In Which Hammer Hits Nailhead

Was going to post this on Facebook (had already posted it on Twitter), but realized that this is the kind of stuff I used to bring here. Back in the old days.

Anyway: I ran across this (via Twitter) this morning and want to make sure as many people as possible see it. The content is delightful and informative.

BUT: the Big Important Point is one that I've hammered at for a long time, and the one that drives all my work: It's a perfect, and I do mean perfect, example of how academics, experts, intellectuals of all kinds (scientists, anthropologists, historians, whatever) can use new media to communicate complex ideas to a wide audience.

Perfection.

Wanna A Little Tease? Read the Introduction to IN MEAT WE TRUST

I just discovered that the entire text of the new book's Introduction is up at Amazon -- which means, hey, I can post it here, too. So, without further ado: The introduction to IN MEAT WE TRUST: AN UNEXPECTED HISTORY OF CARNIVORE AMERICA. (Complete, I might add, with some not-great photos of a few pages of the book.)

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Truly we may be called a carnivorous people,” wrote an anonymous American in 1841, a statement that is as accurate today as it was then. But to that general claim a twenty-first-century observer would likely add a host of caveats and modifiers: Although we Americans eat more meat than almost anyone else in the world, our meat-centric diets are killing us—or not, depending on whose opinion is consulted. Livestock production is bad for the environment—or not. The nation’s slaughterhouses churn out tainted meat and contribute to outbreaks of bacteria-related illnesses. Or not.

title page

The only thing commentators might agree on is this: in the early twenty-first century, battles over the production and consumption of meat are nearly as ferocious as those over, say, gun control and gay marriage. Why is that? Why do food activists want to ban the use of antibiotics, gestation stalls, and confinement in livestock production? Why have livestock producers, whether chicken growers, hog farmers, or cattle ranchers, turned to social media, blogs, and public relations campaigns to defend not just meat but their role in putting it on the nation’s tables? This book answers those questions and more by looking at the history of meat in America.

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The American system of making meat is now, and has long been, spectacularly successful, producing immense quantities of meat at prices that nearly everyone can a afford—in 2011, 92 billion pounds of beef, pork, and poultry (about a quarter of which was exported to other countries). Moreover, measured by the surest sign of efficiency—seamless invisibility—ours is not just the largest but also the most successful meat-making apparatus in the world, so efficient that until recently, the entire infrastructure was like air: invisible. Out of sight, out of mind.

No more. For the past quarter-century, thoughtful critics have challenged the American way of meat. They’ve questioned our seemingly insatiable carnivorous appetite and the price we pay to satisfy it, from pollution of water and air to the dangers of high-speed slaughtering operations; from the industry’s reliance on pharmaceuticals to the use of land to raise food for animals rather than humans. In response, meat producers have reduced their use of antibiotics and other drugs; have abandoned cost- cutting products like Lean Finely Textured Beef (“pink slime”); have taken chickens out of cages and pregnant sows out of tiny gestation stalls. Men and women around the country have committed themselves to raising livestock and making meat in ways that hearken back to the pre-factory era. This book examines how we got from there to here.

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In recent years, books about food in general and meat in particular have abounded and in sufficient variety to suit every political palate. Few of them, however, examine the historical underpinnings of our food system. That’s particularly true of ones that focus on meat. Most are critical of the American way of meat and assert an explanation of our carnivorous culture and its flaws that goes (briefly) like this:

Back in the old days, farm families raised a mixture of live- stock and crops, and their hogs, cattle, and chickens grazed freely, eating natural diets. That Elysian idyll ended in the mid- to late twentieth century when corporations barged in and converted rural America into an industrial handmaiden of agribusiness. The corporate farmers moved livestock off pasture and into what is called confinement: from birth to death, animals are penned in large feedlots or small crates, often spending their entire lives indoors and on concrete, forced to eat diets rich in hormones and antibiotics. Eventually these cattle, hogs, and chickens, diseased and infested with bacteria, end up at the nation’s slaughterhouses (also controlled by agribusiness), where poorly paid employees (many of them illegal immigrants) working in dangerous conditions transform live animals into meat products. Agribusiness profits; the losers are family farmers who can’t compete with Big Ag’s ruthless devotion to profit, and consumers who are doomed to diets of tainted, tasteless beef, pork, and chicken.

TOC

I respect the critics and share their desire for change. But I disagree both with their explanation of how we got to where we are and with their reliance on vague assertions as a justification for social change, no matter how well intended — especially when many of those assertions lack substance and accuracy. Consider, for example, this counter narrative, which is rooted in historical fact:

The number of livestock farmers has declined significantly in the last seventy or so years, but many people abandoned livestock production for reasons that had nothing to do with agribusiness. From the 1940s on, agriculture suffered chronic labor shortages as millions of men and women left rural America for the advantages of city life. Those who stayed on the land embraced factorylike, confinement-based livestock production because doing so enabled them to maximize their output and their profits even as labor supplies dwindled. Confinement livestock systems were born on the family farm and only subsequently adopted by corporate producers in the 1970s.

We may not agree with the decisions that led to that state of affairs, and there’s good reason to abhor the consequences, but on one point we can surely agree: real people made real choices based on what was best for themselves and their families.

Make no mistake: the history of meat in America has been shaped by corporate players like Gustavus Swift, Christian gentleman and meat- packing titan, and good ol’ Arkansas boy Don Tyson, a chicken “farmer” who built one of the largest food-making companies in the world. But that history also includes millions of anonymous Americans living in both town and country who, over many generations, shaped a meat-supply system designed to accommodate urban populations, dwindling supplies of farmland, and, most important, consumers who insisted that farmers and meatpackers provide them with high-quality, low-cost meat.

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The tale chronicled here ranges from the crucial, formative colonial era to the early twenty-first century, although the bulk of the narrative focuses on the second half of the twentieth century. It answers important questions about meat’s role in our society. How did the colonial experience shape American attitudes to- ward meat? Why did Americans move the business of butchering out of small urban shops into immense, factorylike slaughter- houses? Why do Americans now eat so much chicken, and why, for many decades, did they eat so little? Why a factory model of farming? When and why did manure lagoons, feedlots, and antibiotics become tools for raising livestock? What is integrated livestock production and why should we care? Why is ours a “carnivore nation”? My hope is that this historical context will enrich the debate over the future of meat in America.

My many years engrossed in a study of meat’s American history led me to a surprising conclusion: meat is the culinary equivalent of gasoline. Think about what happens whenever gas prices rise above a vaguely defined “acceptable” level: we blame greedy corporations and imagine a future of apocalyptic poverty in which we’ll be unable to afford new TV sets or that pair of shoes we crave; instead, we’ll be forced to spend every dime (or so it seems) to fill the tank.  But we pay up, cursing corporate greed as the pump’s ticker clicks away our hard-earned dollars. Then the price drops a few cents our routine, half-mile, gas-powered jaunts are once again affordable; and we rejoice. And because it’s so easy to blame corporations, few of us contemplate the morality and wisdom of using a car to travel a half-mile to pick up one item at a grocery store, which is what most of us do when gas prices are low.

So it is with meat. Most of us rarely think about it. After all, grocery store freezer and refrigerator cases are stuffed with it; burger- and chicken-centric restaurants abound; and nearly everyone can afford to eat meat whenever they want to. But when meat’s price rises above a (vaguely defined) acceptable level, tempers flare and consumers blame rich farmers, richer corporations, or government subsidy programs. We’re Americans, after all, and we’re entitled to meat. So we either pay up or stretch a pound of burger with rice or pasta (often by using an expensive processed product). Eventually the price of steak and bacon drops, and back to the meat counter we go with nary a thought about changing our diets or, more important, about the true cost of meat, the one that bar-coded price stickers don’t show.

Intro

That sense of entitlement is a crucial element of the history of meat in America. Price hikes as small as a penny a pound have inspired Americans to riot, trash butcher shops, and launch national meat boycotts. We Americans want what we want, but we rarely ponder the actual price or the irrationality of our desires. We demand cheap hamburger, but we don’t want the factory farms that make it possible. We want four-bedroom McMansions out in the semirural suburban fringe, but we raise hell when we sniff the presence of the nearby hog farm that provides affordable bacon. We want packages of precooked chicken and microwaveable sausages—and family farms too.

After years of working on this book, I’m convinced that we can’t have it all. But I also believe that if we understand that the past is different from the present, the future is ours to shape. My hope is that this book will help all of us understand how we got to where we are so that, if we are willing, we can imagine a different future and write a new history of meat in America.

Smithfield and Shuanghui: Yes, Please --- And A Bit of History, Too

The proposed sale of Smithfield Foods Inc. to China-based Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd. marks a great leap toward the end of the world as we know it. Or so some would have us believe. Public interest groups Food and Water Watch and the Center for Food Safety, for example, fear that the deal will endanger the quality and safety of American meats. Their argument is that Shuanghui will apply its inferior quality control to our food chain. Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley’s worry list is longer: The deal may affect national security. It will lead to higher prices for consumers and lower ones for hog farmers. Americans will end up eating pork made in China.

There’s no way to predict how the sale will affect farmers (except that demand for hogs will surely increase), but this much is clear: It’s unlikely that the quality of our meats will decline or that we’ll be buying hot dogs and pork chops that carry labels reading “Made In China.”

That’s because Shuanghui chairman Wan Long isn’t interested in supplying food to Americans, let alone applying Chinese quality control standards to his acquisition. His concerns are precisely the opposite: He’s interested in feeding Chinese consumers, not American ones, and in particular, he wants to feed China’s urban population.

Indeed, the key to understanding this “takeover” lies in China’s rapidly growing cities, about which more in a moment. But Mr. Wan knows that Chinese hog farmers can meet demand only by reinventing the way they raise livestock and by improving the quality of the hogs they sell. To do that, Shuanghui International needs expertise of a sort that no one in China’s agricultural and food processing sector has.

So Wan is buying it. And who better to buy it from than the people who created and operate the world’s most efficient meat supply system?

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The American way of making meat offers a way to supply high quality, safe, low-cost protein to billions of people who don’t live on farms. That’s a crucial point, and one best understood by looking at this acquisition from a historical perspective. (See? I can’t avoid it!)

Americans began building a “modern” meat-making system just over a century ago at a moment when they confronted precisely the problem that the Chinese face now: an imbalance between rural and urban populations. In the 1860s, only about a quarter of Americans lived in cities; by 1920, more than half did. Today, about 80 percent of us live in an urban place.

Why does that matter? Here’s a fact about urbanites that is so obvious that most of us overlook it: city folks don’t grow their own food. Instead, they rely on farmers, the very people whose numbers drop even as more people depend on their output.

In 1860, for example, about 60 percent of Americans were farmers, making food for themselves, for the 25 percent of the population that lived in cities, and for shipment abroad. By 1920, fewer than 30 percent of Americans lived or worked on a farm, but more than half the population lived in a city. Today nearly all of us live in an urban place, but less than two percent of us work as farmers. (Most of the twenty percent who don’t live in an “urban” place reside in unincorporated areas or in towns with populations of less than 2,500.)

Put another way, two percent of Americans make food for 98 percent. We don’t notice that imbalance because we enjoy an extraordinarily efficient food supply system; in the U. S., food is everywhere we want to be.

That abundance and seamless efficiency didn’t happen overnight. Building our food system required decades of entrepreneurship, inventive creativity, and legal tinkering (including, it’s worth noting, the construction of agricultural “subsidies” that allow farmers to enjoy standard of living “parity” with urbanites).

Between 1900 and 1910, for example, urban growth outpaced agricultural technology and farmers struggled to keep up with demand. That gap between supply and demand produced predictable results: high food prices. (The phrase “high cost of living” entered the lexicon during those years as escalating food costs provoked head-scratching on the part of economists, and food riots on the part of angry urbanites.)

Farmers and others, including economists, scientists, and government officials, scrutinized the agricultural sector, trying to figure out how to increase its efficiency and thus its yields. Over the next century, they devised new technologies and techniques to do so: Tractors and other tools, hybrid crops, commercially manufactured livestock feeds, fertilizers, and herbicides and pesticides. “Integrated” management systems that coordinated the production and transfer of foodstuffs from farm to factory to grocer to consumer. Genetics research to improve livestock carcass yield.

The making of meat in particular was transformed into a well-oiled machine that required relatively little land (urban growth drove up land prices) or labor (as more Americans opted to live in cities, farmers faced chronic labor shortages). The quality and, yes, the safety of meats increased even as their prices dropped.

Today many Americans are critical of the way farmers raise livestock and meatpackers process beef, pork, and poultry. It’s true that so-called industrial livestock production operations can and do generate pollution, aren’t particularly pleasant neighbors, and rely on a form of organization that echoes that of a factory. It’s true, too, that packing plants move at rapid speeds and rely on unskilled labor.

But Americans adopted and promoted these methods of livestock production and meat processing in order to ensure abundant supplies of low-cost meat for an urban society. They aren’t perfect, but they place minimal demands on land and labor.

But hyper-efficient agricultural production and food processing do more than feed urbanites. Those are also the cornerstones of a "consumer economy," which is the kind of economy we have here in the United States. (*1) Consumer economies are based on the making, selling, and buying of non-essentials --- think cars and cosmetics, shoes designed for style rather than function, iPads and televisions.

The cornerstone of a consumer economy is disposable incomes; citizens must have money to spend on non-essentials. One way to ensure that consumers consume is with credit. In the 1920s in the U. S., for example, General Motors created the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) to provide low-interest loans so that Americans could purchase cars.

But a crucial factor in sustaining a consumer economy is low-cost food. The less money people must spend on food, the more they can spend on video games, books, and cell phones. How to get cheap food? By devising hyper-efficient methods of food production and processing. (*2)

*  *  *

Back to China, a nation whose urban population has grown at a remarkable pace. In 1970, 83 percent of Chinese lived in rural areas working as farmers who fed themselves and the 17 percent that lived in cities. Today, however, 51 percent of Chinese live in cities. The agricultural 49 percent, many of whom rely on methods that haven’t changed in centuries, struggle to keep pace with demand.

And more urban stomachs are on the way: The Chinese government has laid plans to move some 21 million people a year off of farms and into cities. (For a recent in-depth story about this plan, see this piece in the New York Times.) One consultancy group predicts that by 2025, 65 percent of China’s population will live in a city.

The rationale for this plan? The Chinese government has decided, for better or for worse, that its future lies in building a “consumer” economy.

The campaign to depopulate the countryside is seen as the best way to maintain China’s spectacular run of fast economic growth, with new city dwellers driving demand for decades to come.

“An objective rule in the process of modernization,” [said one Chinese official] “is we have to complete the process of urbanization and industrialization.” (both quotes from New York Times)

But this plan will only work if all those newly arrived city folks have money to spend (and so far, that part’s not working too well). One way to increased the “supply” of disposable income is --- you guessed --- by ensuring an abundance of cheap food.

And so, as Americans did a century ago, the Chinese must figure out how to match agricultural output by ever fewer farmers to ever-growing urban demand. They must improve not just agricultural efficiency but quality control, too. (There’s ample evidence that many of the food nightmares that have unfolded in China in recent years are due primarily to farmers scrambling to keep up with demand using technologies and skills that aren’t up to the task.)

And that is why Shuanghui wants Smithfield. Like other American meat processors, Smithfield is an old hand at feeding urbanites, but it’s also a master at coordinating farm, food processor, and consumer demand. Smithfield, like other American livestock- and meat-supply operations, operates an “integrated” production process, organizing high tech hog breeding, farrowing, and feeding operations at one end, streamlined packaging and distributing systems at the other, with as-automated-as-possible slaughtering and packing operations linking those two pieces.

That’s what Shuanghui is buying: Smithfield’s managerial, technical, agricultural, and scientific expertise.

Neither Wan Long nor China’s leaders are fools. They know that, historically, when the human beings have no food, political unrest follows. The Chinese must resolve their farm-city food equation; it’s in the world’s best interest that they do so.

If that requires the Chinese to buy American expertise, please: have at it! Better that than political turmoil that will make the events of 1949 or the Cultural Revolution look like small potatoes indeed. Only this time, every person on the planet will be dragged into the chaos. If the sale of Smithfield can help prevent that, more power to it and to Shuanghui International.

But at a time when American agriculture is under attack from Pollanist reformers, and many people crusade to transform modern livestock production into a pastoral, but antiquated, idyll, the Smithfield sale reminds us of the benefits of our meat supply system. If we turn our backs on it, we may not like the return to the past that our future will become.

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*1: Americans began shifting to a consumer economy about a century ago. The project gained impetus during the Great Depression of the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal aimed at “priming the pump”: putting money into Americans’ pockets so that they could buy stuff and thus generate employment.

But Americans began the transition to a consumer economy only after they’d successfully built a “producer” economy: During the nineteenth century, Americans focused on building transportation infrastructure as well as factories for the manufacture of goods that furthered industrial development: rail ties and sewer pipes, machine tools and steam engines. By the end of the nineteenth century, that foundational structure was in place and they shifted their attention to manufacturing consumer goods --- radios, clothing, cosmetics, and cars. Americans bought such goods prior to twentieth century, of course, and they continued to invest in and manufacture producer goods after consumer consumer gained supremacy. But in the twentieth century, the economy revolved around making and getting (relatively) unnecessary “stuff.”

*2: Getting to “cheap food” isn’t as easy as it sounds because it requires a society to overcome the “paradox of plenty”: When food is abundant and supplies are greater than demand, consumers enjoy low prices, but food producers --- farmers --- earn little profit. If the reverse is true and demand outstrips supply, food prices rise. Farmers profit, but consumers howl.

Thus the fundamental contradiction of a consumer economy: the paradox of plenty (or, as farmers call it, the pain of plenty). Urbanites demand that farmers produce an abundance of foodstuffs. But if farmers comply, they earn little profit and so either can’t or won’t produce more. And so the consumer economy has grown hand-in-hand with one of the great balancing acts of American politics: the need to guarantee cheap food on one hand and income parity for farmers on the other, a need that spawned the programs and policies known collectively as “farm subsidies.” This balancing act was and still is complicated by the fact that most Americans live in cities and don’t produce their own food.

United Nations Building As Booze-Free Zone?

This in the NYT about booze, diplomacy, UN. And history (although the reporter didn't mention that last).

. . . there is still a sort of residual 1950s, 1960s feel to the culture,” said Mr. Gowan, whose father was a diplomat. “You do sort of feel that you are sort of stuck in the past.”

I'd be sad to see this alcohol culture change. (*1) Seems more useful and fitting to sustain the Post-World-War-II spirit living in those hallways and meeting rooms.

History matters. It can saturate a space and make it live in ways that we otherwise might not notice.

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*1: A fix? Introduce new and interesting beer and spirits --- and hey! --- Global diplomacy, rejuvenated. And for pennies relative to billions.

When It Comes to Craft Beer, Can We Get Over the "Local" Bullshit?

People, can we get over the “local” beer crap?  Please. What follows is an out-and-out, in-your-face rant. You’re welcome to ignore. I won’t be offended. (And if you’re not connected to or interested in the craft beer business or community, none of it will make sense. So you should ignore it. Please. Go have a good beer!) 

As my beer readers likely know, Sam Adams (Boston Beer Company) is launching New Albion Ale, a re-creation of the first microbeer in the US from the first microbrewer, Jack McAuliffe. BBC/SA is using Jack’s recipe and Jack supervised the creation of the beer. Sam Adams/BBC won’t make any profit on this project; all of that goes to Jack.

Today, someone at Facebook posted a link to a video from Boston Beer Company about the New Albion launch. And someone posted a comment saying, in effect, too bad the project wasn’t being carried out by a “local” brewer.

To which my initial reaction was: What the fuck?

My second reaction: What the hell is LOCAL? New Albion closed its doors 30 years ago. What, precisely, is “local” for a defunct brewery?

My third reaction: What the HELL difference does “local” make? If you’re gonna get bent out of shape about “local,” then you need to stop drinking Sierra Nevada, Stone, New Belgium, Left Hand, and about fifty zillion (okay, I exaggerate) other craft beers.

Because many craft brewers distribute their beers regionally, nationally, and, yes, even internationally. If that means their beers are no longer politically, craft-ily correct enough for you, well --- you've got a problem I'm glad I don't have.

My fourth reaction was: For fuck’s sake, how do you think a “local” brewery could pay for the project undertaken by Boston Beer Company? Where would a tiny local brewery find the money to make the beer, let alone advertise this project?

My fifth reaction was: Get the fuck over this “local” shit and the idea that the only “real” craft beers are based on an equation based on a combination of location and size, a combination that apparently ignores the significant factor of quality.Now that I’ve finished ranting (although no, I’ve not exhausted my extensive vocabulary of profanities), let me run a few facts past you:

Fact one: Many years ago, Jim Koch, the founder and president of BBC, and a craft brewing pioneer (albeit a controversial one) noticed that the trademark for New Albion was about to expire. So he grabbed it. Why? Because he didn’t want some bozo to start making “New Albion” beer as if it had some actual connection with the original New Albion craft brewery. (*1)  Jim cares about history.

Jim’s held the trademark all these years. He likely wouldn’t have done anything other than protect it, had it not been for my book. That’s not arrogance; it’s a fact. For all intents and purposes, until my book came out, no one in the craft beer biz knew where he was or why he mattered. Now they do, and he’s been honored by the craft beer community since then.

Fast forward to 2012: Jim Koch decided one way to honor Jack's contribution to craft beer was by releasing Jack’s original beer. The official announcement came at this year’s Great American Beer Festival in October. The beer launches in January.

Here’s another fact: No one in craft brewing has done more to turn ordinary beer drinkers --- and whether you like it or not, that’s the biggest group of beer drinkers in the U. S. --- on to good beer than Jim Koch. No one. His beers function as “gateway” beers, just as Starbucks functions as “gateway” coffee that eventually draws people to the little indie coffeeshop down the street.And when he’s not busy dishing out gateway beers, Jim makes imaginative, high quality beers for the geeks.

Here’s another fact: Several years ago, there was a serious hops shortage in the U. S. Jim had enough hops on hand for his own needs, so he offered up what he had left to those who needed some. Did he do this because he truly cared about his industry. Yes, I believe he did. Was this good PR? Of course! He’s in the business of making money, just like every other craft beer, including your sweet little local guy down the street.

But being a good businessman is not incompatible with having a heart and soul.Is Jim Koch a “big” brewer? Depends. As he says, compared to, say, Anheuser-Busch, he’s a pygmy. Compared to your “local” beermaker down the street, however, Jim’s “big.”

Why does that matter?

What’s the connection between size and “local” and those intangible traits of “quality” or “heart” or “soul”?If you care about good beer, or “independent” businesses, or businesses with heart and soul, then “local” is irrelevant.

As it happens, my ire coincides with an unrelated recent spate of news articles about “craft” versus “crafty.” If you’ve missed this kerfuffle, you can learn about it by googling (or Binging or DuckDucking or whatever search engine you use). (*2) As far as I’m concerned, it’s all marketing smoke and mirrors (as my friend Jim Koch once put it). (*3)

This business of “my beer is holier than yours” is counter-productive and irrational.You want to drink good beer in the United States? No problem. There’s LOTS of it around. Even in the small town in central Iowa where I live, thanks to the good beer makers who’ve decided to make their beers available regionally and nationally.

Do I care if it’s “local”? No. What I care is that these several thousand small, family-owned businesses are making good products in a sustainable business model that aims to do good, not evil.

If you don’t like it, well, alrighty. Don’t drink any New Albion Ale when it comes out. Stick to your “local” beers. Me? I’ll enjoy all kinds of wonderful beers. Because I can and because so many men and women in the craft beer community (emphasis on “community”) understand that the virtues of quality need not be constrained by location. __________

*1: Think Schlitz, PBR, etc. as beer brands now owned by holding companies and beers that having nothing to do with anything other than marketing.

*2: The most painful commentary about it came from Schell in New Ulm, Minnesota. They’re no longer “pure” enough to be with the craft beer gang. Go read the piece for yourself. I  got weepy. I’ve met the people at Schell. They’ve been here making beer longer than I’ve been alive; much longer.

*3: Indeed, it’s literally marketing. The Brewers Association has hired a “real” public relations firm which, as near as I can tell, is quite good at its job. This “controversy” about craft versus crafty is a) manufactured; and b) doing a great job of drawing attention to craft beer.

Building "Community": How to Do It?

I posted my previous ramble  about "community" and Newtown to Facebook and a good friend who read the post asked the obvious question: How, precisely, are we to build community? 

Or, as she put it:

I agree with what you are saying but the pragmatist in me asks "how do we do this?" and "what does it look like?" It seems all Americans would agree that we want a safe (safe from internal and external foes) country that cherishes its children and provides a physically, mentally and spiritually good place for them to thrive. But, it seems the trouble begins when we decide how to get there. Someone will demand gun control, someone else will say we have the right to bear arms and protect our families....you get my drift. I guess it boils down to: "how do we put our differences aside to reach a common goal?"

Excellent questions. And here is one answer, specifically related to the "food" activists that I mentioned in that post. (As in my previous post, I'm grossly simplifying all of this to keep it short.) Their idea was to create structures where people could engage and connect, and over time, those structures and interactions would forge "community." They proposed using food, the one thing all all we humans have in common, as a device for linking people to each other and to "place."

Indeed, the idea of "place" was crucial: They started from the idea (which you may or may not agree with) that the food system had become "corporatized" and "globalized." As a result, most Americans didn't know where their food came from, even at the most obvious and direct level. Most Americans, for example, know zero about farmers and farming.

So activists began building an "alternative" food system, one based on regional and local production whenever possible (the idea was to make communities food self-sufficient, to ensure "food security").

The plan was that consumers and farmers would become more connected. People would feel closer to the land and care more about it and about the impact of agriculture on the environment, and become more aware of how and where food is made. In the process, people would feel a stronger sense of "community."

Again, that's a gross simplification of a complicated project. But the main point is this: activists and reformers didn't want to wait for legislation. After all, we can't "legislate" community or civic-mindedness, right? So their view was to start from the ground, no pun intended, and create at the most local level, a sense of connectedness.

It was and is an ambitious project, but it's borne fruit (again, no pun intended): if you buy food from a farmers' market, you're enjoying the benefits of this larger project. If you've decided to support local farmers, or to avoid milk or meat with hormones or from "factory" farms, you're supporting this project.

And --- I'm guessing that you feel ever so slightly more aware of not just your food, but where it comes from. And perhaps more aware, too, of your "community."

So: these community builders were pragmatic. (*1) They couldn't force community down people's throats. But they believed that the world would be a better place if more people felt more connected to each other, and they set out to build structures that would lead to that goal. Hence: various food-related, community-building projects.

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*1: You've never know if from reading some of the papers and essays in which various people worked out this set of ideas. Much of its is freighted in jargon that I want to throw myself out the nearest window. The good news, however, is that the theorists had students who then went out into the real world and started building "community."