I am but a mere teeny tiny cog in a much bigger food system
Will voting with your fork actually make a difference?
If you are a recipient of the annual paper version of Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy (or if you’ve read them online; I’ve linked to them in the ‘about’ page), you may be aware that food has become something of an interest of mine in recent years (I call it an interest; my husband might call it an obsession). There are a couple of aspects to this interest. One, I enjoy eating, and I like food. I like looking at cookbooks, reading about food and grocery news, watching cooking shows, and I even kind of like cooking. This is what I think of as the small-scale way of being interested in food. But there is a second aspect to my food interest — the big picture way of looking at food. And at this level, it isn’t so much food that I’m interested in but rather food systems.
A thousand years ago (or actually maybe only about twentyish years ago; it just feels like forever), one of my geography lecturers taught us about food systems. I enjoyed his courses and fell in love with geography, but although I continued studying geography all the way through to my PhD, the bit on food systems got a bit sidelined. I got distracted by other research interests, like bookshops, festivals, and libraries. I forgot about food systems entirely.
Then a few years ago I read some books about food, then about food politics and food systems, and they led me down a rabbit hole and suddenly I cared way more about food systems than I ever did as an undergrad. Food systems are, as it might be obvious from the term, about the entire system that delivers food to your plate. Farmers, yes, but also farmworkers, meatpackers, chemical companies, biologists, geneticists, food corporations, flavourists, food engineers, truck drivers, supermarkets, financial and investment funds. There is a lot of complexity in the logistics and supply chains that bring us food, and there is also a lot of money and power involved.
What I was learning was that a lot of the money and power were concentrated in areas that I thought were unfair. Unjust, unsustainable, and not in ways that would lead to a resilient food system that would be good for the earth or the people and animals on it. This discovery changed the way I bought food, the way I cooked, and the way I ate and fed my family. I tried to vote with my fork (I was learning that my actual vote didn’t make as much of a difference as I hoped, because Big Food and Big Agriculture spend a lot of money lobbying Congress to write legislation favourable to them).
Voting with my fork means that I read ingredient labels. I try to find information about the companies making or selling the food I buy. Before the construction began, in the good old days of having a kitchen, we subscribed to a CSA box, and now we buy a lot of produce from the farmers’ market. We would buy meat that was grass-fed and responsibly raised from Farm Foods (now I buy meat from the farmers’ market too).
And my whole vendetta against ultraprocessed foods is part of this whole ‘voting with your fork’ thing. I didn’t want to feel like I was being tricked by food engineers and massive food companies to buy and eat their food-like substances, with their hyper-platable products of dubious nutritional value but were great for their profits. I see your tricks, food marketers.
I sometimes wonder how much of a difference this is making. I recently listened to a BBC Food Programme podcast about the food system which looked at what happened at a recent UN summit about the food system, its problems, and how it could change. There was another recent BBC Food Programme podcast about innovators in the food world and what they’re doing to make a positive difference. All the food innovators they talked to were brilliant, but one line in particular in the pod stood out to me — if you don’t like the current system, what can you do to get out of it? That particular innovator’s answer was to start Wildfarmed, a company in the UK that has created its own supply chain to grow crops in ways that prioritise soil health and biodiversity (I wish I could buy its flour but alas their products are thus far unavailable in the US).
It feels like what I’m doing by voting with my fork is nothing earth-shattering. I’m not starting a new radical company that is changing the way we farm or supply restaurants or writing policies that are helping small farmers and food producers. I am arguably the smallest cog in this entire system, the end consumer, the person who buys food and cooks it and eats it. We spend about $10,000 a year on food groceries, which is nothing when profit and loss statements for food companies and supermarkets are measured in the millions and billions. You know what has an impact? Agricultural subsidies. Lobbying in Congress. That’s where the money is.
But then I remember a quote that was used in many presentations from the CEO at the Green Building Council of Australia, where I worked in my 20s: ‘From small things big things grow.’ And another famous quote by Maragret Mead that was on the classroom wall at Umoja, a school in Tanzania where I once volunteered: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has.’ And maybe this is why I still try to vote with my fork, and buy ethically and sustainably where I can — I harbour the wild hope that perhaps the thousand or so dollars I spend a month on our groceries can make a difference. More importantly, I’m planting seeds. My children are watching. They are developing their tastes and learning about food and seasons and what real food tastes like, and maybe this is enough of an impact. Brilliant and clever people are coming up with new ideas to transform the food system and make a positive difference all the time, so maybe it is enough simply to support those trying to make a difference by voting with my fork.