The bureaucratization of food

Joe Cunningham, Columnist, Pincher Creek Voice

Joe Cunningham

     I spent the last ten years of my life as a small food producer. It was an interesting journey. I say “was” because I have recently gone into semi-retirement from the gourmet smoked fish business my wife, Janice Day, and I operated here in PIncher Creek. Most Pincher Creekians do not know there was a fish producing business in Pincher Creek for ten years and it gave me a chuckle every time I watched the reaction of someone here finding this out for the first time. They werenʼt ill-informed - how would they be expected to know?  Ninety-nine percent of what we made went to specialty stores and expensive restaurants in Calgary and Banff. It had to.


Iʼm not being flippant. For years we agonized over pricing our products high enough to stay in business. Eventually we settled on a pricing scheme that placed us at roughly double that of similar category, however inferior, supermarket products. We were successful! ... well... sort of. You see, we grew at a reasonable rate, got rave reviews from all over the planet (some food writers going so far as to say we made the best cold smoked product in the world), operated on a mean and lean budget, were courted by Alberta Agriculture, and were proud of the little innovations and inventions we came up with to make our small operation work as efficiently as possible. Hereʼs the catch - we didnʼt make enough money to justify continuing, on a purely economic basis. We were living near poverty so we could continue experiencing the personal, cultural and artistic gratification of making something of intrinsic value while living a lifestyle with an element of independence. Although by the time we had worn ourselves out we were selling about
$115,000.00 worth of stuff a year, we werenʼt even clearing minimum wage for our efforts. Somethingʼs gotta give eventually.

Itʼs the same story elsewhere. Over those ten years Janice and I got to know a lot of other small food producers in Alberta, and elsewhere - vegetable growers, apiary owners, makers of sauces, condiments and frozen gourmet food, ranchers, bakers, cheese makers, coffee roasters, and oyster growers ...etc., etc., etc. Their experiences were related to us in an endless stream of commonality and challenges. At least we werenʼt alone.

One reoccurring frustration struck a chord - perception of our products as “over- priced”.  Once, while standing in line to buy my weekly supply of tomatoes from Heather Dodd at the Pincher Farmers Market I struck up a conversation with an elderly friend who confessed her feelings of sinfulness at buying produce that was “sooo... expensive”. I immediately retorted with overbearing emphasis: “Itʼs cheap!!!” The essentially innocent poor woman reddened with embarrassment. But thereʼs a fundamental cultural perception at issue here which I want to grapple with. Itʼs causes are at the core of a basic problem which may eventually sting us all. It is also, indirectly, why we only had a market for our food products in specialty niches in Calgary.

We sure do have a lot of “stuff”, donʼt we - at least here in the western world. By various tunnel-visioned methods our lives are demonstrably blessed with increasing ease, convenience, variety, and comfort. Thatʼs the way the economic system within which weʼre embedded is designed to work, after all. Technology and growth, fueled by consumption and competition. I remember back to the sixties, when I was a young boy, the promises, echoed to me by my then young and idealistic mother, of a brave new world and a glowing future without want and suffering (at least not as much). Our economic system would, through technology and growth, make us all wealthy and satisfied. In ways, thatʼs been the promise for a long time. Itʼs just that after two world wars it seemed to many that it was finally inevitable if there was any intrinsic justice in the world at all. Of course back then we didnʼt use phrases like ʻconsumptionʼ much. Enterprise, freedom, and progress were words that were more common back then.

So if weʼve generated so much wealth in the last sixty-five years (and let me reiterate
- we have) what have we done with it? Where, as a society, have we invested it, and to what end? [Itʼs awfully tempting to now turn to flippancy and proclaim: to what end?... why to our own, of course!]
But seriously, where we have invested it (I mean in an abstract sense - as a culture) is a little more difficult to tease out, but far from impossible. If you steel yourself against the obfuscation that is in the interests of the our economyʼs beneficiaries you could say that the wealth has gone up and out. Up in the sense that increased wealth has largely benefitted those already wealthy. This is well documented as well, although the aforementioned obfuscation kicks in as the marketʼs apologists refer to such offensive and condescending concepts as “trickle down” and the more recent “wealth creators”. Iʼm NOT suggesting a conspiracy on the part of the wealthy. All human beings evidence hoarding tendencies when given half a chance. Itʼs just that weʼve made a religion of a system that rewards and praises such a civilization-destroying dynamic.
Once again, I could be accused of rambling. Whatʼs all this got to do with the bureaucratization of food?- you might well ask. Well, in my opinion what is relevant here is the proper setting of the stage. After all I did say: “Up and OUT”.

One way to understand what I mean by “out” is to see it as a kind of thinning out. To be precise - down-grading of all that “stuff”. As wealth accumulates at the top, some kind of “trickle down” is absolutely necessary. After all, we must have learned SOMETHING from the French Revolution. If our system is addicted to accumulation at the top while at the same time requiring trickle down then, as I said before - somethingʼs gotta give.

What has “given” in western society has been evolving for at least the past 100 years. It began with the assembly line, progressed on to women in the workforce and subsequently the need for working class families to have two bread-winners to keep up. At the same time weʼve experienced an increase in the size of companies and organizations supplying consumers with goods and services: the “big is efficient” paradigm. Part and parcel of this way of thinking has been increased bureaucracy in both government and business. Nowadays weʼve become used to spending a couple of hours with an automated telephone service system to solve a minor problem with just about anything. And what about the end of specifically scheduled service appointments with the power company or the company changing your water meter (just to get local). If time is money then a lot of expense has been off-loaded onto consumers. I have a parcel arriving by courier this week. From past experience I know I will not be able to talk to the driver even though we both have cell phones and if Iʼm not here to sign for it whenever it may arrive I will get a note on the door and instruction that I can pick it up at the nearest central depot which is now Lethbridge. If a relative tries to pick it up for me they wonʼt get it because they donʼt have identification that matches the address! All because in order to make their service affordably competitive the courier company has cut out essential services that will be unneccessary  for 90% of itʼs deliveries. Thatʼs progress!

The situation with respect to goods is similar and perhaps has been going on even longer. After all, subsequent to the Second World War we have been inundated with “wonder” products that have been slowly recognized for their inferiority but just to take note of current developments Iʼll list a couple of products we take for granted and are sometimes even thankful for as they seem to make our working class incomes tolerable:

• plastic plumbing “hardware”
• pressboard dressers and kitchen cabinets
• sheet metal on cars that canʼt withstand any hail
• plastic and cardboard shoes
• furniture held together with staples
• plastic “chrome”
• paper blinds
• appliances with motors that burn out in a year
• ”hardwood” flooring with water sensitive stuff sandwiched inside

Part of this down-grading and off-loading in tandem with maximizing working class efficiency has included the gradual universal spread of bureaucracy. We tend to think of bureaucracy as the post office or employment and immigration services or child welfare or the gun registry. Really, itʼs everywhere. We run into it when a car dealership tells us you have to buy that whole section of your car because you canʼt buy just the part thatʼs broken; or when you discover after a month that all the interesting produce is gone from Walmart and you canʼt buy a long sleeved shirt in the summertime because the sales stats are now in.
A lot of people were surprised in 2008 during the last big tainted meat crisis when they learned that all the meat products they thought came from various manufacturers all came out of one huge production plant in Ontario. Brand loyalty was just a marketing scheme to make us think somebody cared.

So now weʼve finally come full circle. Thanks for bearing with me. That problem at the huge processing plant was, and is, a fully bureaucratized system. It cranks out dozens of brands of meat products on a fully modern and automated assembly line, with hundreds of monitoring systems and isolated product flow routes with dozens of sanitizing stations and quality control check points all subject to inspection by experts and requiring reams of documentation for the Canada Food Inspection Agency to insure all the procedures laid out in itʼs Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points manual are followed. Believe me, much of this manual reads like a legal contract, and for good reason. Bureaucratization insures that there will be some tiny peon at the end of the line to blame when something inevitably goes wrong. How can you really blame bureaucrats in such situations for creating systems where they spend most of their time doing paper work and attending conferences and training sessions. At least theyʼre safe there.

So why, you might ask, would we as a society build such beasts? Well, if youʼre a mega company this system works to your advantage. Economy of scale does work to reduce costs and in such an economy the big get bigger. And itʼs a vicious circle - bureaucracies work for the super-large, not for the small. They are subject to the same systematic principles. The bureaucratic control systems that regulate the bureaucratic producers spend most of their time and efforts developing increasingly complex systems for increasingly large production. They make no sense for small operations but the small operations are now a necessarily disregarded 10% portion of the huge efficiency model.

Of course there is a limit to economy of scale. When things become too complex human problem-solving efficiency breaks down. It would be arguably more efficient for all systems to stop growing at some “medium” point. But aye, thereʼs the rub. Humanʼs are hoarders and competitors. The power of size trumps maximum efficiency because self-interest trumps community interest in the economic system we have collectively devised. Even if something like that mega production meat facility is less efficient than, say, a number of smaller operations, itʼs owners have a competitive advantage the bigger they are.

The writing is on the wall for small food production facilities. Janice and I still get correspondence from the food control bureaucracies imploring us to voluntarily comply with bureaucratized control systems that make no sense for our small operation; but how would those bureaucracies even know that. The bureaucratic peons are not in the field, and for those that eventually see the big picture it is only something over which
they have no individual power. Already in many provinces (Albertaʼs still one of the best) regulatory requirements are daunting for small producers. When nutrient labeling became a requirement I was told by one local food control bureaucrat that having analysis done by one of the “approved” labs would only cost us $2000.00/product. At the time we had nine products - $18,000.00. I didnʼt bother to explain to her that that was more than half what we earned the previous year. I found a way to comply more cheaply but numerous other bureaucrats with whom I have had heart to heart chats, mostly intelligent, sincere, well-meaning people, have confirmed to me that the future will only hold ever-more stringent controls. The bureaucratization of food proceeds full steam ahead.

What does this mean for our future? On a local scale food communities are wonderful things. That good food exists at all these days is a tribute to the communal mutual support networks of small food communities. The reward to effort ratio of the individuals in these communities is abysmally low, and yet they persist. But the hundred mile diet movement canʼt solve the bigger problem. After all, a little quick math shows that. Most of our food would have to be grown next door to large cities while weʼre in danger of running out of arable land of a global scale. If things continue on current pathways it will become harder and harder for small food producers to make a go of it. At the same time more of our food will come from fewer and larger producers. Considering growth and land availability trends food will become more expensive.Iʼm afraid solutions now are more about looking upstream to see what or who is throwing the bodies in the river in the first place.

Itʼs not that we canʼt afford good food. We canʼt afford ignorance. We canʼt afford to continually hand decision-making away to those hanging onto the coattails of the powerful. We canʼt afford to accept that we should be grateful for cheap goods. We canʼt afford to support a system that continues to push everything we create - all our wealth - up and out.