For this week's food issue, Mark Bittman, the magazine's lead food writer and a Times opinion columnist, wrote the cover story about California's Central Valley after asking readers of his blog to suggest places he should visit.
Of all the suggestions you received, why did you pick the Valley?
I made the final decision because I thought that the Central Valley was the place that represents contemporary agriculture most starkly. It's also a place I always wanted to go. When I was a kid, ahem, in the '50s, there was a show on Saturday mornings called "The Modern Farmer." It was this black-and-white show from California of people riding around on tractors, and it really fascinated me. I spent a week last year in Iowa, and I thought it's crazy to be writing about agriculture and not spend time in the Central Valley. This trip only pointed out how much I have to learn — it's really incomprehensible how much is there.
What did you see there that you did you not expect?
Really, the image of the carrots that's on the cover. I went there expecting to have my mind blown and then within 10 minutes of arriving at Bolthouse Farms, getting out of my rental car, and there were 50 truckloads of carrots there. That same day I saw 10,000 or 20,000 acres of almonds, 30,000 dairy cows in several dairies. A crummy little vineyard in the Central Valley is probably half the size of all the vineyards in Napa Valley. The scale is unimaginable.
Is it appealing?
It doesn't register as food when you see it in that quantity. It is gorgeous in an abstract way. It's not like being at Tom Willey's place, the organic farm, where you see 3 acres of this or 10 acres of that. Then you really want to start picking and cooking. When you see carrots as numerous as stars in the sky, they are not something you want to cook, at least not on the spot.
Do you think the big agricultural companies don't really think of it as food, either? Is it just product to them?
I think that's very much a part of the problem. Not everyone in the Valley thinks that way, but it's endemic. This is historically the case, and most people I talked to said this. Companies will rip out a crop at a moment's notice if they think they can make more money planting a different crop. Bolthouse is obviously big into carrots, and they aren't going to switch. But it's not really as if they are saying "How can we provide consumers with the tastiest carrots?" or "How can we provide consumers with the healthiest carrots?" They are thinking about bulk and profit margin. That's not entirely a terrible thing. We need and want a lot of carrots. I came away from this trip feeling quite moderate. The Central Valley will never be comprised of lots of tiny farms. The question is how do we get fewer pesticides, better labor practices, more sustainability and so on out of those big farms?
One possibility that you propose is a national food policy.
Right, consumers need to be conscious and make noise, but without some kind of helpful government intervention, I don't think things are going to change. Some cities have proposed food policies that are quite interesting, but there are no state or national policies that I know of. Most of what happens in terms of regulation is passing theoretical limits to how polluting residues can be on food and the kinds of pesticides and fungicides and herbicides used on crops. But there is no national food policy that says, for example, the United States will consume one billion pounds of almonds in the next year, so let's grow 1.5 billion and there's plenty for export. Let's not plant 2.5 billion because that land could be used for tomatoes or something else. I mentioned it to my edito,r and we agreed that it sounds a bit Stalinist.
Talk about politically toxic.
Right! But that aside, why would you not want to talk about what's the best thing for the future of the United States? I would argue that the answer is not what amounts to an anarchic market of a million individuals deciding what they want to plant and then having this dogma that the market will decide. Growing a lot of almonds and exporting them to China is not the end of the world, but I do think that when you look at the Midwest, where the vast majority of land is used to raise corn or soybeans used for feeding industrially raised animals or producing corn syrup for junk food, really is. It is something that is not going to change until we say that land is too valuable to us to be used that way. We need more diverse and regional agriculture. What harm would there be in making a plan?
Of the other locations that people suggested that you investigate, is there anything else you will follow up on?
I'm going to go to Africa. I've been wanting to do that for a number of reasons. That's a sort of silly thing to say — it's like saying "I'm going to go to Asia or to North America." But I'm going to figure out where I can go in Africa that makes sense for a story.
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