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Today's article is brilliant, especially if you are in the "home industries" sector or you enjoy buying real food from farm stalls and markets. The message is global. It is brought to my attention by Scott Cundill of Majesticway.net

By Charles Eisenstein. Originally appeared in Wise Traditions Magazine.

www.wildfermentation.com

My brother John and I share a hobby of brewing lacto-fermented sodas – root beers and ginger ales – which we share among family and friends and occasionally sell at health food conventions. Often we are asked, "Where can I buy this?" Our answer is "Nowhere." Unless you are lucky enough to run into us at the Weston A. Price Conference, chances are you will never see lacto-fermented soda for sale anywhere.

Our personal reasons for not "expanding our operation" are deeply relevant to the conflict between craft and commerce in food production.

Usually I make soda in 5-gallon batches. The process is fairly time-consuming, but it fits in well with other chores and there is no obligation to brew a certain amount at a certain time. Since I enjoy brewing several times a week, I produce a surplus – far more than our own family can drink. To expand to a commercial level, though, would mean changes in the way I brew, because as it stands I can only net about $20 per hour of labor. To be commercially viable, I would need to exploit efficiencies of scale by buying better equipment: a bottle-washing machine, bottler, larger fermentation vessels, etc. Then it is no longer a kitchen hobby; it is a business that must consider shipping, legal licensing, labeling laws, sanitation regulations, accounting, etc.

The Compromises of Commerce

So far so good. Some people are naturally inclined towards business. There are more and more small foodcrafting businesses these days, and I am happy to pay a premium for their products. But it is more than a matter of hobby vs. business – there are certain compromises one must make to bring production past a certain critical volume. The critical volume for fermented foods is especially low, because the product is alive and working. Lactofermented soda keeps fermenting in the bottle, for instance, leading to foaming and spraying when you open it, or even dangerous exploding bottles, if you leave them out long enough. There is a good reason that mass-marketed soft drinks are dead. In fact it is a necessity in the context of national brands, centralized production, and mass distribution. To change the way food is produced and processed inescapably demands changes in the way it is distribu ted and sold.

The compromises one would have to make to sell fermented soda on an economically viable scale are constant refrigeration and scary warning labels, or pasteurization, or plastic bottles. None are acceptable to us, for ecological and health reasons.

Similar compromises apply to most of the fermented foods that have survived the last century of food industrialization. Pickles and relish are no longer fermented at all, but preserved in vinegar and sterilized with heat in the canning process. Wine is treated with sodium metabisulfite before fermentation to destroy wild bacteria and yeasts that make the results less predictable. Beer is usually pasteurized or microfiltered to kill or remove living yeast. Yogurt survives, but it just isn't as good after the first day; the same is true of bread. Sauerkraut is usually pasteurized. To be sure there are niche brands, available in health-food stores, which are still living foods, but then freezing or refrigeration is necessary. This is rather ironic, since a major motivation for fermenting foods in the first place was to preserve them, in the days before refrigeration.

To make our soda with pleasure and without compromise limits us to a production level of ten to twenty gallons a week. This is sufficient to supply perhaps five or ten households. From this realization, a new (or rather very old) economic model of food production suggests itself.

When Money Reigns Supreme

Anyone who has tried to incorporate all the principles of Nourishing Traditions into their diet will find that it is almost a full-time job. If you want to grind your own flour, bake your own bread, make your own yogurt, your own soaked-and-slow-dried nuts, your own relishes and chutneys, your own bone stock, your own sprouts, your own kombucha and ginger beer… this is more than the typical beleaguered house husband can handle. One wonders how they did it in the old days. The answer is, They didn't! For one thing, before the age of the suburbs and the automobile, extended families lived together in the same house, and as often as not, next door from cousins and uncles. Four people cooking for 16 people is a lot easier than one person cooking for four. Moreover, communities were small and close-knit, and there was probably some degree of specialization and sharing among households.

I don't want to make ginger beer for hundreds of people, most of them strangers, but I would be delighted to make it for a handful of other families whom I know well. Maybe one of them would make fresh-ground slow-rise sourdough bread for me (I never could get that to work). Maybe another would supply me with chutney and fish sauce. Maybe another makes soy sauce. Another brews beer; another wine from their own grapes. Maybe another neighbor has a 30-gallon cauldron for making beef stock; another, a 30-gallon pickling crock. For most traditional foods, the optimum level of production is more than for the nuclear family, but less than what is considered economically viable in today's money economy.

Money can facilitate exchange among friends and neighbors, but in essence money is an anonymous form of energy – almost by its definition as a universal medium of exchange. Among friends and neighbors, the usual laws of market economics do not apply. You don't seek to maximize profit. You don't raise your prices to the maximum just because you can. You are not doing it for the money; you are doing it for your family and for the neighbors. In an economy of reciprocation and social exchange; that is, in an economy that is not primarily a money economy, "economic efficiency" takes on a different meaning.

The more anonymous the customer, the more money stands as the sole motivating force. In today's multi-level, automated, and standardized food production & distribution system, the consumer is almost totally anonymous to the farmer, the commodity buyer, the processing factory, and even the grocer. There is no reason to care about the wholesomeness of the product, except to the extent necessary to conform to whatever regulations are enforced, and whatever the public might find out about. No reason? Oh pardon me, I forgot about altruism. Yes of course, a company might make products better than they need to be out of a abstract altruism, but when the (very real) pressures of market competition come to bear, such altruism quickly degenerates into sloganeering and PR. Some version of "caring about the health of the consumer" surely appears in the mission statements of all the major food c orporations, including the most egregious violators of the public trust. In other words, it is hard to genuinely care about someone you don't even know. Compassion in the abstract is almost always a self-deception. Much more reliable is the goodwill and mutual sense of responsibility that exists among neighbors who are bound together into a community, their good intentions enforced by social pressure and the intimacy of long association.

In many areas of life, social mechanisms of enforcing responsible behavior have atrophied as communities have disintegrated. These have been replaced by legal mechanisms. The old mechanisms of gossip, ostracism, reputation, etc. have lost their power. No matter how much your neighbors dislike you, your money is still good at Wal-Mart. In today's anonymous society, we are little dependent on our communities, which have become mere collections of buildings. More and more, we are connected to our neighbors by proximity only. The increasing legalism and litigiousness of America is a symptom of unraveling communities, weakening connections. On a most basic level, we no longer make food for each other. All phases of food production, from the farm to the kitchen, are increasingly the province of strangers who are paid to do it.

You cannot pay someone to care. You can pay someone to act as if they care; you can pay them to follow meticulous guidelines; but you can't make them really care.

Wholesomeness of food is more than a matter of which methods and processes are used to bring it from soil to table. When caring is codified, the code loses much of its meaning, especially under the influence of powerful corporations. The letter persists while the spirit departs. Many of the best, most conscientious farmers I know eschew the organic certification, because they know that food produced according to the letter of the organic code need not be consonant with the spirit that gave birth to organic farming in the first place.

Toward a More Personal Food Economy

To genuinely return to our "wise traditions" in food, farming, and the healing arts, I believe we must begin to dissociate ourselves from the money economy and return to older models of reciprocity. As with anything, such an effort must start with you, personally, as an individual. For starters, price must not be your primary consideration in making a purchase. The consumer's desire to find the cheapest price is a crucial link in the whole crazy chain. The supermarkets compete on price, their suppliers compete on price; the food processors are compelled to choose lower costs over healthier processes; the farmers are enslaved to commodity markets that compel them to cut raise productivity (measured in dollars) to the maximum just to survive. Commodity markets do not care about the farmer's well-being. They operate according to price, and price alone. If that price means 16-hour days and bare survival for the farmer, so be it. If it means 16-hour days and bankruptcy for the farmer, so be it. The market, in which sentimentality is an obstacle to good business, does not care.

Compassion usually only extends as far as the eye can see. We live, most of us, oblivious to such things as world hunger, deforestation, and toxic waste – oblivious, that is, until it comes a'knocking. Our response to a starving person at the door is different from our response to a starving person in Africa, who we know exists, in theory, but who isn't in our faces. How could we expect consumers, then, to really care about farmers, who are separated by layer after layer of distribution, processing, and packaging? And how could we expect farmers to really care about the wholesomeness and goodness of their food, when the beneficiaries are similarly remote, and when the tangible rewards hinge not on goodness but on cost efficiency?

Social connections, and human contact, are the ally of good intentions. It is easy to participate in an exploitative food system when you cannot see the victims. But it goes against human nature, and rational self-interest, to victimize someone with whom you have a continuing relationship of mutual dependency. In the arena of food, we put it this way: "Social connections and human contact are the ally of good food."

Vast economies of scale are incompatible with personal relationships. What personal relationships can there be when you have 10,000 customers and 200 suppliers (or 10 suppliers employing 200 laborers)? At vast economies of scale, of necessity, standardized specifications replace relationships of trust.

Government regulations governing food quality, toxic ingredients, etc. can only go so far. When food is a primarily a commodity, powerful forces will always be at work to deceive the public for the sake of profit. Usually this deception won't be intentional; it will be the sum total of the economic decisions, wishful thinking, unquestioned habits, and skewed scientific research priorities of food companies, farmers, consumers, and scientists. It is tempting to look for enemies, but the conspiracy we face is one without conspirators. The problem goes deeper than that, to the way we treat food. Certainly new regulations can be beneficial, but it is an uphill battle when food is a commodity.

An alternative path exists: food should not be primarily a commodity. Food is a gift of God's Good Earth, for which all religious traditions teach gratitude. To subject it to the economic regime of the lowest bidder is to desecrate the gift and insult the Giver. For most of human history, the sharing of food was a significant social act, cementing ties between friends and kin, showing welcome to strangers. Today it has become an anonymous act of commerce.

http://www.wildfermentation.com/resources.php?page=economics