"Perilous Bounty" by Tom Philpott

Perilous Bounty, published August, 2020

The problems of agriculture in American society have been made worse by the pandemic and by policies of the current (outgoing!) administration in Washington. Agricultural and food industry labor, notably that of slaughterhouse workers, has been put at risk of infection by conditions in the places they work. Trade wars have jeopardized markets for international sale of grain and meat products. Meanwhile, existing problems with water and soil resources and climate change are becoming more and more critical.

The book Perilous Bounty by Tom Philpott surveys the pre-coronavirus problems, with a concentration on produce growers in California and meat producers and grain farmers in Iowa. The author predicts a number of possible disasters -- but I think the predictions don't even fully take account of accelerating climate change, and of course not knowing what the pandemic would bring. He paints a very depressing picture!

Rather than write a detailed review of the book, I offer you a few quotations that meant the most to me, reinforcing the way I think about the challenges of being a decent human being and also a buyer and consumer of food.

About farm and food-processing labor:

"There’s also the crucial question of what industrial agriculture does to the workers it relies on and to the people who live within its proximity. Toxic water, fouled air, low wages, horrible working conditions, the withering away of public services— these facts of life in our industrial agriculture zones are signals of a food system gone rancid. With a few exceptions, like the annual agrichemical-fed algae bloom that blots out life in the Gulf of Mexico, their harms tend to fall most heavily on the people who live nearby, allowing most Americans the privilege of enjoying burgers and salad without thinking about, say, entire towns that are forced to buy bottled water to avoid being poisoned." (pp. 8-9). 

"Once a largely unionized middle-class profession, slaughterhouse work has emerged as low-paid and startlingly dangerous work. Drawing an average hourly wage of $ 13.38, meatpacking workers incur injury and illness at 2.5 times the national average. The prevalence of repetitive-motion conditions among laborers is nearly seven times that of other private industries. Much has to do with the speed at which they work: hog carcasses weighing as much as 270 pounds come at workers at an average rate of 977 per hour, or about 16 per minute. It’s no wonder that refugees fleeing political violence have emerged as an important labor source for the industry." (p. 94). 

About the growth of farm-to-table sales: 

"Despite the farmers market revolution of the past quarter century, the larger food system still exists to transfer cheap meat and corn and soybean derivatives from the Midwest, supplemented with mass-produced vegetables shipped in from California and other countries, into our bodies." (p. 179)

"For those who do dare to look, the response is often to opt out— to 'eat local,' to shop at the farmers market. While that choice is perfectly rational, and has led to an impressive boom in local and regional food sales since the mid-1990s, it has done little to slow the intensification or ecological degradation of industrial agriculture." (p. 7)

Since the author's research was completed around a year ago, many things have become worse, such as continuing drought and fires in California. Severe weather events in the midwest last summer also created havoc for farmers, especially the Iowa derecho, that is, the severe and enormous windstorm, in August, 2020. Coincidently it occurred the same week as the publication of the book. See "Iowa derecho in August was most costly thunderstorm disaster in U.S. history: NOAA estimates damage at $7.5 billion, higher than many hurricanes." in the Washington Post, October 17, 2020.

In reading Perilous Bounty, I learned a great deal about the risks to the whole agricultural endeavor that feeds us. Who knew that a giant flood was a possibility in drought-plagued California? Such floods happen around every 200 years; and the last one was in the 1850s. They are a consequence of some freaky trans-pacific oceanic build up of moisture, and damage from one would be worse than an earthquake! Who knew that the soil in Iowa was deteriorating so fast that heroic measures with fertilizer and other chemicals can hardly keep up? I thought I knew a lot about Monsanto and their hideous deceptions about pesticides, fertilizers, modified crops, and other risks to human life, but Philpott presented many new twists to the ugly story. It's a painful book to read, despite the interesting description of a few farmers who are experimenting with better ways to preserve their way of life.

Follow up: see the next post for more quotes from Perilous Bounty: https://maefood.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-wry-baker.html

Review by mae sander © 2020.