Working For Jobs

by Tom Philpott.

In
part one of my musings on food and “great places,” I painted a bleak picture of the U.S. food
landscape: one in which a handful of companies churn out mountains of
low-quality food, competing not to see who can put out the best product, but
rather to see who can most deftly and deeply slash costs. The fixation
on cost-cutting gives rise to all manner of dysfunctions, including the
erasure of skilled food trades like that of the butcher and the rise of a vast,
low-wage, low-skill army of food-system workers.

Indeed,
I’d wager that a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of the food system—
balancing the benefits of cheap and plentiful food against costs like
unchecked pollution, diet-related maladies, public-health concerns like
antibiotic resistance, and the effects of chronically low wages—would
find that food today is a net drain on the resources of most communities
throughout the nation.

A broad look at the culinary landscape reveals devastation on many levels—mountains of flavorless chicken breasts harboring multiple varieties of antibiotic-resistant pathogens; boatloads of insipid tomatoes harvested by people making sub-poverty wages and housed in conditions not unlike those of Apartheid-era South
Africa; suburban landscapes pockmarked by endless carbon-copy outlets selling such suspect fare.  

But
the big picture isn’t the only picture. Our food system is actively
generating dreadful places, but if you hone in, you’ll also find that
all throughout the country, people are creating great places based
around food, too. Corporations wield plenty of power in this country,
but they don’t control everything. Even as hyper-consolidation of the
food industry lurches forward, citizens are creating their own alternatives on the ground.

To
illustrate my point, let’s look in an unexpected corner of the culinary
world: beer. (Don’t smirk—can there be great places where there isn’t great beer?) By 2004, Anheuser-Busch brewed fully 45 percent of the
beer consumed in the U.S. The Budweiser maker and its two
largest competitors, Miller SAB and Adolph Coors, controlled about 80
percent of the market. Then, in 2007, Miller and Coors (which had
already merged with Canadian beer giant Molson) combined to become
MillerCoors. So now just two companies produce eight of every 10 beers
consumed here. The product is inferior—they cut beer’s traditional
staple ingredient, malted barley, with rice for the express purpose of
making the beer bland.

And yet, look what’s happened in the U.S. brew market over the past 30 years:

As
recently as 1980, fewer than 50 gigantic brew facilities produced all of the beer
consumed in the United States. Nearly all of it was horrible. Lovers of good beer were relegated to the
tiny import section of the beer case, or to making their own. Today,
there are more than 1,700 breweries in operation—we’ve returned to the
pre-Prohibition level of 1900 (granted, when the U.S. population was much
smaller).

What
happened? Put simply, a critical mass of people got sick of drinking
corporate swill. A home-brew revolution was launched, and some of those home
brewers got really good at their craft and opened small breweries. As
those small regional breweries flourished, the circle of people who
enjoy a good beer widened—drawing more craft brewers into the market.
In 1980, the U.S. brew industry was the scandal of the beer world, its
products universally scorned by beer aficionados. Today, walk into a
bottle shop like Carborro Beverage outside of Chapel Hill, N.C., or Brooklyn’s glorious Bierkraft,
and you’ll find dozens and dozens of excellent U.S. beers, representing
a dizzying variety of styles. Even as Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors
continue dominating the overall market and churning out gazillions of
gallons of their dismal product, U.S. brewers represent the global
avant-garde, providing inspiration to new-wave beer-makers even in
countries with strong beer traditions like Belgium and England. Here in
the U.S., consumers have more beer choices than ever.

There
are a couple of “great places” lessons to be drawn here. First,
regionality. Who wants to live in a country where the food and beer is
the same wherever you go, as nondescript as a Walmart looming at the
edge of a suburban freeway? Our new-wave beer culture is helping revive
something that has been eroding for a century in this country: regional
identity. When I travel, I can now think in terms of beer-sheds. Here is
just a sampling: Stone, Green Flash, and Port in Southern California;
Lost Coast, Russian River, and Lagunitas in the north of the state; Bells
and Founders in the upper Midwest; Five Points and Brooklyn Brewery in
New York City; Highland, Duck Rabbit, and Craggie here in North
Carolina; and so on. All of them are world-class breweries, and none of
them existed in the pre-1980 Dark Ages. You can now go nearly anywhere
in the country and experience a robust and varied local beer culture.

There’s
also an economy-related “great places” aspect here. I don’t want to
live in a place where a small class of “knowledge workers” flourishes,
catered to by a large and de-skilled “service” class that’s barely able
to scrape by. In my vision of a great place, economic prosperity is
shared broadly, and communities benefit from the presence of skilled
artisans producing a variety of things in their midst.

By
1980, the brewer trade had essentially disappeared in the U.S.
Production happened at a few mega-breweries, overseen by engineers and
staffed by low-skill factory workers. That model still has plenty of
momentum, but the brewing revolution has reestablished the brewing
trade. Virtually all of the 1,700-plus craft breweries in the U.S. are overseen by a skilled brewer. According to the Brewers Association,
the craft brew industry now supports more than 100,000 jobs—none of
which would have existed today if everyone had been satisfied with what they were swilling
back in 1980.

And
we’ve barely tapped the economic potential of de-corporatizing our beer
supply. After 30 years of explosive growth, craft beer still represents
just 4.9 percent of the U.S. market. In other words, there’s plenty of
opportunity for new generations of skilled brewers to ply their trade.

Moreover,
craft beer is starting to become more intimately knit into regional
agricultural economies. Right now, barley and hops—two of beer’s main
ingredients—are grown in mono-cultures concentrated in a
few places. Craft breweries in the Northeast typically source these
staples on the same commodity markets as those in, say, Southern
California. Malting barley requires special facilities and skills—and
as the malting industry consolidated right along with the beer
business, all of that evaporated. But imagine the economic benefits if
barley and hop production were to spread out again. When you enjoyed a
pint at your local pub, you’d not only be supporting your neighborhood
bartender and brewmaster, but also nearby farmers and workers at the
local malthouse.

Just such a vision is coming into place here in North Carolina. In the wake of the 2008 spike in wheat prices, a group of artisanal bakers and farmers launched the North Carolina Organic Bread Flour Project, designed to reestablish wheat and other grains on the state’s farmland and connect farmers directly with the burgeoning artisanal bakery and craft-brew scene. Such a revival of grain agriculture—for decades concentrated in the Midwest—cannot happen without the very processing infrastructure that has been dismantled over the past half century. This coming fall, the project plans to roll out the state’s only mid-scale flour mill, called Carolina Ground, and it’s partnering with a business called Riverbend Malthouse, which plans to roll out its malting facility this fall, too. In 1980, every dollar you spent on bread or beer essentially leaked out of your state’s economy, supporting a few low-wage jobs but mainly just profits for mega-processors. It’s likely that within a couple of years, every dollar you spend on a good beer or loaf of bread in North Carolina will reverberate through the state’s economy, supporting a range of skilled craftspeople and farmers. As that money circulates through communities, it creates opportunities to support other skilled trades—the brewmaster can afford to shop at the farmers market instead of the chain grocery, and so on. Such models are eminently adaptable to regions across the country.

I’ve
focused on beer for this post because I love it and haven’t had much
chance to write about it; but I could have settled on any number of
sectors within the alternative-food economy. In part one, I complained
that the rise of gigantic meat processors had stamped out the butcher
trade, once a solidly middle-class and high-skill occupation. Well, the
butcher trade, too, is in the midst of a revival, intimately linked to the surge in grass-based, small- and mid-scale meat farming that’s taking place throughout the country. The
same, of course, can be said of vegetable farming as we move from
relying on vast, water-sucking, labor-exploiting operations in California
to far-flung, human-scale farms that provide us with seasonal produce
adapted to our own regions.

To
me, food is integral to the concept of “great places.” It represents
the opportunity to rescue our culinary culture from the clutches of
corporate flavor engineers and replace it with something that ties us to
landscapes around us and to the skills of our neighbors. Economically,
it represents the opportunity to revalue labor, and create economies
based on respect and care, not exploitation and the race to the bottom.

There
are many obstacles between present reality and my vision of a delicious
food future, chief among them the lack of infrastructure—as I’ve written so many times before, including in my very first column as a Grist staffer in 2006.
But as the story of craft beer shows, things can change for the better
fast—especially when people band together in pursuit of
deliciousness.

Related Links:

Great places, great food: part one

Mom-and-pop vs. big-box stores in the food desert

Great places: smart density as part of economic flourishing

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