Mister We Could Use a Man Like Mike Dukakis Again

Since Iowa's caususes began to matter, political campaigning has heated half the state's summers. Because of its pole position in the presidential nominating process, hopeful candidates canvas the state not only during the summer before an election but also the summer before that, prior to its first-in-the-nation caucuses. Next term, it looks like the Republicans will be in Iowa a year or two earlier. Let's hope they've learned something.

While the overwhelming majority of Iowa’s population now lives in cities and suburbs, most candidates still play to the old rural clichés about Iowans. So, they import bales of hay and bandanas to stage media events outside hip Des Moines corporations like Meredith.

While pandering to our inner rube is harmless to Iowans, it’s risky of the candidates. They walk a thin line between identifying with Iowa voters and coming off as either phony or priggish. But that’s changing. My father used to tell how his father lost an election in Iowa because he didn’t know how to milk a cow. Today, the only people who still hand milk cows live in Old Order Amish communities, so candidates are no longer judged on their barnyard skills. But elections are still won and lost because of what they eat.

Democrats failed to carry Iowa twice in the last six Presidential elections, coincidentally the only two times they lost the popular vote. And both Mike Dukakis and John Kerry choked on food matters. In 1988 Dukakis suggested that Iowa farmers diversify into crops like Belgian endive, flowers, blueberries, apples and grapes. He even suggested changing the structure of federal farm subsidies to encourage farmers to plant crops other than corn and beans. For a lot of small individual farmers, Dukakis was dispensing wisdom and foresight. A walk through just about any authentic farmers market today shows that there’s good money in growing diverse crops that humans can eat. You don’t need a minimum of 40,000 acres to make the numbers work either.

But Dukakis threatened a status quo which continues to guarantee lavish price supports for the Big Two crops, farmed increasingly by fewer and richer investors, mostly financed with out of state money. As a result, Iowa agriculture now resembles Third World mining more than early 20th century farming. Since 1988, the number of heavily capitalized outsiders exploiting our natural resources has grown exponentially, while the number of proud farmers who grow good foods to eat, and who can live off their land, has dwindled to a precious few. Big Ag helped take Mike Dukakis out, somehow making him look like he didn’t understand farming. In retrospect, he understood too well.

In 2004, John Kerry’s wife didn’t help his elitist Francophile image at all by advocating more rabbit on the American dinner table. That too actually pointed out a stupid problem with government intervention in our food system. Since rabbits multiply like rabbits, why do they cost so darn much at the store? Because Congress has refused to mandate the federal inspection of rabbits, unlike chicken or red meat. This forces processors to pay extra for inspections. Since no grocery store with lawyers on retainer would dare carry a meat product that is not USDA inspected, rabbit remains either very expensive or very hard to find. Both Kerry and Dukakis were talking about something we didn‘t want to hear and something that Big Ag and Big Chicken didn‘t want them to fix.

Food politics has changed less than you might think. In a prelude to today’s mad rush to convert corn into car fuel, Thomas Jefferson worked obsessively to develop sesame seed oil. His motive was remarkably similar to the justifications of ethanol subsidies that one hears today, from politicians as different at George Bush and Chet Culver. Jefferson talked about freeing America from dependence on foreign oil. In his time, salad dressings were being made exclusively with imported olive oil.
One hundred years before freedom fries and the French frying of Kerry’s image, Grover Cleveland rebelled against French food. Cleveland so disdained his own French White House chef that he often preferred eating with his servants, where’ corned beef and cabbage was the standard fare. The President joked sarcastically to the press that he dined on “boeuf corné au cabbeau.”

In food as in politics, there are no new ideas, only recycled ones. During the presidential campaign of 1928, a famous circular published by the Republican Party claimed that if Herbert Hoover won there would be "a chicken in every pot." Hoover’s image makers stole the phrase from 16th century France where King Henry IV used it. Then three other Presidents stole it from Hoover.

In hindsight, Dukakis was merely suggesting that farmers return to a practice that the average person still doesn’t realize has been abandoned - raising foods that humans can eat. Since Dukakis was pilloried, grapes have returned to Iowa in a big way. Iowa farmers in the 1990’s discovered they were a hedge against the tyranny of corn and bean prices: Grapes actually return more money per acre than most any other Iowa crop. They also have environmental advantages: Grapes prevent erosion and encourage small family farms that sustains rural communities. For the most part though, Iowans are still content to let places like California and southwest Wisconsin grow good things to eat, while industrialists convert the most fertile farm land into ethanol mines and livestock feeding troughs.

Mister, we could use a man like Mike Dukakis again.

Fortunes Collide in the Des Moines Lobe

My grandfather liked to say that Iowa’s good fortune had been thrust upon it but bad luck was its own doing. Grandpa farmed in the Des Moines Lobe, a tongue shaped area of north and central Iowa with Des Moines on the tip of its tongue. Receding glaciers of the last Ice Age dumped enough silt and loam there to create the world’s richest soils. When word of its miraculous fertility reached Europe, immigrants flocked to Iowa creating one of the greatest population explosions in history.

Iowa and those immigrants grew rich in the 19th century by raising foods that would, by the early 20th century, make Americans the best fed population in world history. Corn fields and livestock pastures, rotated with myriad other crops, orchards and vineyards all thrived. Iowa became a rich state with an economy based on a sustainable agriculture that directly supported most of its population and indirectly supported nearly everyone else. Iowans ate better than others, especially during the Great Depression, because they consumed the good foods that they raised from seeds they saved, whether at home or in local restaurants that bought directly from local farmers. Within that environment, both Populism and high quality food became synonymous with Iowa. That was what Grandpa meant by good fortune.

During the last half century, government policies and industrial agriculture diverted the miraculous abundance of the Des Moines Lobe. Rather than raising varieties of quality foods, the land was reemployed producing record setting quantities of things that yielded “industrial convertibility” and profits for a new elite investor class that often moved those profits out of Iowa. Machines replaced workers and the majority of Iowa’s population shifted to cities and suburbs. Stewardship of the lobe land reverted to corporations that cared more about immediate returns than about the land and its ability to regenerate.

Iowa became the prize fiefdom of industrial agriculture, as recent statistics dramatize: Iowa planted more acres of hay this year than 16 other states planted, period. Iowa also planted seven times more soy beans than hay and almost ten times more corn; Over eighty five per cent of Iowa’s corn and a full ninety one per cent of its beans were planted with biotech “seeds” which can not be saved for replanting and which require huge applications of herbicide and fertilizer; Des Moines Water Works now owns the world’s largest water filtration system to compensate for the run off of those fertilizers and herbicides, which are also blamed for the Gulf of Mexico’s Dead Zone.

Some things don’t change. The lobe remained rich enough to raise some of the best foods on earth and a few old fashioned farmers still do that. This decade, new independent Des Moines restaurants found national prominence supporting unique local foods. Diners responded creating a culinary niche that resisted industrial food and celebrated Iowa food artisans. That helped revive the old Populist Iowa and made Des Moines the center of a confrontation zone for conflicting food philosophies.

Such clashes drew national attention with debates about immigration stings in Marshalltown and Postville, ethanol-generated food inflation and the Iowa legislature’s usurpation of local control, taking from counties the authority to restrict the pollution of confined animal feeding operations (CAFO’s). When Iowa scientist Tara Smith discovered an alarming relationship between the MRSA (killer bacteria that resist antibiotics) epidemic and CAFO‘s, Iowa became THE battleground state in the food wars.

This summer, over forty international food activists convened in Des Moines to plot changes to America’s meat system. That conference drew non profit giants like Pew Charitable Trusts and Sierra Club, ranchers, farmers, church leaders and labor organizers. Remarkably, the group came from the far left, the far right and the middle of partisan politics. They met almost continuously for 30 hours brainstorming ways to alleviate the way American meat production pollutes our air and water, violates human rights and abuses monopoly powers, workers, consumers and animals. The big issue, which tied the others together, was the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), a bill now in Congress and supported by President Obama that would end the prophylactic use of antibiotics in industrial agriculture. As maverick rancher Mike Callicrate (one of the heroes of “Fast Food Nation”) explained:

“If we can get PAMTA passed it’s the end of the CAFO - because CAFO’s can’t exist without massive antibiotics. Without CAFO’s, all the other problems improve by leaps and bounds.”

The conference highlighted trends and ironies of the food system. Bet you didn’t know that:

~Dairy Farmers of America own 8 import licenses; “Angus” labeling requires only 10 per cent Angus bloodlines; Most “grass fed” meat in America comes from Canada and Wyoming where grass is available for only a few months a year;

~AMRP’s (advanced meat recovery pellets) are now included in most frozen industrial hamburger products and AMRP’s can test positive for spinal and brain matter;

~The leather and wool of grass fed animals is judged to have superior texture and strength. Prius now offers “grass fed“ leather seat covers.

I asked delegates to explain a news release from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) which baffled me. How could the US in 2009, following decades of suburban sprawl that had devoured farmland, plant its largest acreage ever of soy beans and also the second largest acreage of corn? Callicrate responded with most others nodding cynically.

“You don’t actually believe the USDA numbers? Nothing is impossible but overestimating the acreage planted will cause commodity prices to fall and that’s in the best interests the USDA and all the Big Ag corporations that influence the USDA.”

In the following three weeks, corn prices plunged. That’s what Grandpa meant about Iowa’s bad luck.