Dairy dilemmas: Milk and cheese as "wicked problems"

Dairy cows at Appleton Farms in eastern Massachusetts

Sandra Batie, an agricultural and resource economist at Michigan State University, uses the term "wicked problem" to describe issues so fraught with internal paradoxes and inconsistencies and so overlaid with competing and often contradictory ideologies and assumptions that it is difficult or impossible even to have a collective conversation about them, let alone figure out how to fix them.[1]  Batie sees agriculture as a particularly "wicked problem," and much of my recent focus on food and farm history arises from this same idea.  Because we have so little shared sense of how we got to the food system we have now, many of the attempted fixes and alternatives often feel fragile and ungrounded.

Take dairy.  It's one of the agricultural sectors most overlaid with both nostalgia (think milkmaids, butter churns, black and white Holsteins on a Vermont hillside) and ideology (think childhood nutrition, school lunch subsidy, and the raw vs. pasteurized debate).  It's also one of the liveliest frontiers of local-food revitalization (think urban professionals turned artisanal cheesemakers).  

Yet it's a component of the food system whose history is particularly murky and ill-understood.

Tyler French: Attending to other tables as well as our own

I have just finished writing the copy for Nourish SC, a traveling exhibit of eight panels addressing community food security in my home state of South Carolina. I hope for the exhibit to become a rallying call for members of the local food movement to expand their efforts on the social equity front, which has been ignored in favor of the environmental and economic fronts of the movement. In creating the content for the exhibit, I interviewed 13 individuals involved in either the local food movement or increasing food security, including a local farmer, a USDA official, a food bank COO, social work and public health professors, and a board member of United Way of the Midlands.

I immediately encountered tension between the spoken and the actualized goals of the local food movement.

Linda Norris: Moving beyond the butter churn

I’d been tossing around in my head what to write in this blog post, and thought I would be writing it from eastern Ukraine, but circumstances intervened and I’m actually home in chilly upstate New York. Luckily, this photo appeared in my Facebook feed one January morning, with Katya’s caption, “my daily winter tea.”   And somehow, amidst this glorious tumble of collected herbs, my thoughts began to crystallize.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel and work in all kinds of different places, but one place that has captured more of me in the last four years has been Ukraine.  I first went in 2009 as a Fulbright Scholar and have continued to return on an irregular basis, co-founding the Pickle Project with fellow Fulbrighter Sarah Crow to encourage conversation in both Ukraine and the United States about food, culture and sustainability.

When I asked about the tea in the photo, Katya replied, “I don't know the exact meaning of those herbs, but I believe they are much better for me as usual tea from a shop, because gathered by my mom on my motherland.”  In that one phrase—her mom and her motherland-- she shared both the intensely personal and the intensely political nature of food in Ukraine.   

The personal means that the local food movement isn’t a movement in Ukraine; it’s a way of life for many.  The idea of a local food movement generates many bemused smiles. But that way of life depends on shrinking generations of mothers and grandmothers who still make the time to collect herbs, to pickle and to preserve, either in their home villages or in their dachas (summer homes) where intensive small cultivation is how every weekend is spent.   

The political nature of local food is harder to see than the village gardens and root cellars, but like the old Soviet system, it pervades every part of Ukrainian life. Most Americans have never heard of Holodomor, the enforced famine of 1932-33 during which Stalin’s orders starved millions of Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens to death, despite living in the region known as the Bread Basket of Europe.  And few Americans understand the full extent of the extreme privations that happened on the Eastern front during World War II. But most of us do know a bit about Chernobyl and the contamination that continues to resound on many levels—including the food supply.    

Those 20^th century events created powerful national and personal memories.   Those memories mean that the political is personal.  For many, the safest path in the food chain is to rely on your own family’s hard work--or the babushka at the market selling homemade pickles--no matter that every day you pass a McDonald’s outside the metro station.

The transition from a peasant economy to the Soviet collectivization of agriculture is something virtually unaddressed in Ukrainian museums, much the same way American local history and outdoor museums often take a pass at the transition to corporate agriculture.  It’s complicated—so it’s often ignored.   If museums everywhere cannot address the big changes of the 20^th century, it’s equally hard to imagine how they will address the big changes of the 21^st.  

I think of my extended experiences in Ukraine as a continual, surprising, process of turning my own thoughts and assumptions around, looking at them from different angles and perspectives.  As public historians, I think that’s one role we can play, no matter where we are, creating situations where farmers, foodies and everyday people can look at food from different angles.  We can create dialogues that cross boundaries, including those of class and location. I’m interested in exploring how historians could contribute to--and how museums might create--a model such as Conflict Kitchen, the amazing Pittsburgh pop-up that only serves food from countries that the United States is in conflict with as a way of encouraging conversation, including international Skype parties between citizens of Pittsburgh and those in Iran and Afghanistan.

In 2011, with support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Pickle Project sponsored a series of four open public conversations in four Ukrainian cities.  Such open conversations are unusual in Ukraine—and not surprisingly, we found that the food conversations opened up much broader conversations about politics, memory, a sense of place, and the future.   (You can read more about the conversations both on our blog and in an article in the Spring, 2012 issue of Museums & Social Issues).   

Such work means though, that we have to go out of our comfort zones, as historians and as museums, take a hard look at our own biases and assumptions and move beyond the butter churn.

~ Linda Norris

Photos:

Tea by Katya Kuchar

Preserves and pickles for sale at the market in L’viv by Sarah Crow

Workers on a collective farm, undated.

Bread wars and problems of plenty: Lessons from the early market society

An 1805 map of the property that became Van Buren's farm

Chapter Four of the Martin Van Buren NHS Ethnographic Landscape Study report that I'm commenting on in this series of posts dealt with "Farming in an Emerging Market Society (1787-1839)." This chapter, which takes the story of Van Buren's farm up to the time when he purchased it just before losing his bid for Presidential re-election, left me with two big and really important takeaways.

First, thinking through the ways that farming in the northeastern states changed during this period left me firmly convinced that large-scale capitalism and small-scale agriculture are fundamentally at odds. By "large-scale" I mean not just global or corporatized, but pervasive in its adoption of a logic that foregrounds efficiency in search of maximum profitability. In agriculture, that logic has historically taken us down the road toward increasing mechanization, consolidation of small properties into larger and more expensive farms, pricing based on often-distant and often-volatile markets rather than local circumstances or costs of production, and other trends that eventually led to a fully industrial, commoditized food system not accountable to local markets or conditions. The seeds of what some have termed the "paradox of plenty" [1] or "problems of plenty" [2] were sown in this period, with efficiency and consolidation leading to lower prices and greater abundance for consumers, but driving small farmers out of business and leaving the rest chasing an ever-receding threshold of profitability.

It has taken a long time for the full implications of this to become clear, but the signs were there from the beginning.  One wonderful resource for my Ethnographic Landscape Study was Martin Bruegel's Farm, Shop, Landing:  The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860 (Duke University Press, 2002), which gives a detailed picture of how the growing and selling of food were changing in response to the increasing prevalence of market-based logic.  Bruegel reports (pp. 59-60) that a kind of informal "fair trade" system existed in the region until the early 19th century, with farmers and traders working out deals that spread their profits and risks fairly equitably.  As more fully capital-oriented markets took hold, however, those agreements were challenged.  For example, an 1810 ordinance in the town of Hudson required vendors in the public market to make their goods available to all comers rather than holding back some products for favored or regular customers (pp. 67-68).  This reflected a growing expectation of standardized pricing based on general supply and demand, rather than more flexible relationships between producers, consumers, and intermediaries.

And my second takeaway is the realization that despite some level of early 19th century prescience about the problems inherent in letting those more generalized "laws" of supply and demand determine how food would be grown and sold, no one had enough experience yet with capitalist markets to see where this all might lead.  As the riskiness of those markets became clearer--for example, after the Panic of 1819, one of the first systemic economic crises in the new republic--various efforts to strengthen and improve agriculture in the old northeastern states emerged.  But the irony of these projects is that they often involved pursuing exactly the same kinds of strategies--efficiency, higher yields, open markets--that were undermining the ability of small farmers and other food producers to survive in the longer term.

The New York of 1803, caught in bread wars

One striking example of this that I came across in researching my study is the early 19th century controversy over New York City bread prices.  Regulations known as the "assize of bread," rooted in medieval English law, limited bakers' profits and were resented by early American bakers, just as current limits on the price of milk are resented by dairy farmers unable to cover their own costs of production.  In November of 1801, New York's bakers staged a one-day work stoppage that badly frightened consumers and led the city government to intervene to make sure that bread--a staple food--remained available.

The bakers were trying to assert their right to a fair piece of the emerging market economy, just as small farmers were.  But both groups miscalculated, failing to understand their relative lack of power within a system increasingly dominated by concentrated capital and the unforgiving logic of efficiency.  New York's bakers finally managed to get the assize of bread abolished in 1821, but their organizing had irked a group of New York financiers who saw older artisanal guild networks as a barrier to free trade.  These well-heeled investors responded to the bread crisis by launching a new corporation, the Bread Company, that could provide cheaper bread to consumers.  By helping to create the legal underpinnings for a more wide-open market system, farmers, artisanal producers, and their allies among politicians and reformers actually made small farmers and producers much more vulnerable to large-scale competition and economic volatility.[3]

The really big takeaway here, and the reason why I think this particular period of history is well worth present-day food and farm reformers knowing more about, is that it shows how the attempts to compromise and chase after the new efficiencies demanded by capital-oriented markets in order to keep small-scale food production functional ultimately had exactly the opposite effect.  This history lends weight to contemporary efforts to re-scale our food systems so that they are once again more accountable to regional and local conditions and markets.  The "lessons" of the past aren't usually directly applicable to the present, but there can be a great deal of benefit from being able to say to those who argue for a fully market-oriented food system, "Look, we tried that, and here's why it didn't work."

Next:  Martin Van Buren buys a farm and Cathy struggles with presentism.

SOURCES

[1]  Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty:  A Social History of Eating in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 1993).
[2]  R. Douglas Hurt, Problems of Plenty:  The American Farmer in the 20th Century (Ivan R. Dee, 2002).
[3]  The assize of bread is discussed in Chapter 7 of Howard Rock's Artisans of the New Republic:  The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York University Press, 1984).

The 1805 map is by William Dickie, "A survey of the lands of John and William Van Ness...on the West Side of the Albany Road in Kinderhook" (from the collection of Martin Van Buren NHS).

Connecting to farm history (and why Martin Van Buren is cooler than you think)

Martin Van Buren c.1855 (Mathew Brady)

Despite his indisputably awesome side-whiskers, Martin Van Buren doesn't have the brand-recognition of many of his fellow American Presidents.  A single-term (1837-41) Chief Executive whose tenure was shaped by the financial crisis of the late 1830s and the excruciating sectional tensions leading up to the Civil War, he's mostly remembered today for his role in creating the party system and for the fact that his political nickname, "Old Kinderhook" (O.K. for short) has passed into our everyday language.

Lindenwald, Van Buren's post-Presidential home

Van Buren's relative obscurity has been an interpretive and public relations challenge for the national park site at his post-Presidential rural estate in Kinderhook, New York, and it was also a foundational issue for me when I started working on an Ethnographic Landscape Study focusing on farming for the park about three years ago.  It was perfectly plain to me that a national park that encompassed a vibrant working farm--as Martin Van Buren National Historic Site has done since a 2009 boundary expansion that now circles Van Buren's entire property instead of just its central mansion--had many potentially exciting links with present-day debates and struggles over the politics of food, farming, health, community, and economics.  But what did it have to do with Martin Van Buren?  I remember asking, at our initial project meeting, how close I had to stay in my research to Van Buren himself, and being told, "Everything has to connect to or through Van Buren.  He's the reason this park exists."

Artist's rendering of Van Buren's farm c. 1850

Over my next few posts, I'm going to write about how I did that, chapter by chapter, in the study (which you can now download from the park's website).  In this first post, though, I thought I'd just say a bit about that challenge of finding ways to stay centered within a very specific history and interpretive mission while building out toward the larger context of today's food movement and all the social, political, economic, and moral questions it raises.  This is of course the central challenge of public history:  maintaining a balance between the  uniqueness, contingency, and essential "otherness" of the past--and the methods of inquiry that historians have developed for building knowledge about it--while remembering why it seemed important to focus on a particular aspect of the past--in this case, ongoing debates about farming as we rethink the costs of our energy-dense, globalized way of life--in our present-day work.

In a nutshell, it was possible to do this at Martin Van Buren NHS because of the still-essentially-agricultural society in which Van Buren lived and the always-essentially-political nature of debates about food, farming, health, and land use.  You don't have to think very deeply about food in the 21st century before you find yourself engaging with political questions.  And because the economy of Van Buren's America was still largely built around agriculture, those farm-related questions connected with nearly everything else.  Here are some of the big links that seemed most salient as I was gathering data for my study:

• Questions about the place of farming within a market-oriented society. Farming was becoming much more a matter of commercial exchange in the early 19th century, with supply chains  lengthening, crops becoming commodities, and prices determined more by distant market conditions than local costs and circumstances.  Martin Van Buren and his neighbors farmed for their own household sustenance but also increasingly sold commercial crops like potatoes, apples, and hay for New York City and more distant places, entering into the kinds of volatile, market-driven relationships that farmers have been trying to navigate ever since.  The present-day food movement is attempting to rethink these kinds of markets and relationships and to shorten our food chains again.
• Questions about the relationship of agriculture and industry.  Industrial manufacturing was  surging to the forefront of the 19th century American economy, particularly in the older northeastern states.  Industrialization brought new tools that made farms more productive but also created new expectations that they should be as efficient and mechanized as factories.  It's another vicious cycle that farmers have been caught in ever since:  greater efficiency means lower prices, which means the need for greater mechanization and higher yields just to stay economically viable.  And again, the contemporary new/small-scale/local/sustainable food movement is trying to find ways out of the cycle, back to a scale of production and marketing closer to what existed in Van Buren's time.
• Questions about labor and land.  Van Buren took up farming at a time when young, landless farmers were already struggling to find and afford productive land in the old northeast (that's why so many of them headed west) and when the country was sharply divided over the use of non-free agricultural labor.  As with debates over land protection and access today, these 19th century arguments were all about morality, market forces, and the relative political power of regions and kinds of people.
• Questions about the role of government.  As with industrialization and commercialization of farming, Van Buren lived and farmed--and was involved with politics--at a sort of hinge-point in U.S. history.  Particularly after the Civil War, the federal government became much more involved in agricultural policy, methods, and markets (Abraham Lincoln signed the U.S. Department of Agriculture into existence as a Cabinet-level position in May 1862, just two months before Van Buren died).  It's another ongoing set of issues, which have been clearly felt in the recent months of negotiation over the 2012 Farm Bill.  Do some kinds of farms and products need or deserve public support and subsidy?  How (and how much) should food production and marketing be monitored and regulated?  How have farmers made their voices heard politically as their numbers have dwindled, and what does that mean for the steadily-increasing numbers of new/young/locally-oriented farmers who are choosing a different path from the dominant one that's been mapped out over the past 150 years?

The kind of farming Martin Van Buren practiced at Lindenwald was quite different in many ways from what's happening in the contemporary food movement.  But the questions he was grappling with in and through his farming endeavors are still strikingly relevant--in fact, we're still working on the exact same questions, just from a different place within the same economic and technological processes.  In my next few posts, I'll trace those questions through the specific history of one Hudson Valley farm over three+ centuries.