The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News April 29, 2005

Alumnus Cook shares recipe on “fixing food”

The recently published book Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us was the topic of the talk that Christopher Cook (OC ’90) gave on Monday in Hallock Auditorium. Cook, who is also the author of many articles on domestic policy issues for Harper’s, Mother Jones, The Economist, The Nation and the Christian Science Monitor, indicted food companies who “cajole customers into wanting more and increasing portion sizes when they don’t even have the education and finances to seek out better options.”

Ecological Design Innovation Center chief and fellow Oberlin alumnus Brad Masi (OC ’83) introduced Cook. Masi also noted the relevance of Cook’s work given the tendency of Oberlin students to be “very involved with the alternative movement.” He said that many Oberlin alumni have devoted themselves to careers focused on organic food and other such “alternative” farming and eating practices. Some, such as the local owners of Agave, the Black River Café and the Oberlin Market, have established themselves as purveyors of responsibly produced food in Oberlin.

Cook said that his motivation in writing Diet for a Dead Planet was two-fold.

“I initially wanted to do a book on labor and the food industry,” he said, “but I wanted to address the broader issue of the food system — both the issue of welfare recipients getting pushed into meatpacking and the horrendous practice of factory farming.”

Thus, he leveraged attacks at both the labor and farming practices of large farming and food processing businesses.

Cook investigated charges against American agribusiness that “welfare to work” programs of the 1990s were in part a way for large meatpacking plants to fill their most undesirable and dangerous positions with easily replaced and non-unionized workers. Issues of labor and employment are thus inherently linked to “a broader system of how food comes to us” by “horrendous jobs like rapid-paced assembly line production with 30 percent of workers getting injured in a year and welfare recipients being forced into a captive labor system.”

Furthermore, the “classic tales of migrant labor being subjected to horrendous situations and deep poverty have not gone away,” Cook said. Unfair treatment of migrant workers in Ohio initially sparked his interest in investigative journalism while he was an Oberlin student. He lamented the state of migrant farm laborers from Latin America who, splintered into isolated communities in the Midwest, are unable to form unions or demand better working conditions.

Though he first emphasized the abysmal conditions foisted upon agricultural workers and the plight of small farmers “pushed out of the system by a glut in the food supply,” Cook placed equal weight on the capacity of current farming practices to cause “public health crises” and environmental degradation. He blamed “a diet that contains excessive amounts of dairy, red meat, fat and sugar” relative to actual nutritional needs for making Americans “deeply unhealthy” and encouraging the intensive development of environmentally damaging practices.

Cook targeted intensive factory farms for utilizing large quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, causing “the DDT crisis of decades ago as well as a great increase in cancer among farmers and farm workers” as well as consumers, he said. Claiming “the production of meat is now the top water polluter in the country,” he called environmental degradation caused by meat production “a structural issue of how meat gets to us.”

Government regulation and new farming practices were among the many panaceas that Cook offered in response to his charges that the American agricultural system abuses both workers and the environment. He expressed an opinion that “food is an excellent example of a sector in American society that should be socialized” and identified the movements toward organic farming, farmers’ markets, “new, creative economic relationships,” and urban farming as key to solving “the whole array of crises that confront us today.”
 
 

   


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