For me that "forgotten" part of my life that just refuses to stay behind some mental door I've continually been closing is debate. That's right, debate. Though a few who read this blog are already aware of what I'm about to describe, I'm guessing the majority are not and so I'll go ahead and delve into it. From my sophomore year of high school through my third year in college, I competed in policy debate. For two years after college I coached policy debate at Catholic University here in DC. So needless to say it was a big part of my life for the better part of a decade.
When I finally decided to no longer be involved in debate - either competing or coaching it - it was a big decision and I pretty much tried to completely remove it from my life save for the close friends I'd made through it. But no more traveling to tournaments, no more obsessive research, no more talking debate all the time, life would go on to different things. And from being immersed in an activity that took place on college campuses across the country, early in the morning, on weekends, among a bunch of too-smart, hyper-competitive, type-A, nerdy, fact-obsessed people to working in a restaurant kitchen, I'd be lying if I didn't say that the two environments were vastly different.
There are a a number of ways in which debate factors into my life even still: a lot of friends I have I met through that process, the skills I learned can never be unlearned and have proved to be very valuable — skills like the ability to quickly research, to speak and articulate clearly, to detach oneself from an issue and try to see all sides of an argument, etc. But the most recent one I discovered (or rather, remembered) happened this weekend at a party.
While talking to my roommate who happens to work for a certain environmental non-profit, the subject of environmentalism as it relates to agriculture and food came up. Now you might think I'd have some opinions on this simply because I work in the food industry but the truth is that my feelings (incredibly passionate feelings) on this subject were formed quite some time ago. My last year of college, the topic that year was about the US relationship with the European Union and one of the subsets of that topic was about a US vs EU dispute before the World Trade Organization regarding genetically modified foods. The EU set up restrictions that banned products containing genetically modified foods from being imported and sold for consumption unless they were clearly labeled as such. The EU also banned the planting of genetically modified (GM) crops.
Without getting into too much detail, I'll just say that since you spent half your time in debate arguing for that year's topic (affirming) and half of the time against (negating), every team picked a specific subset of that topic they wanted to advocate when they were affirming. My partner and I chose the GM foods area that year. Not because we knew a lot about it necessarily, it just seemed interesting and it seemed like not a lot of other people were picking it so that was a bit of an advantage because it meant that in most debates, we'd be "experts" on it and the negating team would probably know very little about it since they likely hadn't heard another case about it all year.
As the year went on, I spent a LOT of time reading about GM foods and the agricultural system in general. It helped that another subset of that year's topic was about the US Farm Bill and the system of agricultural subsidies it dictated. My partner and I were arguing against GM crops but also against the system of conventional agriculture in the US that made these scientifically altered seeds seem like the answer. The more I read on both sides of the argument, the more I realized that the arguments in favor of GM foods were weak and largely driven by research funded by the companies that produced the seeds. And the more I came to really hate these companies. Monsanto, Dow, and Dupont were three of the biggest agro-chemical companies and all three were heavily invested in GM crops.
The arguments they set forth in favor of scientifically altered food crops were that modifications to seeds allowed for greater crop yields. This, they argued, would mean excess food and it would save the planet from hunger. They argued that seeds could be engineered to thrive with less water which would also make it easier to grow crops in drought stricken areas and, again, alleviate world hunger. Every argument they had was shrouded in a philanthropic cloak of alleviating hunger and suffering in the Third World.
Unfortunately, the reality of GM crops is very different. For one thing, the vast majority of these crops are engineered not to be healthier or easier to grow for the small farmer. The majority of them are engineered to be used by industrial farms because the companies that make the seeds are the same companies that make the pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers that are applied like a blanket to industrial farms. The companies engineer a seed that can survive an application of a deadly and intense pesticide so that a farmer can do a large scale application of the poisonous chemicals and everything that comes into contact with the pesticide is killed except for the crop. This creates a crop that exists in a sterile, lifeless, monoculture.
And, interestingly, a great majority of the American agricultural establishment and the Congress that supports that establishment is totally on board with the idea of these crops. When politicians and agricultural lobbyists talk about the American farmer, the picture they want the public to see is a small, family farm with chickens running around the yard, an old cow named Bessie, children that get up early every morning to milk cattle and gather eggs as part of their chores, a big old farmhouse that's been in the family for generations, and other such Norman Rockwell-esque visions of farm life. But that's not the reality of farming in America these days.
Farms used to be microcosms of diversity but today's farm is a sterile environment based around the idea that monoculture is okay. Monoculture is defined as a culture dominated by a single element and, as it's practiced in agriculture, it means an entire ecosystem defined by a single element. For huge swaths of the American Midwest, this is the standard. Farms in Iowa or Kansas that used to look like patchwork quilts of different crops and fallow land for grazing or that was being allowed to rest in a off year are the rarity. Now, multimillion acre farms are dominated by one crop, be it corn, soybeans, canola, wheat, or any of the other major subsidy supported crops.
Needless to say, this is not an environmentally sustainable culture. For one thing, it's simply an affront to nature because in the natural world, monoculture is far from the norm. But perhaps even more destructively, these monocultures are only made possible through the applications of fertilizers and pesticides. The amount of chemicals that are put on the land, combined with the failure to grow different crops means that the soil is being leached and destroyed. The beauty of diversity in farming is that each element has a role to play. Farmers used to have very specific schedules for rotating the crops on their land. Those crops that leached nitrogen from the soil would be harvested and replaced with a planting of something that replenished nitrogen in the soil and so on.
So while all of this is certainly bad and, at least to me, interesting, what does it have to do with where I am in my life now?
Well, I obviously learned a lot about agriculture, farming, science, and large chemical companies that year. The weird thing is though, unlike a lot of the topics before, I didn't simply stop reading about or being interested it once the year was over. Maybe it's because I have always been passionate about food and so this touched a nerve in a way that no other debate topic really had. Don't get me wrong, I still know a lot about many many random subjects and can explain the World Trade Organization dispute resolution process or the US arrangements regarding tactical nuclear weapons based in Europe or even how the UN governs war crimes tribunals. But this is the only topic that I have actively continued to read about and research once the debate year was over.
I have become passionate in my views about agriculture, food, and science and how those are and should be related. As someone that works in food day in and day out, I am not just a cook who prepares dishes without thinking about what's on the plate and why. And, even more so, as a cook that one day hopes to have my own restaurant (that's right, T and I have plans people) I have intense views about the kind of food I want to put on a plate.
Working as a cook at a restaurant that is owned and run by someone else means that a lot of what you do is executing a vision that doesn't belong to you. You don't make the decisions about where the food is sourced; you cook it, you plate it, you send it out of the kitchen. But if you have a dream about the kind of place you'd like to run when you're the one making the decisions, you consider a lot of things. Sure you think about a theme and a type of food you'd like to serve. Sure it's fun to think about what you'd want the space to look like, or the type of flatware you'd prefer or what kind of wine list you'd build. But, for me, before all of those things is a commitment to making sure that whatever style of food I'm sending out on whatever plates we're using is food that supports an environmentally conscious agricultural system.
So while I could go on about this forever, I'll just say that it was really enlightening to realize this weekend how my most passionate and deeply held views about food and farming all started with a debate topic from my junior year of college. Funny the way things work.
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