar, relatively simple, and easily distilled into a buying decision: Look for the right label, and you’re done.

But that’s not the reality. Many of the familiar models don’t work well on the scale required to feed billions of people. Or they focus too narrowly on one issue (salad greens that are organic but picked by exploited workers). Or they work only in limited circumstances. (A $4 heirloom tomato is hardly going to save the world.)

What we need, in other words, is to rise above the easy focus on tactics and focus on changing the way we think about success. We need to question the measures with which we’ve become familiar, and new tools to measure externalities now called to our attention. And we need to do all that at sufficient volumes to ensure the economic viability of the resultant ecosystem.

That’s scalable intimacy, folks, and I am more convinced than ever it’s where we are headed in the journey to what’s next.

What do you think?

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• Slow Food (chefann.com)
• Michael Pollan on What’s Wrong with Environmentalism (3quarksdaily.com)
• Obama’s Sustainable Choice For USDA (takepart.com)
• Encourage Obama To Name a Secretary Of Food (barrier-busting.com)
• Agriculture Sustainability Metrics Need Work: Can You Help? (treehugger.com)
• Move up the food chain (rawlivingfoods.typepad.com)
• Cookbook Author Mark Bittman (time.com)
• Tell Michael Pollan your food rules (the-f-word.org)

Tagged as: Environment, Food chain, Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, organic farms, Sustainable agriculture