‘Just as humans didn’t move beyond the Stone Age because the world ran out of stones, it’s unlikely we will go beyond a corporate food system because we have run out of monopoly corporations. We will return food to small and public organizations because that is the most logical way to manage a food system designed to provide primarily local and healthy food to all, at greatest benefit possible to health and the environment. ‘

—Wayne Roberts

Field notes this week:

It’s weird and embarrassing to admit this after 52 years of activism, but it’s only a few weeks ago, following a prolonged period working with food advocates in the area of Turin  – an area well-known as a stronghold of the Italian left for many decades – that I finally figured out that the food movement needs to embrace business if it’s serious about food system transformation.

Nice to know that it’s never too late to learn something new and obviously important!!

I am not saying we have to support corporations – far from it, as you’ll see below. I’m talking about business, especially the huge majority of small and medium businesses that do a lot of the bullwork in modern societies, and do it by organizing their work as businesses. This is going to become more and more true as we make more and more advances in improving and democratizing the food system.

Let me review a few key elements of food business that are central to a healthy and equitable food system:

Farmers

Farmers are organized as, and see themselves as, family businesses. It’s possible to define them as self-employed, and it’s certainly possible to define many of them as not-for-profits – not-for-break-even would be truer for far too many of them!!! – but they are constituted as businesses. They own property and equipment (or at least the bank loans on their property and equipment), they don’t get employee benefits as part of their income package, and they lose their business if they don’t pay their bills.

If the food movement thinks through what it means to be pro-farmer, it needs to be supportive of the most vulnerable sector of the business community—the people who mostly buy from and sell to huge monopolistic corporations.

Indeed, I’d like to see farmers become more businesslike, so they become less dependent on monopoly corporations, and more linked to community-based businesses and government-sponsored agencies that are managed in business-like ways.

Independent Artisans

This group has a possibility to replace work that is now done by highly automated huge processing corporations. The artisan bakers and butchers and candlestick makers are central to rebuilding both craft production qualities in food, as well as  personal relations with customers – two key elements of a positive food system.

Artisans run their own businesses, and compete directly with monopoly (more precisely, oligopoly) corporations. They’re the ones who are going to eat the lunch of the corporations, and that will be a good thing.

Social Enterprises 

Some are non-profit, some aren’t, but all function in effect as businesses – succeeding or failing depending on having more money coming in than going out the door. Though they may not be formally businesses – I’m thinking especially of co-ops and companies set up inside charities – they are run like businesses and must be businesslike to survive.

Social enterprises are a growth sector in the food economy, and are usually right-sized in terms of the scale they need to be efficient and the scale they need to develop good relations with the people they serve. Some social enterprises are non-profits, but even those self-defined as for-profits usually operate from what is called a “triple bottom line,” which attempts to integrate community, environmental and company needs. Increasingly, such companies are often identified as B-corps, which means that their triple bottom line commitment is a formal part of their terms of incorporation.

Many of these social enterprises come out of the food movement, and have been inspired by the food movement to perform a vital service.

Restaurants and main street grocers

These retail and prepare at least half the meals eaten by the population. The great majority of them are small and medium-sized, and usually require many times more “blood, sweat and tears” for many times less compensation than is true of  executive suites in corporations.

It is unlikely that many of the people employed in any of the above-mentioned businesses earn anything close to the income of civil servants or educators, let alone corporate executives. And none enjoy anything like the job security of civil servants or educators.  Any suggestion that the people self-employed in the above kinds of work constitute a privileged elite would arouse deservedly scornful laughter.

I believe that the future of the food movement depends on the growth of small and medium-sized businesses that will build the emerging “infrastructure of the middle” – which I hope which will replace many large corporations from owning he chain of activities between small and mid-sized food producers and the consumers who buy their products – either individuals or restaurants or cafeterias.

These small and medium-sized businesses and social organizations will likely succeed by following the advice of the futurist Buckminster Fuller. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” he said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the exiting model obsolete.”

Just as humans didn’t move beyond the Stone Age because the world ran out of stones, it’s unlikely we will go beyond a corporate food system because we have run out of monopoly corporations. We will return food to small and public organizations because that is the most logical way to manage a food system designed to provide primarily local and healthy food to all, at greatest benefit possible to health and the environment. Small and medium-sized companies will figure out a more efficient way of handling that task than is currently provided by today’s oligopolistic corporations.

In their place will come businesses that serve the public interest. That is at odds with the very definition of  corporations, which have a legal requirement to first and foremost serve their stockholders, and never to subordinate profit-making to service of community or environmental needs.

Such deeply-entrenched definitions of the corporation  have been exposed by books such as Joel Bakan’s The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, and Harry Glasbeek’s Wealth by Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy. The definition of corporate mission makes corporations ineligible to play a significant role in the food sector because the very function of food inherently prioritizes the need to serve health, community and environment before business benefit or profit.

The true cost of such corporate control of food has recently been identified by a United Nations-sponsored project called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). The profits of the world’s major corporations, the report shows, are a small fraction of the value of the damage done by these same corporations to health and the environment. Snack food manufacturing, for example, imposes two dollars of damage to the environment for every dollar in profit the corporations make, the TEEB study shows. The  corporations make money for shareholders, but at a cost to society.  

There are many advantages to organizing new food infrastructure so that small and medium businesses are dominant players, not impersonal corporations. Small, local businesses ensure optimal employment within each foodshed, rather than in distant corporate headquarters. It also encourages a food economy that is embedded within a community, and expressive of that community’s ethic and needs. It also ensures that no corporation is “too big to fail,” or so big that it becomes a force for inequality within the community.

Inviting local and independent business participation in the food movement and within the food sector could lead food movements to adopt several new forms of campaigning. They might, for example, be more supportive of “buycotts” – deliberate efforts to purchase from businesses that are most supportive of community health and environmental goals. Food advocates could also advocate for more egalitarian government job creation grants to institutions on which independent businesses depend, such as farmers markets.

Before developing policies, however, we need to address issues of process by opening a dialogue to welcome business (as distinct from corporate) participation in the food movement.  

Cities — home to many food artisans, restaurants, caterers, grocers, farmers markets and distributors, as well as quite a few food growers – are a great place for that dialogue to begin.