What the Food and Agriculture Industry Can Tell Us About The Social World
While reading a book about food, agriculture, and ecosystems — in hopes of learning a little bit about nutrition, food culture, and fine dining — I can’t help but gain a completely different insight from Dan Barber’s The Third Plate as I am assuming he has intended. As I read on, becoming more and more familiar with the seemingly recurring lessons he himself has learned from a variety of experiences, I come to think of how these lessons are analogous with lessons in the social world. Let me explain.
Barber charts his experiences with organic farmers. In search of the most delicious — and its direct correlate, flavourful — products, successful farmers are forced to understand the interconnectedness of each element in their field: the soil, the crop, the weed, the insect. With this knowledge of the complexities and the micro and macro ecologies that come to characterize a well-, or ill-, functioning ecosystem, farmers are able to provide world class chefs, and their diners, with the best produce.
And so he illustrates again, this time with livestock, that the knowledge of a cow or duck and it’s interaction with it’s environment allows farmers to provide exactly what animals need to be happy. And as Barber comes to learn and pass to his readers: a happy animal is a healthy (and yes, delicious) animal.
And again, the lesson persists with the illustrations of a bass farm in Spain. It may be surprising to learn that thousands of pink-bellied flamingos consume 20% of this bass farms annual product, Barber highlights, but the pinkness of those bellies is just the metric the farmer needs to understand the health of his fish (and the other 80% that he can sell to world-class restaurants). The phytoplankton feed the fish, the fish feed the flamingoes, and the flamingoes filter waste to aid the phytoplankton — and again. Knowledge of this complex ecosystem is necessary for the end goal — the delicious fish.
Albeit just one of Barbers lessons of the food and farming industry, it is one that has my mind bridging gaps. As I read, I can’t help but see the problems that Barber identifies and the solutions that he highlights through his experiences as analogous to those ill-defined in social science. In other words, for me, Barber uses the relatively contained area of food and agriculture to highlight complex relationships and advocate solutions. In a well defined narrative of food, his methodological approaches can be adapted to the problems facing the social world — an ill-defined narrative of human well-being.
Barber’s constantly reiterated end goal in the area of food and agriculture is a delicious and nutritious product (a correlation between two variables for which he spends the entire first chapter advocating). In social science, and specifically political science, we can adapt this end goal to be human happiness. It is the goal of all policies, research, and laws. With this as our basis, we can go forward.
As Barber argues, the delicious and nutritious product cannot occur unless the complexities of each ecosystem is understood and addressed, even if losses are incurred along the way (such as the fish). Today in social research, true complexity is seldom understood. Oil has an effect of regime type, personal psychology of leaders has an effect of foreign policy, and culture plays a big role in gender-based violence and the effectiveness of laws to combat it. However, these insights that drive certain policies do not see the world as a complex ecosystem. Psychologists determine a leaders behaviour, economists determine what a trade policy does to small business, sociologists determine how drug policies affect incarceration rates, and political scientists show how social media aid in democratization. However, all deal with the social world in bivariate terms and don’t fully recognize the complexities that link elements between fields.
The way things are, understanding of what soil can tell you about the health of crops can get you to successful organic farming and better tasting produce but an understanding of what social factors can tell you about other social factors cannot get you to happy people. We cannot fully understand the social world through the use of simplifying paradigms that are analogous to industrial agriculture practices or use of huge fishing nets.
