Jonas Jungwoo Lim
BA History
June 2023
As historians, we are familiar with the narrative of modern progress. Throughout our undergraduate studies, we are taught about the liberties enabled by modern development: the freedom to speak, to commerce, and to eat. According to this narrative, the colourful array of goods we see in a supermarket is a glorious product of modernity.
However, at what cost? As historians, we know freedom always comes with a cost and, consequently, a responsibility. Isaiah Berlin distinguishes these two sides of freedom as positive liberty and negative liberty (1958). To put it succinctly, positive liberty is the ‘freedom to’ control one’s actions, while negative freedom is the ‘freedom from’ the control of others. While we always focus on our’ freedom to’ when discussing modern progress, we rarely talk about our’ freedom from’.
What did we lose in exchange for our freedom to eat? What exactly have modern humans gained our freedom from?
It is from nature that modern humans have gained our freedom to eat. Hannah Arendt described modern history as a story of humanity gaining an ‘increasing mastery over nature’ (1961). Our modern freedom to eat is also the freedom from the constraints of nature. As we no longer plough our own fields to eat, we imagine that modern progress has liberated us from nature.
However, recent events have made us question this narrative. Amid a cost-of-living crisis and a nation-wide shortage of eggs, we find it harder to believe that modern progress led us to ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (Leibniz, 1710). Can we be assured that modern progress will take care of our dietary needs? In other words, how sustainable is our freedom to eat?
Are we eating in the best of all possible worlds?
I spent my pre-adult years in a place classified as a ‘food desert.’ A food desert is a region too distant from food supply chains that it is impossible to buy anything but ultra-processed food. Living in a school in the mountainous regions of Korea, my schoolmates and I would walk over an hour to visit the nearest supermarket, a highway rest stop in the middle of nowhere. Our only regular food source was the truck that brought food to be served in the cafeteria. On days with severe snowfall, there would be none.
It was not that my region was an absolute ‘desert.’ The surrounding mountains were full of greenery. And strangely enough, our region was the nation’s foremost producer of cows. An hour’s walk away from my school was a cow factory or, what experts call, an ‘intensive livestock farm.’
But something didn’t add up. Why were we fed factory-produced Australian beef from across oceans when there was a cow farm in our region?
Beef in Korean society has a curious politics intertwined with a history of nationalism and, to a lesser extent, anti-imperialism. When news of the zoonotic disease Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, more commonly known as the Mad Cow Disease (MCD) hit the beef industry in the early 2000's, Koreans were quick to respond to the import of American beef with hostility, reading it as a sign of U.S. imperialism (Choe, 2008).
Although the uproar against anti-U.S. imperialism gradually faded away during the 2010's, nationalist sentiments about the superiority of Korean agriculture over others remained. Responding to such sentiments, my region Hoengseong quickly branded its beef as gourmet and, more importantly, ‘Hanwoo’, meaning ‘Korean beef’ (See image on left-hand side). Since then, my region has maintained its reputation as the nation’s supplier of high-quality beef from its free-range pastures. The cow factories that I witnessed were thus a rather recent installation. As rural pastures were gradually reforested since the 1990's, cows were moved into intensive livestock farms. Although no longer entirely free-range, the beef’s prestige as the Korean beef remained. As the 'gourmet’ Hanwoo was exported to the cities for high-end consumption, it was only affordable for our school to feed us processed meat from overseas exports.
Hence, modern progress had not freed me from nature. Although surrounded by forests, we had no choice but to relegate our diets to the hands of corporations. To think that the result of all that progress was only the freedom to be fed factory-produced processed meat from depressed cows in a food desert was underwhelming, if not disheartening.
Did modern progress make our diet freer?
Modern agricultural progress did not exactly make us ’freer.’ Intensive agriculture has decreased food diversity by 75% in the last century (Hauter, 2014). Intensive agriculture, the most widely practised form of agriculture today, is the practice of farming to maximise the production of agricultural goods. Chemical fertilisers, soil depletion, and zoonotic diseases usually accompany this practice.
So, what’s the problem? We may have less freedom than we think, but that doesn’t mean you would want to exchange your liberty to make a late-night Tesco run with the burden of having to farm your own food, right?
Well, the trade-offs are harsher than that. Intensive agriculture is not only harmful to livestock but for the resilience of our food supply. Currently, only twelve crops supply 80% of the global plant-based dietary energy (Hauter, 2014). What happens to our food supply if, for instance, a disease wipes out even one of these crops? The abundance enabled by intensive agriculture may look liberating, but, in reality, we are paying the price in other ways.
Most problematic of all is that most of us living in cities do not base our diet on foodstuffs gathered directly from the farm. Instead, we depend on processed food manufactured by corporations whose primary interest is to maximise profit, rather than public health. Nearly all processed foods currently sold in the market come from 10 giant food companies that dominate the market (Oxfam, 2014). Whatever "free choices" we think we are making when we are at our local supermarket, we are probably buying food from these ten firms. This is the result of our progress – the freedom to relegate our dietary needs to the hands of 10 companies.
The narrative of modernity as a ‘liberation’ from nature is delusive. We have not necessarily become free from the constraints of nature: far from it. As corporate-led intensive agriculture decimates our environment, we are slowly paying the price of our freedom to destroy the planet.
The Quest for a Solution
Then, if our freedom to eat is not sustainable, how can we history students contribute to finding a solution?
Luckily, there is an ongoing debate on possible alternatives to intensive agriculture (Swade, 2021). One side argues that we should save nature by removing humans from it, while intensively farming from only limited amounts of farmland. The other argues that we should farm by sharing land with our non-human neighbours.
Eco-Modernism
The former is the ‘Eco-modernist’ approach. Eco-modernism is the belief that modern technology holds the key to our environmental problems. In 2022, George Monbiot famously proclaimed his eco-modernism to declare that human agriculture is destroying the planet. As a solution, Monbiot proposes that we should only consume factory produced foodstuff, while returning 75% of our farmland back to nature. The remaining 25% would be used for intensive agriculture to feed humans.
What does Monbiot’s eco-modernism mean for humans and their relationship with nature?
Eco-modernism assumes that human agriculture is parasitic to the land, and the only way to protect nature is to rid humans of it. In essence, for Monbiot, humans are separate beings from nature.
Monbiot’s dichotomy between nature and humans echoes the logic of modern industrialists. Concretely, his solution to ‘preserve’ nature by ridding it of humans echoes the logic of late nineteenth century progressivists of the United States.
From the 1890s, progressive U.S. politicians advocated to ‘preserve’ nature in national parks (Roosevelt, 1908). This led to the establishment of five national parks in Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. The purpose of this act, however, was not to ensure biodiversity or sustainability, but to ensure that the ‘American Spirit’ was preserved in nature while the U.S. could grow as an industrial power. Consequently, in Roosevelt’s period, the U.S. experienced the highest rates of urban industrial development and a severe degradation of nature. Ironically, ‘preserving’ nature justified the logic that humans could do anything outside of the fences of national parks.
Humans are, and always have been, part of the natural environment. Monbiot’s argument that humans need be kept separate to protect the ‘environment’ sounds good in theory. Yet, in practice, it gives a moral leeway for people to think that we can do anything with the ‘human’ parts of our land.
Regenerative Farming
The latter solution, ‘regenerative agriculture’, focuses on ‘sharing’ nature with our non-human neighbours. Regenerative agriculture rejects the use of chemical fertilisers, weed killers, and insecticides in favour of natural processes that do the same job, albeit on smaller scales (Langford, 2022). Isabella Tree aptly proposes that farming is only a by-product of a natural process, and the farmer’s role is to create conditions for nature to carry out this process at its best (2018). Ultimately, regenerative farming aims to produce food in a sustainable way that does not damage the ecosystem for human benefit.
Eco-modernists like Monbiot remain sceptical of regenerative agriculture, as it yields lower output than modern intensive farming. Still, it is not like we do not have enough food in the planet. Hauter shows that 30% of the food we produce goes to waste. Meanwhile, nations with the highest starvation and malnutrition rates are also the ones that export large amounts of food to the Global North (Hauter, 2014). The problem is not that we are not producing enough, but that we do not give it to those who need it the most.
How can historians help?
The uncritical faith in modern progress is, in this sense, misleading and dangerous. Modern progress did not promise the freedom to eat for all, nor did it ‘free’ humans from nature. The debate between eco-modernist and regenerative solutions shows us that people, even environmentalists like Monbiot who seek to improve the status quo left by modern development, still uncritically accept ‘modernity’ to a positive concept, when it assumes a strict divide between humans and nature.
This is where a historian’s perspective can be useful. History is a powerful discipline because it teaches us how to be critical of power structures that enable societal oppression. Histories of environmental injustices, indigenous land appropriation and violence can help us think critically about our food systems today. As historians, we must critically engage in these debates on the potential solutions to the food crisis, while dissuading people from the myth that modern growth is a process of gaining freedom from nature.
Only then will our freedom to eat become truly be sustainable.
Editor's note: This article was written by Third Year historian Jonas Jungwoo Lim, as part of our 'Environment and Crisis' issue in June 2023.
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