Iowa Looks Like Rome of the Gracchi, Minus the Elegant Statesmen

Sir Tadema's "Women of Amphissa"

"Euphrosyne with Grapes"

Dinner Changes the World

History is a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat.’ Anonymous

Food has never been so cheap as it is today. In percentage of income spent and in the number of hours of labor required to eat, contemporary Americans are more distanced from hunger than any people who ever lived. But before the middle of the 20th century, history had been fairly described as “a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat.’” Up till then the notable developments of civilization had been primarily motivated by the desire to eat, or to eat better. And the greatest of all civilizations fed itself to death, in a lesson eerily conjugate with contemporary Iowa.

The Roman Empire was built by small family farmers. Before the first century B.C., the Roman state restricted ownership of land to small parcels. Because only land owners could serve in the military, this proud yeomanry filled Rome’s armies. As the empire grew the state began subsidizing imported grains from slave labor colonies. This reduced the market price of domestic grain below the cost of its production. It ruined Italian farmers and ended the great institution of small family farms. If this doesn’t sound familiar yet, just wait.

A few rich families bought the land of the dispossessed soldier-farmers who fled to the “bread and circus” welfare state of Rome itself. The large farms were more productive because the rich owned state-of-the-art plows and slaves. Yet it still became more profitable to trade imported commodity contracts than to actually produce food. Domestic farm land was converted to pasture for the more lucrative livestock trade which was fueled by gourmet excesses of the new upper class. The state had to further subsidize grain imports to feed the growing masses of dispossessed farmer-soldiers.

Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Carthage, was the greatest philosopher-statesman and soldier of pre-Christian Rome. He surrounded himself with the greatest thinkers of the empire’s golden age. They created what historians dubbed “the conscience of Rome.” Scipio’s daughter Cornelia became the greatest salon-keeper of classical times. She raised two sons as a widow, after turning down the king of Egypt preferring to remain simply the daughter of Scipio and the mother of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus.

When Tiberius saw that Italian farms were worked by slaves, he feared for the future of the state. After he was elected Tribune, he enacted land reforms limiting the size of holdings, returning small plots to the citizenry and winning the love of the masses. Conservatives labeled him a tyrant and murdered him. His little brother was later murdered and the charismatic Cornelia was forbidden to wear mourning, lest she inspire an uprising. One hundred and fifty years later, Jesus of Nazareth made speeches that were nearly identical to Tiberius Gracchus’ more eloquent writings about connecting to the land.

Today Iowa looks a lot like Rome of the Gracchi but without the eloquent statesmen. Built by a community of proud citizen farmers, Iowa has become an urban-suburban state surrounded by large agricultural tracts that are owned mostly by non-farmers. Without subsidies the land would be worthless because food can be raised cheaper elsewhere. Without imports the population would starve - because the richest agricultural land in the world lacks the diversity to feed its own farmers, let alone its urbanites anymore.

Politicians pay lip service to the romance of the small farm and the independent farmer. Then they go out to dinner with the fat cats from Tyson. Even the agriculture related literature of our era has forgotten the Gracchi, turning instead to the wimpy King Lear (A Thousand Acres) and Don Quixote (The Straight Story) for analogies. The only history lesson that has been absorbed is that you can get killed trying to deal with the problem of unsustainable agriculture.

Without even knowing it, we change our world with the decisions we make about what we eat. American slavery was an economic by-product of food lust. Human labor was the only commodity West Africa had to trade in an insatiable cyclical appetite for salt, corn, rice, sugar, rum and tobacco. After slavery ended, 19th century America grew rich and powerful because Europeans got hooked on our wheat - a crop modified in America to compensate for the sudden end of slave labor.

We even change the world with decisions about what we feed to the food we eat. In the early 20th century Iowa grew rich after the discovery that corn could be fed to cattle, without killing them before they were ready for market. By the late 20th century, hog lot confinements fouled Iowa - because the average consumer wouldn’t pay a little extra for the superior taste of pork raised without pig abuse.

It’s less obvious now, but history remains a conjugation of the verb “to eat.” The next Gracchus could be a new kind of gourmet, able to inspire people to buy foods that don’t defile their lives, their land and their sense of honor.

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.

Acommodating “the Mother of Invention”

“When the fire dies in the hearth, the funereal delights of cold snakes come into their own.” Piero Camporesi

Poets prefer “the good old days” but hard times have inspired most of civilization’s great discoveries. In the food industry that was the case even before civilization began. When prey became scarce, ancient hunters invented salting, smoking, cold storage and air-drying. Ancient gatherers invented pickling in winter climates, not in tropical areas where fresh foods were always available. Civilization arose when tribes determined to keep a constantly burning public hearth, so that hunters, gatherers and planters could start their personal fires without rubbing sticks together.



Those fires evolved into communal ovens, temples, churches and governments.


Long before Plato noted that “necessity is the mother of invention,” men had pushed the limits of their environment until their carelessness forced them to adapt to newly limited resources. In The Iliad, Homer’s heroes consume an ox over an open fire every 300 verses and disdain fish as a food of destitution. By the Golden Age of classical Athens, fish was luxury food and wood was so scarce that Athenians invented braziers, making charcoal a major industry. For the next thousand years, most of the great inventions in cooking compensated for exhausted supplies of wood. Cauldrons, fireplaces, ovens, ranges, clay pots, woks and kitchen cutlery were all invented to cook more food with fewer resources.


Iowa’s food history, even its prehistory, developed in reaction to catastrophic events. Descending glaciers dumped the world’s richest silt on a tongue-shaped midsection of our state - the Des Moines lobe. Then grazing animals migrated to the bountiful tall grasses. Hunters tracked that prey here. When planters came, first slowly in wagons, then rapidly on railroads, they cleared the grasses and the forests to grow corn, the king of grains. In the 19th century, western and northern Europeans in Iowa reaped the greatest harvests in the world.


The state’s agricultural was converted, from vast diversity to just two cash crops, in reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Corn and soy beans were easily processed into non-perishable food stuffs that aided the World War II effort. After that war, those two crops created the backbone of an industrial food revolution that led to the political invention of government-subsidized proteins. That created the cheapest food in world history - measured in the number of hours of labor required to eat. Contemporary Americans are more distanced from hunger than any people who ever lived. But all things are relative and in today’s economic chaos, everyone is looking to cut their budget, including their food budget. If history is prelude, then new creativity will follow.


Already in Des Moines some chefs and restaurateurs are ingeniously breaking such eggs. In the Shops at Roosevelt, La Mie owner Joe Logsdon had a state of the art French bakery that was productively serving breakfast and lunch. He tried dinner service but it stretched his staff and hours and it wasn’t as productive. Tag Grandgeorge had been running the kitchens of some of the more interesting restaurants this decade - Arthouse and Grand Piano Bistro among them. After spending time in France and New York, he wanted something smaller and more French. Rent never sleeps, so Logsdon offered to share his space with Grandgeorge, who opened Le Jardin for dinner only, with an entirely different staff. Two of the city’s best cafés now have a better chance of turning a profit.


Jesus Ojeda came to Des Moines after the closing of Le Francaise, a legendary Illinois café that made most national critics’ short list of America’s best restaurants. He worked there under Don Yamaguchi, one of America’s most creative chefs. After a stint with George Formaro at Centro, he opened his own café El Chisme. Determined to make all his food from scratch, even in a little family diner, he realized that tortilla recipes could be easily changed to make pizza crusts with the same machinery. His creative spark began mixing slow foods of Mexico and Italy in cross cultural applications. Then he began making scratch pasta, everything from angel hair to lasagna sheets.


Sometimes, the best new ideas are old ideas. Like snout-to-tail eating, a hot new alternative to the modern decadence of raising entire animals for just a few choice cuts and shipping the rest off to fertilizer and pet food companies. Le’s Chinese BBQ has been cooking snout-to-tail for a years now with pigs, ducks and chickens. Old Castle recently custom-built a rotisserie large enough to roast three whole sheep at the same time. Customers can not only find lamb now, they can specify orders anatomically, a service that has been unavailable here for most of the last century. Norwalk’s La Quercia, producer of pork products for the nation’s best restaurants, is applying snout-to-tail thinking too. That company introduced new guanciale, pancetta, lonza, lardo, spallacia, and prosciutto products last year, all made from precious acorn-fed pigs. That pig diet had disappeared even in its Duchy of Parma homeland but snout-to-tail made it practical again.


Some economizing ideas go to extremes. One of Iowa Pork Council’s “best tenderloin” awardees, Larsen’s Pub recently served us a tenderloin sandwich on a very cold bun. When asked if it could be toasted, the owner replied, “To do that, we’d have to light the grill. So we don’t do that.”