Episode #225
Julie Guthman: Big Tech’s Takeover Of Organic

Food systems author and researcher Julie Guthman unpacks the rising influence of Silicon Valley in agriculture, where tech-fueled solutions like hydroponics, vertical farms, and cellular meats are being sold as climate saviors. With a deep understanding of both the organic movement and its co-optation, Guthman offers a critical lens on how the framing of “food as code” is reshaping farming, removing soil from the equation, and consolidating power in the hands of tech elites. This conversation invites listeners to question whether innovation is truly the goal – or whether control is the real harvest.

Our Julie Guthman interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Julie Guthman at her home in California, May 2025:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today to Julie Guthman. Julie, I just interviewed Austin Frerick. I don’t know if you ever read his book “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry,” but it’s a good book about food monopolies.

Dave Chapman 0:19
He said something about you. I said I’m going to interview you shortly. He said, “Oh, she’s my academic heartthrob. I just love her work.” Tell me a little bit about your work. I’m going to let you introduce yourself just a little bit.

Julie Guthman 0:34
Sure. I’ve been a professor at UC Santa Cruz for 21 years. I just retired in December.

Julie Guthman 0:42
Congratulations.

Julie Guthman 0:43
It’s a great time to retire, thanks. If I look over the course of my research career, it’s generally been about various efforts to transform how food and agriculture are done or how food is produced. That ranges from my earlier dissertation project, which I completed at UC Berkeley on organics, to my most recent work on Silicon Valley’s foray into food and agriculture, which has gone on with the assumption that they can do it better than everybody else has.

Julie Guthman 0:45
Yeah. I want to talk about both and some of the points in between.

Julie Guthman 1:05
There’s a lot in between, too.

Dave Chapman 1:06
When you started, you did have some background as an eater who cared about food and cared about organic, I think. You came from a family tradition…

Julie Guthman 1:40
Yeah. My father was a health-food freak from way back when… you know, the “health-food freak” terminology. It was actually tough living with him. I grew up when healthy food was pretty nasty. I had to have carob-chip, whole-wheat, honey cookies and got ice cream once a year, if I was lucky. The good food was not tasty. It was a struggle.

Julie Guthman 2:12
I’d go to friends’ houses and go for the junk food, big time. But anyway, I did come from that. When I went back to get a PhD, it was my third career. I didn’t expect to be a researcher, and I had no idea I would fall into this career trajectory at all.

Dave Chapman 2:34
In earlier life, I think you told me that you used to help organize the EcoFarm conferences. Did I get that right?

Julie Guthman 2:41
No, I’ve attended them. I never organized them.

Dave Chapman 2:44
You weren’t going behind the scenes…

Julie Guthman 2:46
No, I sat on the EcoFarm board for a while, but I was never an organizer at the conference.

Dave Chapman 2:52
Okay, I think EcoFarm board counts for what I had in mind. You came from that tradition, which I think EcoFarm is an amazing place.

Dave Chapman 3:02
It is, yeah.

Dave Chapman 3:05
That was before you started the studies as…

Dave Chapman 3:08
Oh no, no, no.

Dave Chapman 3:09
You were already a PhD at that point?

Julie Guthman 3:11
Yeah. My background is that I was an accountant and a community organizer for a while. I got into studying food and agriculture, not at all related to my background from growing up. But honestly, it was from a seminar that I took in graduate school where the assignment was to research some sort of global commodity chain. That seminar was in 1995 or 1996.

Dave Chapman 3:59
So, about five or six years after the National Organic Program started?

Julie Guthman 4:10
I’m getting the timing wrong. It was…

Dave Chapman 4:20
I’m sorry. The Organic Food Production Act passed in 1998. The National Organic Program didn’t start in 2001.

Julie Guthman 4:28
Let me just say how I got into it. We had to do a group project studying some sort of global commodity chain because this was a time when there was a lot of academic work on the restructuring of the food system, like the growth of soy in all these big commodities. In my group, we said, “Well, what if we do something on salad mix or something in California?”

Julie Guthman 4:51
My professor, who was my advisor, was very excited about that. There were three of us, and we just started off checking it out. We had some hypotheses about what was going on that proved to be true, which was that agribusiness was taking over a lot of organics. Within a few weeks, we talked to some of the new organic supermarkets, several growers, and distributors.

Julie Guthman 5:24
We just learned a lot very quickly and also learned that this whole area had been under-researched by social scientists. I still thought I was going to do my dissertation on something else, and my advisor was like, “Are you nuts? You have this project right before you!” That’s what I ended up doing my dissertation research on. That was the beginning of it.

Julie Guthman 5:47
Yes, I was an eater. In the 1980s, the Bay Area restaurant scene was really booming. I had been going to good restaurants and eating at places like Alice Waters’ restaurant and Stars in San Francisco and eating the great salad mix. That’s what got me interested. But I did not expect to do anything like being a scholar of food and agriculture. It fell into my lap.

Dave Chapman 6:18
Right from the beginning, you were studying this bifurcation in the organic world. One side was what we might call the movement, and the other side is what we might call the industry or the business. They were already pulling apart to some degree, or it started with the movement.

Julie Guthman 6:43
The term “bifurcation” is a term I used early on, or “the conventionalization of organic” is a term that became associated with me. I was seeing that in my research, and I spoke to, I think, 150 growers at the time. There was not a lot of research done, so it was easy to get in the door with people. I purposely sampled growers who had moved from conventional into organic or were conventional growers dabbling in organic.

Julie Guthman 7:22
I did talk to several people who had been organic from the get-go, including some of the people we would associate with the organic food movement, like the people at Full Belly Farms, for example, the usual suspects, or Jim Cochran at Swanton Berry Farms. But I wanted to understand how and why conventional growers were moving into organics. That became the major focus.

Dave Chapman 7:50
What was your experience of those people coming in from conventional agriculture? I know many people who started there and became true organic champions, but I also know many for whom it’s just… I just interviewed a friend of mine, who’s a hydroponic producer, and he never buys organic because he thinks it’s a scam. But he grows a lot of organic as well as a lot of conventional, because he says, “The market demands it, so I do it.”

Julie Guthman 8:25
That’s the gamut that I ran. There were some people who had started in conventional agriculture, who were completely convinced by organic ideals, and who had moved as much acreage as possible to that, and some who were just dabbling in it when the market was right for them, and would go in and out of organics and find acreage to do it on. Some of the rationales were really interesting.

Julie Guthman 8:50
Some growers said, “Well, I was worried that they were going to have my favorite pesticide taken away from me in the regulatory scheme, so I wanted to figure out how I was going to do it without that.” I think that’s an important point that I keep on coming back to in my work today, which is, if growers are worried about having regulations that are going to change the way they’re going to grow things, they’re going to experiment with more agroecological methods.

Julie Guthman 9:21
The main reasons people were going into it were because they saw the light, or because they were worried about pesticide regulation, or because a buyer had asked them to. A lot was that. I talked to a bunch of people – no one really talks about this whole region – in San Diego County who live inland and have two, three, or four acres of avocado or citrus groves. It was like residential real estate with groves. They didn’t care at all about agriculture. They were retirees.

Julie Guthman 9:58
There was a buyer there that was going around saying, “Hey, grow organically, or don’t use anything, and we’ll buy this stuff from you.” There were a few hundred growers of that sort that had no interest in agriculture whatsoever. I purposely did my work in California, in different regions, to understand the regional dynamics, but also its interface with what I understood to be the histories of those regions.

Julie Guthman 10:28
This was an area of San Diego County: orange groves and avocado or more citrus groves. Then this area was like retired aeronautics people.

Dave Chapman 10:41
As somebody from the Northeast who started coming to California to talk about these questions, I don’t know when it was, but I started coming to EcoFarm to give talks and visit farms. I have gotten a bit of an education. California is this amazing place where there’s a lot of what I would call “real organic,” but there’s a lot of what I would call “industrial organic.” It’s the home of industrial fruits and vegetables.

Dave Chapman 11:16
Could you tell me, from your perspective, how you would define “industrial organic”? What does that mean?

Julie Guthman 11:26
I would say “industrial organic” would be growing organic according to the least common denominator of what you can get away with in terms of the regulations, but continuing to monocrop on – maybe not necessarily large acreage… I think we need to be really careful when we talk about what a large farm is, because a large wheat farm, let’s say, is several tens of thousands of acres, right?

Dave Chapman 11:59
Large ones, 20,000 acres, yeah.

Julie Guthman 12:02
A large lettuce operation may be only a few hundred acres, but lettuce is so high value. I have another project we could talk about, if you want, on strawberries, which are extraordinarily high value. I think these days it’s probably a $100,000-per-acre investment. If you look at the value of crops sold, “large” takes on a very different dimension than acreage. I digress there, but I’m less concerned about the size…

Dave Chapman 12:38
Not necessarily about the size, okay.

Julie Guthman 12:39
But the mode of barely following the regulations, more monocrop-oriented. The labor relations… I’ve seen very poor labor relations on organic farms. So, it’s not really about the labor; I think it’s more about the commitment to agroecological methods or not.

Dave Chapman 13:09
We’re going to talk about agroecology in just a minute. I have a friend I met, a mid-scale grower, I would say. Half of his farm is organic and half is conventional. In his heart, I believe he’s an organic farmer, but the market works out for him that he does both.

Dave Chapman 13:35
He told me that his son went to one of the UC schools – I don’t remember which one – and studied agriculture. The organic class was entirely about what you can substitute that’s allowed for what you would like to use that’s prohibited. I thought, “Wow, that’s not organic farming. That is…”

Julie Guthman 13:57
That’s the input substitution.

Dave Chapman 13:59
That’s right.

Julie Guthman 14:00
That’s the other way I would define the industrial models – more the input substitution. I know we’ll talk about the regulation of organic a little bit, but some of them fought really hard to have some of the substances that are questionable as organic– as you well know – included so they could be called “organic.”

Dave Chapman 14:21
Could you give me an example of a substance that was fought for in one…?

Julie Guthman 14:25
It’s been a very long time since I thought about that, but it wasn’t …I don’t remember. The nitrates.

Dave Chapman 14:37
Yeah. They have a lot of hydrolyzed products that are as potent as a chemical fertilizer, and if you don’t dilute them enough, they’ll burn the roots off your plants. Very popular in hydroponics now.

Julie Guthman 14:54
You’re going to cut that part out. But I’m not up to date with that stuff at all.

Dave Chapman 15:02
It’s okay. In your mind, what makes something industrial organic isn’t necessarily a question of scale. It is about a mindset of how people approach it.

Julie Guthman 15:16
It’s a practice. People have various motives. I think it’s a practice. Can you have a diversified farming system on large-acre tracts? I don’t know. There are some limits to that, but I don’t think size is a very good indicator, precisely because the crops differ so much in how you grow them. So, it’s the monocropping, input substitution, and soil methods that aren’t paying attention to replenishing the soil, obviously.

Dave Chapman 15:24
I know that, say, in baby greens, for example, and I think strawberries is another example of these very intensive, very high-value crops. Man, they work that soil. They’re just turning them over so tightly that all of the problems of conventional agriculture start to show up and grow.

Dave Chapman 16:26
To me, it’s interesting that what creates these problems, to a large degree, is the marketplace – the economics of what land is worth, what you’re having to pay for rent if you don’t own it, what the marketplace is demanding, and price. One of the things that you’ve talked about a lot is how good we’ve gotten at making food inexpensive at the cash register.

Julie Guthman 16:59
Absolutely. A lot of these industrial methods are extremely efficient. People see efficiency as a value. It’s not a good value. They’re extremely efficient, and the prices are really cheap.

Julie Guthman 17:15
What do you mean ‘efficient’ there?

Julie Guthman 17:20
The highest yield for the lowest resources. We talk about efficiency as if that’s the greatest good, and I don’t think it is at all because it’s not sustainable.

Dave Chapman 17:30
Okay. Let’s go a little deeper there. I’ve had this conversation with myself and with other people, and I go, “Yeah, but every farmer I know is interested in efficiency,” because they’re trying to figure out how to make a living, but they’re doing it in a very different context. What is the context where the kind of efficiency you’re talking about becomes what dominates your decision-making? What are you leaving out of that? What are the things that are hidden from that?

Julie Guthman 18:04
The long-term ability of the soil and the surroundings to be self-replicating. But it’s also a focus on yield, yield, yield. This is something I really struggle with, because I’ve been in some projects with agricultural scientists. It’s hard to communicate with social scientists who have been arguing for a very long time that producing more does not help farmers, nor does it help food security.

Julie Guthman 18:43
Agricultural scientists are so wedded to the idea that we need to produce as much as possible, and farmers think that too. This came up in my work on strawberries. I was pushing farmers, saying, “Why do you want to find the high-yielding varietal if it’s not flavorful?” or “What else is going on?” They say, “Well, if I don’t do it, somebody else will do it.”

Julie Guthman 19:07
There’s this kind of treadmill effect or collective action problem that growers feel like if they don’t produce as much as possible, they’ll go out of business – which is true, because somebody down the road is producing as much as possible, and the markets adjust to that. Then the farmer who’s trying to produce differently loses out. You have farmers saying, “Well, I need to produce as much as possible.”

Julie Guthman 19:39
Then they’ll complain about low prices. They complain about low prices because markets are constantly flooded with too much supply. So, it doesn’t work. This is the argument I have with agricultural scientists. Like, “It doesn’t make sense to produce this way. What if you lose a little crop and do it with fewer pesticides or no pesticides?”

Dave Chapman 20:02
Yeah, it seems to be a treadmill that nobody knows how to get off of.

Julie Guthman 20:06
Well, it’s a collective action problem. There have been attempts in history to try to have orderly marketing so you don’t always flood the market, but it’s really difficult because farming is very individualized, and farmers want to do what’s best for their operation and aren’t thinking about the collective much.

Dave Chapman 20:25
Yeah. I think the Canadians have come up with some solutions around milk, and they’re better at controlling production in order not to create a glut in the marketplace. I don’t think Americans have done that.

Julie Guthman 20:39
There were milk marketing orders in the past, and there’s been marketing orders around other crops.

Dave Chapman 20:48
We have not quite done. But I just wanted to say one of the interesting developments is, in the organic world, there are obvious examples of monopoly now. Driscoll’s, by their own claim, are over 70% of the organic berry market. Grimmway and Bolthouse are over 80% of the current market. I think this isn’t a good thing.

Julie Guthman 21:18
Yeah, it’s not.

Dave Chapman 21:19
So, why isn’t it a good thing?

Julie Guthman 21:21
Well, because if someone controls the market, they can ultimately control prices, and they control what farmers can do. Driscoll’s is a great operation. It has lots of different arrangements with their growers. Some people are growing for an affiliate company of Driscoll’s, and some are independent growers that sell to Driscoll’s, but they have to use Driscoll’s packaging, and they have to use Driscoll’s varieties that are proprietary.

Julie Guthman 21:52
Driscoll’s doesn’t necessarily say how exactly they can grow, but once you specify the variety and the price, you’re kind of locked into a whole lot of other things. So, it doesn’t give much freedom to do otherwise. When you have proprietary varieties, it’s the privatization of this important thing we call the seed.

Dave Chapman 22:28
Are you familiar with the term chickenization?

Julie Guthman 22:31
I’ve not heard of that term.

Dave Chapman 22:33
It’s what happens in the poultry industry, both meat and eggs, and which I think maybe four companies own 90% of the production. And they have created a relationship…

Julie Guthman 22:49
The contract farming. I know the relation, but I’ve never heard the term “chickenization.”

Dave Chapman 22:54
If you’ve been chickenized…I think Driscoll’s is a more benevolent chickenization than the actual chickenized?

Julie Guthman 23:02
Chicken growers who are contract farmers have absolutely no freedom. They are told exactly what to do. What’s happening there is the companies, probably Tyson Foods, are controlling all the pieces of production but not taking any of the risks.

Julie Guthman 23:24
So, the farmers take the risk. All the kinds of biological risk that happen from getting the eggs and growing them out and having the chickens get diseases, the farmer takes that, and the shipper gets all the consolidated benefits. It’s just a really bad deal for farmers.

Dave Chapman 23:41
Growers take on labor too. The relationship with labor – what’s paid – is up to them.

Julie Guthman 23:47
Yeah. That’s the classic model. I think Driscoll’s is a mixed bag. They’re more benevolent in some areas and not in others. Chickens are really different than strawberries in terms of what kind of control you can have. Driscoll’s will say, “Well, we’ll work across to everyone they want, as long as they use our shipping containers and our varietals.”

Julie Guthman 24:10
But they also have very specific quality standards, and so growers are taught that – like, I think when I was talking to strawberry growers, they were culling 30% of their strawberries, as opposed to the 10% that those growers that were working for Giant were, because of Driscoll’s very specific quality standards. We know that quality, in this case, means size, color, and shape, not taste.

Dave Chapman 24:46
I think that the Driscoll berries used to taste better.

Julie Guthman 24:50
I don’t think they’re very good.

Dave Chapman 24:51
They’ve become pretty cardboardy.

Julie Guthman 24:55
It’s their raspberries that are like…really do nothing from…

Dave Chapman 25:04
I’d like to go into strawberries a bit more, but before we do, a couple of things. One is, you’ve talked about, I would say, the failure of industrial organic to address the needs that organic was trying to address. What are the needs that organic was trying to address that industrial organic doesn’t?

Julie Guthman 25:33
To farm in a more long-term ecological way that doesn’t extract and that replenishes soil and the area around it. This is really old research, so I think about it differently than I used to, but I want to be cautious, because I think… I hope we can talk about organic regulation. I think that farming industrial-organic is better than farming industrial non-organic. If we’re using fewer pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, I’m good with that. I think it’s a good thing.

Dave Chapman 26:29
That’s a step. That’s an important step.

Julie Guthman 26:32
It’s a really important thing. If that’s what allows more farms to use fewer toxic inputs, that’s a good thing. I don’t think that holding up an agroecological ideal – even though that’s my aesthetic preference – is necessarily the right kind of way to think about what the goal is. I’ve always been on the fence there, even though I know what I prefer.

Dave Chapman 27:03
I think we’re all confused about that because we all agree that an industrial organic product is better than an industrial chemical product. However, it’s also not what I think of as organic. I think that the question is, we seem to have a failure of imagination around terminology here.

Julie Guthman 27:25
I also think it really has to do with the choice the organic movement made in terms of regulation. That’s been the key thing I’ve been talking about for 25 years now – or 30, whatever it is. I understand why, at the time that organic farmers first started dreaming up having a certification system, they didn’t really believe they could stop chemical agriculture in any other way.

Julie Guthman 28:32
So, they came up with this voluntary labeling system where – we know the stories – the first standards for organic you could write on half a piece of paper: that we can’t use this, you can’t use that. You know it when you see it, and it became this hugely elaborate system of regulation.

Julie Guthman 28:32
There have been lots of critiques made – I’m sure you’ve interviewed all the people – about how the regulations fall short in terms of what they allow and don’t allow, and that’s a really important story. But the part of the story that doesn’t get enough attention is how the system of regulation itself created a barrier to widespread proliferation of organic techniques.

Julie Guthman 29:32
The reason is because organic proved to be a lucrative market, particularly in the beginning, and you had these conventional growers coming into it. Then the organic movement people reacted to that by saying, “Well, we need stronger standards. We need to uphold our standards,” which is a good thing. But on the other hand, what they were essentially doing is saying, “We want to limit the market” – by having the standard – rather than saying, “How can we encourage more people to grow this way?”

Julie Guthman 29:32
First of all, if the incentive is to encourage organic by a higher price premium – which is what the label was doing – it only works if you keep that price premium high. And that price premium only stays high if you limit who can grow organically. That’s what was motivating a lot of people to come in as organic – they want the price premium.

Julie Guthman 29:32
The movement’s organic growers were saying, “Okay, sure, but we want to have these high standards,” but we’re also trying to limit the market to keep our prices high. It’s a system of regulation that is discouraging movement into less toxic techniques. Am I making sense here?

Julie Guthman 27:37
You are. I have a few things to say, but go ahead.

Julie Guthman 30:13
I rethought this again when I was working on alternative proteins, which are trying to substitute for conventional livestock. I think alternative proteins – most of them – are ridiculous, but I think conventional livestock production is horrific. What you see the alternative protein producers saying is, “Well, we don’t think we can change industrial livestock, so we’re going to create an alternative in the form of these fake plant-based meats, or cellular meats, or fermented proteins that are going to seem like meat someday.”

Julie Guthman 31:03
But those alternatives are not marketable – or they’re not economic – because conventional production is so damn cheap. Rather than saying, “Let’s figure out a way to regulate conventional agriculture – which, not only should we regulate anyway because it’s done so horrifically, but that would make alternative proteins more marketable, more economic” – they’re not doing that. They’re saying, “We’re just creating an alternative.”

Julie Guthman 31:36
That’s exactly what happened with organic. It’s like, “Rather than trying to think about how to undermine the worst sort of conventional production” – which would make it more expensive if you had to meet higher regulations of conventional – they said, “No, let’s create an alternative.”

Dave Chapman 31:54
So, instead of saying, “We need to reform the farming practices of what we call conventional,” we instead said, “Let’s create a bar for a better kind of agriculture and let them be bad.” Because, to be fair, when I started in this, which was, God knows, 1978 or something, I don’t know, the thought of us limiting conventional agriculture was so absurd. Nobody cared what we thought in the USDA at all.

Dave Chapman 32:37
I don’t think we were trying to create a price premium by creating standards – I think we were trying to figure out for ourselves what we meant by organic. I know the early days – it was like we were sitting here reading books that were 30-40 years old, trying to go, “I think it would be this. I think it would be that.”

Julie Guthman 33:00
I don’t think the original goal was to create a price premium, but that’s the effect of the way this voluntary label played out. I completely understand why the movement couldn’t go after conventional in the same way – like, right now we’re going to hold on, in this particular political moment (which I can talk at length about), we’re going to hold on to every kind of environmental regulation we can.

Julie Guthman 33:28
I see that it was politically difficult, but therein lies the problem. It gave consumers a way to opt out – it did not address… most consumers didn’t have the capability of opting out. For farmers that were already under the fold of organics, it gave them the incentive to protect that, because that’s how they were staying alive financially, rather than think about, “How can we proliferate this?”

Julie Guthman 33:59
The conventional growers I spoke to at the time saw this. They said, “You all wanted us to grow organic, and we’re being told, ‘You can’t do it this way. You can’t do it that way’.” It’s a conundrum. It’s hard to make excuses for industrial organic, because it’s a real conundrum. It’s like, “How can you uphold standards that are voluntary and still spread this practice?” It ultimately is a goal – you would like to have as many people growing agroecologically as possible.

Dave Chapman 34:38
It was a debate in the very beginning in the Soil Association in England, which I think was the first organization that came up with standards. It was a debate between Lady Eve Balfour, Patrick Holden, and his friends, who were called the Young Turks. The Young Turks said, “We need standards. We need to create a certification.” They did say, “Because we’re trying to make a living, and there’s no way that people in the marketplace can understand what we’re doing is different unless we create a standard.”

Dave Chapman 34:45
I know that Lady Eve thought, “I’m not sure you can define organic in that way.” There was a lot of resistance from the older folks, admittedly, most of whom were quite wealthy independently – so they didn’t have to worry about how to sell this stuff and how to make a living.

Dave Chapman 35:31
I think that they both had really good points – that maybe we can’t reduce this into a bunch of definitions, and it’s a way of thinking, and then it’s a way of behaving differently, and at the same time, if we don’t create standards, this will never grow.

Julie Guthman 35:52
I totally see the rationales on both sides. But here we are. What is it? Like, still 1% of acreage in the United States is organic?

Dave Chapman 36:02
Yes. That’s a little bit of a lie. Seven percent of the food is organic. There’s a lot of imports. Also, acreage in California is 9% is organic?

Julie Guthman 36:15
California is a huge percentage of it – a lot of the sales.

Dave Chapman 36:19
But of acrerage, I think it’s 9% of the acreage in California?

Julie Guthman 36:24
Probably.

Dave Chapman 36:24
Thirteen percent in Vermont, by the way. We’re the national leader.

Julie Guthman 36:27
There’s much more in Italy, I think. That’s all great, but still, considering how much organic has grabbed the public imagination, it’s still kind of disproportionately low. How many consumers imagine that they’re buying organics? The surveys always say, “Oh, yeah, I buy organics.” Maybe they buy organic milk – but it doesn’t square with the fairly low percentage of sales and certainly low acreage at this point.

Dave Chapman 37:03
I’ve pondered this because I thought, “How is this possible? You got 7% of the sales and 1% of the agricultural land?” When you look at your number for California, 9%, and you look at Vermont, 13%, and the coasts are higher, and then you look at the Midwest, and it’s much less than 1%.

Dave Chapman 37:29
They’re growing commodity crops, which do have a market for organic commodity crops, for the CAFOs, the confinements, which shouldn’t be certified as organic anyway, but a lot of that’s imported. Two-thirds of the soy, almost half of the corn. How is it that somebody in Turkey or Africa can compete with an American farmer on corn and soy? One has to wonder if they are, in fact, playing by the same rules.

Dave Chapman 38:00
For a berry crop, you can imagine it because of the cost of labor, which we can talk about, but for something as mechanized as grain production, it doesn’t make sense, except that you think it’s fraud. For me, I’m fascinated by the places in which we short-circuit capitalism. It’s funny because as I’ve gone through this, I wouldn’t have said I was a great champion of capitalism when I began. I’m not sure I’m a champion now, but I see that there’s a brilliance to it.

Dave Chapman 38:34
If you read Austin Frerick’s book, there’s a foreword by Eric Schlosser. It’s all quoting Adam Smith. He’s saying, “The absolute enemy of capitalism is monopoly, and it’s the job of the government to defend us from monopoly.” You go, “Okay, well, that’s interesting because our version of capitalism is all monopoly. The unregulated system becomes monopolistic. It’s what happens.”

Julie Guthman 39:04
I think monopoly is a big problem, but I don’t think it’s only monopoly that’s a problem for agriculture. I think capitalism ultimately is a problem here. The other thing that gets too little attention, that I’ve written a lot about – it came up in my organic project and my strawberry project – is the role of land values. Agricultural land is valued based on the most you can get out of that land, including for commercial uses.

Julie Guthman 39:38
If it goes from agricultural land to suburbs, it’s because that land… Land is a scarce resource on Earth. I found this early on when I was doing my dissertation research. It’s like, “How is it that this person is able to grow organically using rotations on this piece of land?” Like, let’s say, in the Napa area?

Julie Guthman 40:08
They say, “Oh, well, they inherited the land from a previous generation.” Once I started thinking about the land issue and realizing that growers who were leasing and had to make payments on land could not afford to take land out of production for fallowing, for compost, for cover crops, or whatever.

Dave Chapman 40:31
In California land values are so high. What does an acre of lettuce or strawberry land go for these days?

Julie Guthman 40:40
I think it’s very hard to disaggregate because those two crops happen to be near commercial uses, because both lettuce and strawberries do really well on the coast, wherever [inaudible 0:40:55] to live. It’s really hard to separate…

Dave Chapman 40:57
What does an acre of land cost there? I’m just curious, if you…

Julie Guthman 41:00
I don’t know about these days, but the last time I looked, Strawberry Land was something like $4,000 per year to lease, and not necessarily with the impending real estate pressures. I did track a few strawberry land sales, and they were going for around $100,000 an acre or something like that. That was about 10 years ago.

Dave Chapman 41:32
If you’re going to make your living off that land you have to farm intensively.

Julie Guthman 41:41
In a model system, what happens is the grower figures out how to get more from that piece of land. The landowner – let’s assume it’s a lease rate arrangement – then says, “Oh, well, then I’m going to just charge you more for that land.” The way in which these systems get embedded into land values makes it hard to change. Some of the most successful organic growers in California whom I know best are those that are farming outside of the usual land markets where there’s that kind of real estate pressure.

Dave Chapman 42:22
They’re finding situations in which landowners support their mission.

Julie Guthman 42:27
For instance, Jim Cochran, who… I think they’ve really cut down on their acreage because he lost land to a fire, actually, but he’s grown on conservation easement land. He’s a strawberry grower…

Dave Chapman 42:39
I’ll be interviewing him in two days. He’s great.

Julie Guthman 42:43
I haven’t seen him in a long time.

Dave Chapman 42:44
So many stories to tell because, of course, his labor conversation is amazing too. I want to go to several things we’ve touched on. But first, there’s a big thing that I struggle with when I listen to you. That is that you’re clear about the devastation and the destruction of industrial organic – the ways in which it’s failing us. But you’re not exactly celebratory of the alternative, which is the farmers’ markets and the CSAs, because you’ve called them out for being something that only people who are more affluent can access.

Dave Chapman 42:56
I don’t think you have to be really affluent to do those, but certainly, you’re probably not broke, you’re not struggling, you’re not food insecure. I’m just curious, because it seems like if you say, “Well, that’s fine for some people, but if we need something that’s going to transform everything, then we’ve got to start with the big corporations and change them,” at the same time, we’re saying, “The big corporations literally cannot solve our problems because they’re big corporations.” It leaves me with no place to go.

Julie Guthman 44:01
I get that. Look, those critiques of farmers markets and CSAs I wrote maybe 15 or 20 years ago are pretty old critiques, and I do think that the alternative movement – since I wrote those critiques – has been more aware of its race and class exclusions and has really tried to address those. I’m not super critical of them. I just don’t think that they’re necessarily enough.

Julie Guthman 44:38
It’s the same logic of, like, the thing about the relationship between industrial organic and agroecological organic. We’ve got to create institutions, practices, and incentives for those that move people along. I know it’s been called “farming in the middle” for farmers, but some way in which to broaden the umbrella to encourage better practices, rather than only thinking about the way to support the most precise, perfect practices.

Dave Chapman 45:19
Good. It’s a perfect transition to “regenerative.” I would disagree with the description of what I do as “precious.” I would disagree that it’s fundamentalist or narrow. I think it’s the way most of the food has been grown in history – not always well; some of those practices were destructive, and civilizations crumbled as a result.

Dave Chapman 45:48
But I think that the radicals here are the practitioners of chemical agriculture. I think that this is a new idea, truly untested, and it’s already showing enormous cracks.

Julie Guthman 46:02
I have nothing to say that’s good about it.

Dave Chapman 46:04
Let’s talk for a minute about regenerative and agroecological. You use the term “agroecological” sometimes, and it’s a beautiful world movement. I’ve talked to people, and when they described it, they said, “That sounds like real organic to me.”

Dave Chapman 46:31
They say, “Yes, but we are adamantly political. We must be political. That is part of the movement.” I just want to say that I now know wonderful college professors who are professors of agroecology, and they’re not very political. I’m just curious. It changes as it grows.

Julie Guthman 46:52
I know several people doing research on regenerative, and I’m not really, really up to date with it. But as far as I can tell, regenerative has that same sort of – what’s the word I’m looking for? – loose meanings that organic has. It means different things for different people. It can be just like trying to do, like, carbon-smart.

Julie Guthman 46:52
I know that there are some big financiers that are really into regen, so I don’t know what to make of all that. I’m not an expert on it. I’m less concerned with the name we ascribe to these things than that we do practices that are diversified. Diversified farming is another kind of code for non-industrial but that are soil-friendly, and don’t use toxic inputs. So, I don’t care what we call it.

Julie Guthman 47:30
There seems to be so much kind of effort put into defining the term and figuring out what that term is, and it’s always going to be appropriated by others. Let’s figure out a way to encourage good practices and not get caught up with the definitions that then lead to these efforts to protect the definition. I know this goes against what you’ve been doing, but you’re protecting the definition rather than thinking like, “How are we going to think about a politics that encourages better practices?”

Dave Chapman 48:22
I think it’s doomed. General Mills is one of… all of big food supports regenerative now. They all say, “We are pledged to go regenerative.” They give a year by which, and all of that. It’s pretty much bubbe meise, to use an old Yiddish term. I remember at Expo West, which is a huge natural foods trade show, General Mills – the first year they put out a regenerative stand – it was like a block long.

Dave Chapman 48:56
Just huge displays. They’d always been organic. That had been what they celebrated. Not this year. This year, it was all about regenerative. Arran Stephens, who is the founder of Nature’s Path, was there. He competes with their organic brand. He went up and asked them, “What does this mean?” Actually, the people in the stand had no idea.

Julie Guthman 49:18
No one knows what it means.

Dave Chapman 49:19
No one knows what it means. General Mills has gone on to say, “We don’t really believe in a standard or a definition” – just what you’re saying. “We want to encourage farmers to do better and to embrace these organic techniques. But we’re going to strip it of all that scary stuff for the Midwesterners, who apparently are terrified of people like you and me, and so they don’t want to do anything that came from Berkeley or Vermont.” Okay, but I’ve seen it weaponized against organic.

Julie Guthman 49:52
Totally. When I was doing that research, all the “beyond organic” labels were weaponized against organic. I totally understand the motives behind real organic, for example. I completely understand, and I’m really sympathetic to it, but I’m also sympathetic to how we move people along some sort of spectrum.

Dave Chapman 50:17
I support the regenerative that is helping to move people along. I do. I always have, until I started to find I had a lot of darts in my back. I’m like, “Why am I being attacked by these people who are trying to move others toward a more organic kind of agriculture?” I remember talking to Gabe Brown a long time ago, and I told him what we were doing. He said, “I don’t really care about certification.”

Dave Chapman 50:44
I thought, “Well, sure you don’t, because you’re one of the best marketers in America. You don’t need any kind of labeling; you are your label.” Now he’s started Regenified, which is a for-profit thing, and it’s going to be big. It’s got standards – they have nothing to do with chemical use. They’re all about the good things they do but not mentioning the bad things they do. Herbicides impact soil too.

Julie Guthman 51:11
I understand that to be the truth. You’re not tilling, so you’re using herbicides. That’s bad.

Dave Chapman 51:22
It’s a wild world out there.

Julie Guthman 51:23
It’s a wild world, and I know that what I think is not politically feasible at this moment. I don’t know what is politically feasible at this moment. That’s a very serious question, because right now, my biggest priority across everything is to not have fascism in this country. I don’t even know what to think about how to make a better food system under the conditions under which we live today.

Dave Chapman 51:53
You wanted to talk about how we change regulation or law which is connected to this?

Julie Guthman 52:02
Yeah. But it’s a hard go. I think that there’s only so much we can do in building alternatives without undermining the stuff we think is wrong. Building alternatives alone doesn’t undermine it. We’ve seen that with organic. It coexisted side by side. It’s why the alternative protein market – which I don’t think is a great thing, but it’s a good analogy – is not taking off.

Julie Guthman 52:02
Why would people buy a gross, highly processed, plant-based burger? The die-hard vegans will, if they really want that burger, when you can get a regular burger for much, much cheaper. You’ve got to figure out a way to make the bad stuff more expensive, and the way you make it more expensive is to regulate it…

Julie Guthman 52:04
That’s very good. I’ve always been challenged because you go, “Well, organic becomes the food of the elite because it costs more.” It does cost more, and it shouldn’t cost more because it’s organic. It should cost more because of the practices. But conventional should have the same practices.

Julie Guthman 53:16
Conventional shouldn’t be so cheap. It’s cheap because you can use whatever, and there’s no way in which you care about the future. It’s extractive, to use a more current term than I used 25 years ago.

Dave Chapman 53:38
That’s right. It’s extractive. There are two perspectives. One I think of as Eliot Coleman, and one I think of as Al Gore. Eliot Coleman is like, “Screw them. I don’t care. I’m going to do it my way, and the people who care will find me.” He’s not exactly just a lone person off in the woods because he was quoted in many national publications and has taught thousands of people through books.

Dave Chapman 54:14
Al Gore, on the other hand… Lots of people hate Al Gore for reasons that are confusing, but they do. I interviewed him once, and we got more grief about interviewing Al Gore. I’m like, “What’s the big problem?” His famous line is, “As good as it is to change the light bulbs, it’s more important to change the laws.”

Dave Chapman 54:39
His focus has been on how do we create national change by changing the laws? Whether it happens to be about climate or happens to be about the food system, which are so intertwined we can’t separate them. You would say, “I love what Eliot’s doing, but I think that Al has a point.”

Julie Guthman 55:05
Eliot is a very controversial figure for reasons you know. But sure, putting him aside, I’d like to eat his chickens.

Dave Chapman 55:16
We can pick one of 500 farmers to put in that role who have said, “We’re going to change it, and we don’t care what the laws are.”

Julie Guthman 55:25
I’m very much in the Al Gore camp. Ultimately, both happen together. You need to learn how to do the alternatives to fill in when you undermine conventional. But you have to do that. How do you do that? You change the way we subsidize agriculture, and we change the way we regulate environmental pesticides. Those are all really politically difficult. I know that, but that’s ultimately what it’s going to take.

Julie Guthman 55:39
There are examples: when there’s been a modicum of regulation, you see changes in practices, and that goes to the strawberries. I’m on this committee that I won’t tell you much about, but it’s driving me insane. But my point over and over again – because we’re looking at what the barriers are to moving to our alternatives to fumigants. I said the barriers are that we still are allowed to use fumigants.

Julie Guthman 55:25
Let’s spend 5–10 minutes on strawberries. For people who don’t understand what a fumigant is and why they have to use it in strawberries, could you explain that?

Julie Guthman 56:11
Soil fumigant is one of several highly toxic inputs used in strawberry production. Fumigants kill soilborne pests – mainly nematodes (little worms) and weeds, to an extent – but mainly they’re used for soilborne fungi that, if they get into the plant, weaken and kill the plant. Methyl bromide was…

Dave Chapman 57:14
Why is it that these fungi are attacking the strawberries? Was this always the case that all strawberries in the world were attacked?

Julie Guthman 57:22
No. The main fungus that drove a lot of the development of fumigants was Verticillium dahliae, which is everywhere. But when you grow a monocrop year after year, the fungi are going to be attracted to that.

Dave Chapman 57:45
So, without any crop rotation.

Julie Guthman 57:47
Without any crop rotation. The fumigants allow them not to have crop rotation. Strawberries are particularly interesting because you can grow strawberries organically or agroecologically – however we want to call it – if they’re a minor crop in a diversified system. And if you put in a brassica before the strawberries, the brassicas have mild fumigation qualities.

Julie Guthman 58:17
But strawberries are grown in monocrops in California. Fumigation allows you to grow strawberries year after year on the same block, because after you harvest strawberries, you fumigate the soil, kill all the remaining pests again, and then you plant again.

Dave Chapman 58:34
It’s interesting to me. I think that we eat a lot more strawberries than we used to. They used to be a special treat. You’d have them for three weeks a year, four weeks a year. They were delicious. Everyone was so excited when the strawberries came in.

Dave Chapman 58:50
Now they’re in every supermarket in America, every day of the year. They don’t taste very good. They’re big, red, and they last forever in your refrigerator. We have shifted our eating habits based on the omnipresence of these strawberries.

Julie Guthman 59:11
It’s interesting because strawberries, like many other crops, have had systematic overproduction. They come up with new techniques to create more yield, and then they have to find the markets. They started fumigating in the 1960s, but then they created varietals that produced more – varietals that are tasteless and last long. All the things you just described are from varietal development, but they always had gluts.

Julie Guthman 59:13
One of the things that the California Strawberry Commission did was create more marketing around strawberries, calling them a superfood. I’ve talked to a lot of people, and they say, “This is the only thing my kid will eat.” They live in New York, or wherever. They go, “This is the only thing my kid will eat. I need those strawberries.” And I get it. But it’s been heavily marketed. The strawberry growers are like, “Well, people want this.” But they produced that market.

Dave Chapman 1:00:18
Right. It’s interesting because, in the production of the berries for that market, it’s not so good – the way they’re produced. There are real problems.

Julie Guthman 1:00:29
There are real problems. Strawberries have the most intense pesticide regime of any crop in California. That’s saying a lot. It’s not only the fumigation, but also antifungals and basic pesticides. This is nasty.

Dave Chapman 1:00:53
We’ve got these very expensive strawberries. They come from around the world. It’s not just California because they want to have…

Julie Guthman 1:01:03
California grows 90% of the country’s, and I think exports… Well, is it that 30% are exported, or that…?

Dave Chapman 1:01:12
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, I didn’t know that. 90% of America strawberries that are produced here are produced in California because of the climate.

Julie Guthman 1:01:23
Yeah, because you can grow strawberries for nine months a year in California, sometimes 10 months a year. Most strawberries are grown on the coast. They call it Eternal Spring because it’s never super hot, and so you can grow strawberries all through the summer and into the fall. In certain years, I’ve seen locally grown strawberries at the farmers market into December.

Dave Chapman 1:01:54
Yes. I’ve noticed that I don’t see those locally grown strawberries in the supermarkets.

Julie Guthman 1:02:01
No. They’re mainly Driscoll’s and Giant strawberries. I buy all my strawberries from the farmers market.

Dave Chapman 1:02:12
I’m noticing that even though it appears that we have more choices all the time, I think we have fewer choices. Those choices exist if you go to the farmers market, but a lot of things that… There was this little golden age, I would have said it was about 10 years ago, where the supermarkets were buying locally.

Julie Guthman 1:02:39
That’s how the natural supermarkets were kind of marketing. Whole Foods is horrible.

Dave Chapman 1:02:44
I sold to Hannaford, Stop & Shop, and Shaw’s in the Northeast. They all had local programs. We had crews coming out with video cameras, and there was a change going on. I was like, “This is fantastic. This is actually working.” That’s all gone now.

Julie Guthman 1:03:08
I hadn’t really thought about it, but you’re absolutely right. That was a big thing where they’d always show the photos of the farmer on the wall. Yeah, you’re right. That’s disappeared. You’re right.

Dave Chapman 1:03:20
One of the things is that all the chains I just mentioned were all bought up by other multinationals.

Julie Guthman 1:03:26
Yeah, like Amazon.

Dave Chapman 1:03:28
Amazon, Ahold USA, Albertsons…

Julie Guthman 1:03:32
Another problem with consolidation.

Dave Chapman 1:03:35
Another problem with consolidation. It has a real impact on what food is available to people.

Julie Guthman 1:03:41
Absolutely. On the other hand, as an avid farmers market grower, despite all my critiques, we buy probably 80% or 90% of our produce at the farmers market. I think bananas would be the exception, and the occasional mango. You have choices, and I have more choices in California than you do in Vermont.

Dave Chapman 1:04:01
We’re very good in the summer, but the summer is not long.

Julie Guthman 1:04:06
I can do it year-round, but I’m only buying… Every time I see a New York Times recipe with tomatoes in April, I’m like, “What? You can’t do that!” It does get the seasonal stuff. I do it all the time, but sometimes you go, “God, it would be nice to have a tomato in this dish.”

Dave Chapman 1:04:32
That’s what I do. I grow tomatoes out of season in the greenhouse.

Julie Guthman 1:04:38
Have you heard of the California dry-farm tomatoes?

Dave Chapman 1:04:40
Yeah.

Julie Guthman 1:04:41
They’re exceptional.

Dave Chapman 1:04:41
Yeah, I’ve heard that they’re exceptional. I know. We don’t have a dry season. It’s not a thing. I have tortured plants near to death, and they were very good. Right here, all you have to do is not irrigate, and you’re torturing them. But they’re very good. They’re really good.

Dave Chapman 1:05:04
Before we go, let’s check in on our dear friends in big tech and their belief that they have solutions to all our problems in agriculture. For me, the most poignant example is the company Plenty.

Julie Guthman 1:05:22
Yeah, that’s already out of business.

Dave Chapman 1:05:24
Which was started by Elon’s brother, Kimball, and had investment from Bezos and others.

Julie Guthman 1:05:34
Square Roots was started by one of his brothers.

Dave Chapman 1:05:38
I know Kimball did Plenty, and he might have done Square Roots, or maybe it evolved into it. But it’s an aeroponic company. They grow this wall of greens, and on the other side the roots are hanging, and they miss it. It’s the most extreme version of hydroponic. The interesting thing about it is it never worked financially.

Julie Guthman 1:06:04
No, it didn’t. That’s why they all went out of business. Because the thing with the techies getting into food and agriculture is that they haven’t defined the problem very well. It’s not clear what problem they’re trying to solve with hydroponics. It’s a presumption that there’s a shortage of land.

Julie Guthman 1:06:25
Land scarcity and land shortage are not exactly the same, but the assumption is that there’s a shortage of land, and so growing indoors will be more resource efficient. But it takes tons of resources to grow hydroponically. The fake meats that they want to grow in bioreactors. They act as if those won’t exist in space somewhere, and that it won’t take all the energy required and the metal for bioreactors.

Julie Guthman 1:06:52
Some of the hydroponic operations use all sorts of Styrofoam and plastics. It’s like many things in tech; they try to mystify how this stuff is grown, but it’s very resource intensive. But it’s not clear what problem they’re trying to solve.

Dave Chapman 1:06:52
Yes, I think of the aeroponics as a Ponzi scheme. They only flourish as long as new investors come in and buy the old…

Julie Guthman 1:07:30
It’s already falling apart. I started doing this research on the tech sector in food and agriculture. When did we start? Maybe 2017; I’m not remembering exactly right now. But it was a time when the sector was just getting going. I just fell upon it toward the end of my strawberry project, in part because some people were talking about growing strawberries in substrate to avoid putting them in the soil, and also because of the labor shortages; they’re talking about robotic strawberry harvesters – they still are.

Julie Guthman 1:08:12
That kind of got me into it, but I was just deeply curious about how Silicon Valley thought they could fix things that no one else could, or they imagined no one else could. It was just starting to blossom. There were events all the time, and all this money pouring into it. Now it’s just like the latest… that’s how the tech industry works.

Dave Chapman 1:08:35
They’re very good at marketing.

Julie Guthman 1:08:36
They’re very good at marketing. They’re very good at the hype.

Dave Chapman 1:08:38
Yeah, they are.

Julie Guthman 1:08:39
But the vertical farms have totally gone belly up. The plant-based meats aren’t doing that well, and most of the rest of what they are offering is digital agriculture, robotics, and/or digital information systems where they’re just sucking up farmers’ data and giving it back to them. That’s probably going to persist, but it’s still not clear what problems it solves. What do the farmers need the data for if they can go and walk their fields?

Julie Guthman 1:09:10
Well, if they’re big enough, they might need the data because they can’t walk their fields, but it’s really not clear what kind of problems it’s solving. I think that’s the main thing with that. It’s also a mismatch of what Silicon Valley can offer and what farmers’ needs are. Because agriculture and food, as we know, are fundamentally biological and biophysical, including the soil, and they’re offering a bunch of digital solutions.

Julie Guthman 1:09:37
It’s like, “What farmers need are better treatments to substitute for toxic chemicals.” If you want to get rid of toxicity in agriculture, okay, come up with a biological product. I’m not saying that’s the best way, but they could be going in that direction. But they don’t. This is digital.

Dave Chapman 1:09:58
I do think that one of the things that sort of defines organic agriculture is that it’s information-intensive. In real organic, it’s not so much that you’re buying inputs; you are understanding how to work with biology. From that perspective, I think that the information revolution has a lot to offer, but in terms of turning it into an app, maybe that will come.

Dave Chapman 1:10:35
But I don’t think that that’s the point. I think that the point is it’s pretty helpful to go to YouTube and be able to draw from 1,000 or 100,000 farmers and see what their solutions are.

Julie Guthman 1:10:51
You can have AI combing through farmer solutions.

Dave Chapman 1:10:54
Yeah, it’s going to change everything. Some of it is going to be good, and some is going to be bad. You’ve written a whole book about the fact that big tech is trying to solve problems that aren’t problems, that they don’t understand because they’re just understanding them from their perspective. It’s not that their tools are necessarily useless; it’s that their application of their tools often is useless.

Julie Guthman 1:11:31
I think it varies. A lot of times, a lot of what’s coming out of Silicon Valley is applications or tools that have been used in other arenas, and they’re looking for new markets for them. Even the cellular meat came from medical uses when they were regenerating organs. They thought, “Oh, we can make meat from cells?” I think that was true for the digital things too. It’s like, “Well, we’ve saturated this market. Let’s find a new place to put it.”

Julie Guthman 1:12:03
I think that’s part of it. I call that solutionism in the book. But I think there’s a big part of the techno-fix too. It’s like, “Here are these worldly problems of climate change, food insecurity, and environmental toxicity or whatever. How can we fix this?”

Julie Guthman 1:12:23
If you come with a very narrow set of tools… what we’ve been talking about, these are social problems or political problems that need political action. A techno-fix is just going to try to solve it with technology and is not going to address these fundamental problems.

Dave Chapman 1:12:40
We have to go to the Green Revolution for a minute. I think that was one of the first examples of this. “We know better; we have figured out a lot of stuff. Let’s go, and now we will save the people of Mexico and India.” Now Bill Gates is trying to save the people of Africa.

Dave Chapman 1:12:40
Because they didn’t want to address land reform. They said, “Oh, we know that there’s a problem of hunger in the former colonies.” The Green Revolution came at a time when there were red revolutions all over the place, and so it was driven by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

Julie Guthman 1:13:06
They wanted to keep the world capitalist-friendly, and they wanted to suppress any kind of socialist revolution or even land reform. The Green Revolution was an alternative to this kind of a social solution, which is to rethink the distribution of land. So, let’s just develop high-yielding varieties and feed the world that way.

Dave Chapman 1:13:54
High-yielding varieties, irrigation systems, the whole pack of chemicals, and mechanization. What’s fascinating is that not only did it ignore land reform, it made it much worse.

Julie Guthman 1:14:09
Absolutely, because it created all sorts of consolidation among farmers. A lot of farmers became landless as they lost their land when they couldn’t afford the packages.

Dave Chapman 1:14:18
Thank you. That’s a very clear explanation. When I started, I thought, “Well, the Green Revolution, that was good. It saved millions of people.” As I dived in and I started talking to people – Hans Herren is fantastic on this – it’s like, “No. It’s not what happened.” What did happen is that we were trying to replicate Iowa in Mexico, and to the degree that we succeeded, now they have the same problems that Iowa has.

Julie Guthman 1:14:49
Yeah, absolutely.

Dave Chapman 1:14:54
I have a friend, Annelise Orleck, who is an academic at Dartmouth, and she’s a labor historian. She’s an expert on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire – I’m an expert on it too. She spoke at the 100th anniversary a few years ago. She taught me the impact of that. It was a fire; a lot of people died, and people were locked in on – whatever, at the fifth floor, sixth floor – in the garment district there.

Dave Chapman 1:15:30
They had no choice but to jump out the window. If they stayed in, they died; if they jumped out, they died. They all died. It was in 1920 or something like that. The burned bodies were lined up on the street. This is in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but not that far from Wall Street. They were taking pictures, and people were coming by, and Frances Perkins was there, who went on to become the Secretary of Labor under Roosevelt.

Dave Chapman 1:16:11
It was a turning point in the American labor movement. It was a turning point because people saw the terrible outcome of bad laws and regulations – that these people were not protected. They saw their bodies, and they said, “This is not okay, and we won’t put up with it.” The laws changed, OSHA was created, and a lot of things happened as a result of that fire.

Dave Chapman 1:16:37
What’s really grim is, at the 100th anniversary, there was a woman, Kalpona Akter, who came from Bangladesh. The same thing is happening there now – weekly fires, people dying, no labor laws, people working incredible hours for very, very little pay – but they have no choice, and we get really cheap clothes. So cheap they’re throwaway. “You want a free T-shirt? You want a free sweatshirt?” “I got too many.”

Dave Chapman 1:17:13
The reason this happens is because we don’t see the fire. It happened far away, someplace else. I think that this is true of lots of things. Certainly, it’s true with labor in agriculture. Most of the labor in agriculture in the U.S. happens in California.

Dave Chapman 1:17:31
Now, 40% of the vegetables come from Mexico or elsewhere, and 60% of the berries; we don’t see that at all. At this point, right now, do you know what an American worker, probably undocumented, is being paid in the strawberry fields?

Julie Guthman 1:17:57
They have to make minimum wage.

Dave Chapman 1:18:00
Which is? In California it’s high.

Julie Guthman 1:18:03
Yeah. It’s over $15 at this point, but the way they do that is with piece rates. Almost all strawberries are picked with piece rates entirely, or a combination of piece and wage rates. The way you meet piece rates to make the minimum wage is, if you’re the worker, you have to be running the entire time.

Julie Guthman 1:18:33
The people who work in strawberries and survive it are young men who can run through the fields, because they’re picking, picking, picking, picking, and then they’re putting them in boxes and running back to the truck to measure them.

Julie Guthman 1:18:50
They make over minimum wage. The growers love to talk about how the workers are so happy because they’re making more than minimum wage, and they’re not having to work all day long because they’re working so fast. But it’s under horrific conditions.

Dave Chapman 1:19:10
They’re really working hard.

Julie Guthman 1:19:14
Yeah. We’re talking about nine crates. A crate has 12 baskets in an hour, kind of minimum. That’s a lot.

Dave Chapman 1:19:29
Having done some of that kind of work, I have nothing but respect for the people who are doing that. But now, let’s go down to Mexico. What are they getting paid for doing the same work?

Julie Guthman 1:19:44
I don’t know, but it would be much, much lower. No more than 10% of that is what my guess would be, but I don’t know.

Dave Chapman 1:19:53
Last I heard, it was under $2 an hour – more like $1. I’m sure they’re hustling too. Now we have a situation – two things. One is people going, “Isn’t it wonderful that I can get berries every day for my breakfast?” They don’t think that somebody who picked them is getting paid $10 a day. That’s because it’s far, far away. If it were in their town, they would be pretty uncomfortable with that, I think.

Julie Guthman 1:20:28
We would hope.

Dave Chapman 1:20:29
Well, I think a lot of people would. That’s the point.

Julie Guthman 1:20:32
That’s just like the deportations we’re seeing. When people see them close up, they’re pretty offended by them.

Dave Chapman 1:20:36
That’s right. We’re getting that in Vermont as well.

Julie Guthman 1:20:47
When they know them. I didn’t know my neighbor.

Dave Chapman 1:20:49
They know them. There’s some brilliant guy who’s out giving talks, and everyone loves and respects, and they’re being arrested by ICE. They go, “Wait, this can’t be.” Do you think, as you’ve studied labor and agriculture, what’s your best hope?

Julie Guthman 1:21:16
To your point, I think that consumers will get offended. Consumers supported the United Farm Workers in the ’60s in their efforts, but I think the best hope is a strong labor movement, and we’re seeing some resurgence of that right now. We have in the last few years. I don’t know any other way to do it.

Julie Guthman 1:21:42
For example – and I’m not the first person to say this – a label that says, “We pay our workers better; we have better working conditions,” isn’t going to cut it unless the workers are involved in that. You have the union label to do that. It can’t be growers saying to the public, “I’m a better employer.” It has to be workers organizing amongst themselves and getting what they need from their workplaces.

Dave Chapman 1:22:08
The challenge is that whatever label… let’s say you have a label that’s good. Fair Trade was good, but then they created Fair Trade USA, which [inaudible 1:22:28] the same, and it’s entirely created by the farm owners, and it’s not as good. I won’t say that it’s all bullshit, but I will say that it’s not as good – not nearly as good. That’s the problem with whatever label, whether it’s created by the workers or not.

Dave Chapman 1:22:37
One of the things I’ve seen is that we can’t outrun the corporations. They’re better at this than we are. They’ve got huge microphones and large staffs of professionals who are better at messaging than we are. We’re going to have to stand and fight.

Dave Chapman 1:23:02
I’m going to interview Paul Hawken this afternoon. He’s going to say, “No, Dave, you’re misunderstanding it. Fighting isn’t the answer.” I respect that. I’ll be there to listen. “Explain it to me, Paul, because I don’t know how else to do this.”

Julie Guthman 1:23:15
At this time, in this day and age, it’s all we can do. The complicity isn’t working. It’s just so not working. I think it’s so evident right now. We have to fight back.

Dave Chapman 1:23:32
Let me ask you my next-to-last question. You’ve written about Amartya Sen, a Nobel-winning economist who taught that the failure of distribution in causing hunger. I think these were very similar ideas to Frances Moore Lappé, who wrote, “Hunger is not caused by a shortage of food, but by a shortage of democracy.” Can you talk about that?

Julie Guthman 1:23:58
I think that Amartya Sen was one of the first scholars to make the point that producing more food was not going to solve the problem of hunger. He based it on his observations of famines in the mid-part of the 20th century. Almost all famines were not a problem of underproduction of food, but some sort of political machinations that kept food from certain people, or just problems of distribution.

Julie Guthman 1:24:40
He was fighting this kind of Malthusian idea that the way to solve hunger is to produce more food. He wrote this before Lappé did. I think it’s so important. It surprises me that more people are not aware of his work and his thinking on this.

Dave Chapman 1:24:58
It doesn’t surprise me, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that most people haven’t heard of anybody. I’ve interviewed a lot of people who are famous to me, but when I talk to other people – my friends, educated people – they’ve never heard of them. That’s okay. That’s the nature of the information age we’re in. There are so many voices.

Julie Guthman 1:25:22
Again, I do a lot of different – not too much – but the work I’ve done with agricultural scientists who really believe that the best thing they could be doing is supporting farmers and producing more. I keep on bringing up these ideas, and they think I’m a nutcase.

Julie Guthman 1:25:22
It’s like, “But these things have been circulating for a long time.” The whole food security notion came from his work – that access is more important than production. All the ideas people talk about – “We need food access” – it all stems from Amartya Sen’s work from at least 50 years ago.

Dave Chapman 1:26:01
Yes. I would say that we don’t need to have heard of Sen. We need to hear you say this. We pass it on. We pass the torch on. We forget who said it first, and probably he didn’t say it first either. But he probably said it very well. Can you describe for me your idea of a Green Revolution?

Julie Guthman 1:26:32
Well, that term…

Dave Chapman 1:26:34
I understand. Let’s reclaim it.

Julie Guthman 1:26:38
You mean a Green Revolution as opposed to an industrial Green Revolution?

Dave Chapman 1:26:43
Yes, I do.

Julie Guthman 1:26:45
I don’t think I have a lot more to say than I’ve already said. I think that, first and foremost, we need to take control of our political system and democratize it. Then we need to have policies that encourage practices that are more agroecological. I know there are many in the food movement that are more kind of anarchists, I suppose.

Julie Guthman 1:27:14
The Joel Salatins – I don’t think he would call himself an anarchist; he’s a libertarian – but they see themselves as like, we just need to do this without government. We can just grow a movement and institutions that are different. But I just don’t think that’s plausible.

Julie Guthman 1:27:41
Again, I point to the current moment and see that we have an administration that’s trying to create that kind of anarchy, that’s trying to derail all of our institutions. I don’t see something else emerging out of that. I see something really nasty emerging out of that. I think we have to democratize our democracy.

Dave Chapman 1:28:05
I thought I was done, but I do have one. This one’s complicated.

Julie Guthman 1:28:09
Oh, no. I might be running out of steam.

Dave Chapman 1:28:12
I know. I’m sorry, forgive me. I know we’ve gone an hour and a half. This is a confusing time, and for me, it’s confusing because, for the first time in my life, I’m seeing quite conservative politicians embracing the ideas that I believe in.

Julie Guthman 1:28:36
You mean RFK?

Dave Chapman 1:28:38
RFK, but not just RFK. We’re seeing it in some of the quite conservative politicians. It’s the first time that I’ve heard voices on both sides of the aisle – not everybody on both sides, by a long shot, but some voices on both sides – talking about the need for whole food, healthy food. We can put aside a lot of things that I don’t agree with, but there’s a lot I do agree with.

Julie Guthman 1:29:10
I think that’s one of the things – a food movement has never been a strong left-right issue. Trump has tried to spin it that way sometimes, although he takes on RFK, which is just kind of mind-boggling – but it’s never been a left-right movement. I think some of the tensions within the food movement have been because the left and the right are in it together.

Julie Guthman 1:29:34
I don’t think it works to think about it that way because there is this really strong libertarian right-wing, I would say even Christian nationalist, piece of it, and then I think the left has embraced food as a way to champion some sort of democratic-socialist agenda. I think everybody’s embraced food in their own ways.

Julie Guthman 1:30:04
RFK is confusing for more than that. Sometimes I go, “Well, I agree that we shouldn’t have food additives, and I agree this is toxic, and we have no idea why the McDonald’s-eating orange guy wants him other than just to destroy…” The anti-vax stuff is absurd. The measles outbreak and the way he deploys science, like, “Go look up your own science.”

Julie Guthman 1:30:32
It’s like, “Well, that’s what we have experts for – to weed through science.” What does he even mean when he says you can find your own science? It’s like, “Well, go on the web and look at any crackpot?” It’s complicated. It is a complicated thing because, on the other hand, the alternative food movement has been a kind of homegrown, like we have our own information sources, and we create new ideas.

Julie Guthman 1:30:54
So it’s really hard. It’s interesting to see the pushback against him as being, like, looking to scientific expertise. We know that scientific expertise in food and agriculture has not always been on our side in terms of what they’re promoting. But you don’t want to say it’s a free-for-all. It’s a complicated time to think about the role of science itself in determining what is good food or good agricultural practice.

Dave Chapman 1:31:25
Yeah, I agree. I’m fascinated by what’s going on. It’s happening so quickly. Who knows where things are going to go? Julie, we’ve had a long conversation. I really appreciate you staying with me. Is there anything you’d like to say on the way out?

Julie Guthman 1:31:45
No, I think I’m good. I talked a lot. That was very fun, very wide-ranging. Thank you for having me on the podcast. It was really fun.

Dave Chapman 1:31:55
It’s great. Thank you.