Food in America

Everyday we eat, some of us more than others. While the United States has the largest people in the world, we also have the most on diets - six out of every ten. We don't know what to eat, we rely on experts. How did we get to a stage, as animals, where we don't instinctively know what to eat? It began with the extension of the American colonies westward - Manifest Destiny. Jefferson had an agrarian ideal for this new country - a nation of independent farmers that would let the corrupt manufacturing take place in Europe. In 1862 a couple acts were passed, seemingly contradictory. First, the Homestead Act was signed, enabling any individual or family a right to 160 acres of land to sustain themselves on. This was an extension of the Jeffersonian ideals of subsistence and the virtue of tending your own land. That same year the Morrill Act was passed, granting money to states to build universities (land-grant universities) so as to research and develop agriculture. This was not for the purposes of providing assistance for families to better sustain themselves, it was to develop more efficient ways to grow crops for market. Around this time canals were being built, allowing faster transportation of goods and the accumulation of both capital and money. These were the first big cities - New York, Chicago, Boston, etc. They were quite dependent on canals as they were the fastest form of transportation. People actually thought that due to the Appalachia severing the canal routes that the U.S. would split East-West. And then the Erie Canal was built, a massive project unlike anything at the time. Similar to the Three Gorges Dam today or the Great Pyramids of Giza in the mid-26th century B.C.E.
And then came railroads, the impact of which can not be fully explained or understood today. It is comparable to the invention of the Internet today. Railroads manipulated time and space, a strange concept to consider. What has essentially occurred over the ages is an advancement in transportation of resources whether they be goods, people or ideas. Railroads allowed the accumulation of even more capital and wealth. Now back to agriculture.
Farmers began producing for the markets. Grains, certain grains such as winter or red wheat, proved easily transportable and widely used. This is however a riddle of chicken and egg. Which came first, the market or the producer? The supply or the demand? Either way wheat was being produced and transported on a larger and larger scale. The farmers needed help transitioning from a subsistence view of American life to a market-oriented future, one that would have caused Jefferson quite discomfort. To help these new farmers with their 160 acres of Homestead land start this transition to market, to accumulated wealth and a shot at the big times in this emerging capitalist society, the government passed the Organic Act establishing the United States Department of Agriculture. And this was initiated... 1862. A revolutionary year to say the least.
The USDA set up extension offices to do research and provide knowledge to farmers now growing mass amounts of wheat. This knowledge was not generational was the knowledge used by subsistence farmers when they first got their land, but was manufactured, laboratory knowledge. This information grew to substitute for the generational knowledge inherited and practiced by the first American farmers and their farming ancestors.
Growing for the market necessitated a logic of growing food for money, as who could subsist off of four tons of hardy winter wheat alone. Farms thus tried to produce more and more, became more capital-intensive as the technology grew. The first tractor replaced animal energy in 1880 and became popularized in the early 1910s. Farms grew larger and only those with enough money and resources could compete, and thus they bought up the smaller farms. This process continued all the way up until the end of World War I.
Before the Great Depression there was an agricultural depression. During the war farmers were producing more than had ever been reaped in history, and they were encouraged to so as to feed the troops. When the troops came back and the demand slowed to a halt, prices dropped, and the market crashed. This is when the government came in, and the system of support structures for large corn and soy farmers still exist today and has created a Too-Big-To-Fail institution that most of the world depends on. What most citizens are unaware of is the true power of our agriculture. It is our greatest foreign policy weapon, as most countries depend on our grains for survival. Food, once the life giving substance, is now used to coerce other nations. I will pick up this story again, but for now it is helpful to think of how this play between markets and farmers shaped our landscape, changed our notion of the ideal American, created an abundance of a resource used for purposes of power (much like oil or gold), and altered our diet and our relationship to both food, farming, and the land. Nearly everything we eat today has corn syrup in it. How has that come to be, is it a natural progression, how would it be different if we could grow potatoes really well? How does an abundance of a resource change societies? It was only with agriculture that humans were able to accumulate resources on a systematic scale - land, food, animals. This was furthered with railroads and industrialization, a system dependent on having a lot of capital to play in the market. Has the internet moved us in the opposite direction, decentralizing resources such as information? What are the boundaries between physical and non-physical resources, and how does their accumulation affect individuals and societies? These are just some questions to ponder over, and in doing so hopefully you will come up with more questions, and more answers, and will understand your self and your world a little better.