Locavorism might be the sexiest trend of the decade, and Wendell Berry is its prophet. His sharp criticisms of agriculture and food politics are only the leading edge of a growing dissatisfaction with how we relate to one another in the progressively enormous systems within which we have embedded—some would say compromised—our humanity.

But this angry opposition is often mystifying to the politically and economically orthodox. Why would anyone resist the production of more food in a hungry world, or turn against the clear social and political advantages of modern systems and technology? Questions of humanity and justice in a globalized world seem at loggerheads, and rarely do the two sides meet.

Two recent books are helpful to Christians who want to get their heads around this debate. Food policy expert Robert Paarlberg, professor of political science at Wellesley and associate at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, authored Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know. It's full of measured, carefully researched answers to food policy catfights, from "What causes famine?" to "Was the green revolution bad for the environment?" to "Is the food industry to blame for the way we eat?" By contrast, in What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, America's prophetic voice in the wilderness—Wendell Berry—takes the deep view on what he sees as the endemic crisis in modern agriculture and economy.

The two books are studies in opposites: the one detached and dispassionate, the other fiery and poetic. Wendell Berry waxes long on our failures while Robert Paarlberg tries to build on our successes. Reading one against the other gives us a way to think—broadly and deeply—about food and, maybe, might also finally bring some political balance to the dinner table.

Three cheers for the modern food system

RJ: A measured voice in the midst of a veritable orgy of anti-agribusiness activism, Robert Paarlberg's Food Politics gives us reason to reconsider trendy criticisms of the modern food system. The story he sets out is simple enough. Today human beings enjoy a vast amount of food choices, unprecedented leisure, and even longer life spans. So while justly critical of trade subsidies and agribusiness monopolies, Paarlberg argues that, on the whole, the modern food system has done more good than harm. The suggestions he makes are reformations, not revolutions in agricultural and economic policy. Paarlberg's steady, factual assessment gives at least three cheers for the modern food system that provides us the privilege of turning up our noses at mass production.

First, some forget that before Michelle Obama planted her token locavore garden on the White House lawn, Eleanor Roosevelt did the same in 1943, planting a Victory Garden—less cultural savvy, more wartime necessity. Just a century ago, hunger was widespread in the United States, and Americans spent an average of 41 percent of personal income on food (compared to 12 percent today). During the Depression and leading into the war, thousands of Americans died from nutrition deficiencies. In 1938, 20 percent of preschool children in America had rickets (vitamin D deficiency).

Today, only 0.5 percent of American households experience chronic hunger. Yes: the opposite extreme—obesity—is a blight on developed countries. But its widespread existence suggests that our food systems have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of our forebears. Famine in the developed north has also been almost completely contained by the mobility and extension of food production. In most of the rest of the world, famine results more from geopolitical instability and under-developed food infrastructure than actual harvest failure. The world produces enough food to feed itself, in large thanks to innovations in agriculture funded by the scale of agribusiness. The almost complete and astonishing defeat of domestic hunger and famine is one resounding victory for our food systems.

A second cheer: The so-called "green revolution," precision farming, and genetically modified foods—and the accompanying extraordinary rise in food production—are all cause for gratitude. Yes: all farming causes environmental damage. But, as Paarlberg points out, the only thing more damaging than introducing high-yield seeds is not introducing them at all. For instance, in 1964, India produced 12 million tons of wheat on 14 million hectares of land. Thirty years later, using green revolution technology, India produced 57 million tons of wheat on 24 million hectares of land. To match that production using old seeds and organic methods would require putting another 36 million hectares under plough. A halt on deforestation alone, especially in equatorial soil-poor regions, makes this a success worth celebrating.

By contrast, organic, local, labor-intensive methods produce far less. While this may seem unimportant to the well-fed North American, it is a deadly serious matter in many other places. In fact, most smallholder farms in Africa practice something suspiciously close to pure organic methods: traditional seeds, polyculture crop planting, and harvest rainfall, all with no nitrogen fertilizer or pesticides. The results are dismal: crop yields are 10-20 percent of those in North America, and one-third of the population is undernourished. Given these realities, Paarlberg says, it is no longer possible to feed the world with farming systems that exclude the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

A third reason to celebrate modern food systems, then, is that they provide real weapons to combat hunger and poverty. According to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, 62 percent of the world's truly undernourished people are small farmers or rural landless laborers in either Africa or South Asia. We now know how to fix this: improved roads, modern seeds, inexpensive fertilizer, electrical power, schools, and clinics. Food production in Africa is far less than it could be. African farmers use almost no fertilizer (one tenth as much as Europeans); only four percent of their cropland is irrigated, and most of the cropped area in Africa is not planted with seeds improved through scientific plant breeding. Consequently, average cereal crop yields per hectare in Africa are about one-fifth as high as in the developed world.

Yet anti-agribusiness activists still yearn (some knowingly, some not) to turn back the clock to the family farm—a move which would cripple global food production and unleash famine on millions of the world's most vulnerable. Banning green revolution technologies would keep those subsistence agricultural economies in a state of stagnation, condemning continents like Africa to malnourishment and perpetual unrest. The great danger is not that international agribusiness will infiltrate and control poor farmers in the developing world, but rather that it will continue to ignore them.

An overfed economy has the luxury of demanding local, high-quality, fresh produce, along with the labor and cost-intensive methods that sustain it. But the rest of our hungry planet begs us to be rid of such infantile nostalgia when we go abroad. Such nostalgia is a kind of innocence—but not a harmless innocence, unhappily, for by elevating smug agrarian moralism above systemic reformation, we betray our social and political inheritance. The problem may well be in the system, but so are an awful lot of hard-won successes. Those successes deserve extension, cultivation—and at least three cheers.

Systems behaving badly

AW: The most prominent of the agrarians—Wendell Berry—has staked his lengthy career as a sort of literary prophet on a simple premise: we humans cannot properly care for and dwell within the world, cannot live well, without knowing our creaturely limits. Those limits are dictated by the shape of creation, and so, as he says, "in ordering the economy of a household or community or nation … nature [comes] first, the economies of land use second, the manufacturing economy third, and the consumer economy fourth." Nearly all of Berry's work—from stories about a fictional community in Port William, Kentucky, to his poetry about marriage to his fiery eviscerations of modernity—begins here.

So the essays in What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth are a natural extension of this, a collection of his thought on economics, farming, agribusiness, place, and local communities from the mid-1980s to today. At his best, Berry begs us to take a step back from the numbers, to peer intently at the contours of our economy and make sure we understand what we're doing before we go mucking about in its innards. We ought not blindly and thoughtlessly accept the systems wrought by modernity—farming, agriculture, and distribution systems included.

Our economy, he says, inverts the proper order of things: We make the consumer king, and turn nature into merely a "resource" to be used at the whim of consumers, who demand what they want and say what price they're willing to pay. If the American consumer demands pineapples in winter, then we'll find a way to get them, and at the cheapest cost imaginable. More insidious still is the attitude this encourages; as Berry says, "The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness."

Here is where Berry finds danger in modern food systems: They may have brought us good, and one can easily make the argument that the green revolution and synthetic fertilizers are necessary in the developing world—the facts, as laid out by Paarlberg, are clear on this point. But the same systems that bring justice to hungry people also can impoverish cultures by driving people away from local communities, first in pursuit of livelihood and then, often, in the belief that the key to happiness is maximized profit, which cannot be found on the family farm. Generations therefore quickly lose their connection to the place and purpose into which they are born—and this, Berry argues, destroys local cultures and the country they make up.

So we must redefine our expectations about what a renewed economy would look like before we set about fixing it, before we too blindly praise the systems that keep it running. We need to know what an economy is for—and the difference between our limited human economies and the "greater economy" of creation, which Berry expounds upon in the best essay in the book, "The Two Economies"—before we know how to properly order (or re-order) ours.

Berry's antidote to an overconfident economy is one based in largely self-sustaining communities: not trendily full of yuppie-run coffeeshops and independent bookstores (though those will probably be there, too), but certainly with Community Supported Agriculture groups (CSAS) and farmers' markets run not by conglomerates, but by neighbors.

Given Berry's deep-seated dislike of cities, it's more than a little ironic that those communities are most rapidly cropping up in global mega-cities, such as New York and London. This highlights the problem with Berry's arguments, which surface for anyone who tries to take his principles and apply them to real-life circumstances: he fuses his call to take human relationships seriously with a thinly veiled nostalgia for the way things used to be. But the two are not equal, and to claim so is ignorant and sentimental. Furthermore, many of Berry's readers simply don't—or can't—live in a rooted community, because that community no longer exists for them. This is why his poetry (and to some degree, his fiction, in its less didactic moments) can ultimately teach us more than his prose. Poetry alludes where prose can merely preach.

Of course, the sort of commercialized locavorism that capitalizes on environmental consciousness to sell products can be just as odious as obscuring sources of food so as to convince ourselves of our limitlessness. Yet the two extremes do not negate the truth: without the prophetic voice of Berry calling us to open our eyes and pay attention, we risk missing the forest for the trees, mistaking the gains of the system for the whole story.

God save the system: scalable justice in a globalized world

RJ: It's important to read Wendell Berry not merely as a critic of economics, but as a critic of modernity itself. He sees agriculture and the economy as case studies in what inevitably goes wrong when human beings embed their relationships in modern systems and processes. He is not simply critical of agribusiness, but of any kind of compromise between the local and the impersonal, of any process or system which shifts and decenters agency and responsibility.

This is part of what makes Berry unique. His poetic vitriol defies easy demarcations of right and left in American life and, for that reason, he earns a certain following among highly educated (if disenchanted) élites. His voice is both timely and important. Systems do behave badly. The adoption of modern technology in our lives is no simple genuflection to progress. It has real, and at times unforeseen, consequences that demand sharp, consistent, and informed criticism. Yes, we urgently need persistent vigilance and reform. What we don't need is a revolution.

Berry's policy proposals nestled in What Matters? are written in prophetic bullet points, as though policy wonks need only tolle lege. But this armchair policy quarterbacking is riddled with controversial pronouncements and completely unburdened by the actual practice of politics. Berry himself would be unfazed by this criticism. He would assume the very impracticality of his proposals is evidence that the system is irredeemably corrupt. But could it be, instead, that Berry's policy proposals are simply bad? Maybe he's got the right principles, but his implementation is too cynical, too uncharitable, and too isolationist. And this gets to the heart of it; what Berry gives his avid readers is a localist project that gives them a reason—an authorization—to disconnect from the difficult, sometimes toxic work of public life.

But to be truly virtuous in a globalized world means that our justice must be scalable. It is not enough to have justice for some. Justice for all means that we need more than decentralized non-governmental advocates. We need systemic—Abraham Kuyper would call it architectonic—reformation. We need laws provided by things like just states, jobs and capital cultivated by things like corporations. The answer to economic obscurity is not retreat. Rather, it is economic wisdom: a fuller calculus that helps us understand the decisions we make, how they do or do not contribute to our vision of the good life, and to what end our economy is directed.

The answer to institutional and systemic malaise is not an individualist, local, fragmented social justice, but a directed and robust public justice—a common, articulated project that demystifies our systems and recaptures our ethical and political imagination. The barbarians may well be in the city, but don't flee to the country. Take up arms. The city is worth fighting for.

Why systems need virtue

AW: It's true: the city is worth fighting for, and griping about the impossibility of justice on a global scale is neither a helpful nor particularly faithful answer to the problems we see around us. Yet it is not simply the city that is at stake. It is our whole humanity. That's why, when we think about our food and the way we get it, we can't dismiss Berry as a mad farmer without anything to say to our modern, globalized world—why we must not throw out Berry-the-economist with Berry-the-nostalgic.

While his practice can be less than rigorous, his theory is tightly in line with what Christians believe about the world: first, that we are necessarily limited beings, and second, that we are fallen beings, prone to perverting the natural order of things for our own short-sighted gain. Systems can do good. They can also do wrong. It's not always the system that is at fault, but supply chains that refuse to make their details available to consumers aren't operating on a level playing field; consumers who demand the very cheapest food without ever stopping to even consider where their dollars are going need a dose of the truth; and those of us who have surrendered the practice of cooking and eating together, of preserving local customs and culture, short-sightedly letting today's convenience shape the long-term future of our communities.

The biblical call to love our neighbors includes both our global neighbors who want for proper nutrition and the neighbors next door. And there's no reason why locavorist tendencies on the small scale—rooted in a desire to encourage flourishing food cultures and support the local farmer—must be a trendy luxury for the upwardly mobile, excluding those with fewer resources: Many CSAS subsidize low-cost shares, and farmers' markets routinely accept food stamps.

But neither should Christians be electing to check out and leave global food systems to rot. No: it is far more radical, far more faithful, far more realistic to enter those systems and seek the good of our global neighbors as agents of virtue. Where there is injustice in the name of limitlessness and cheap bananas, let Christians be among those calling for reform. Where laws can be made to protect workers from exploitation, let Christians be making those laws. And where systems have brought good, fed the hungry, and eradicated malnutrition, let Christians be gesturing, praising, and calling for more of the same.

Such actions are not easy, convenient, or trendy. We need open hearts and minds to think both within and beyond our borders. But only when we are operating on both scales can we truly be seeking shalom. This is what matters. This leads to a renewed commonwealth.

Robert Joustra is editor of Cardus Policy in Public, senior editor at Comment, and editor, with Jonathan Chaplin, of God and Global Order: The Power of Religion in American Foreign Policy (Baylor Univ. Press). He lectures in international relations and foreign policy at Redeemer University College. Alissa Wilkinson edits Comment and teaches English and humanities at The King's College in New York City. Her articles and criticism appear in Christianity Today, World, Paste, and other publications.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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