Food Fight: the latest battle in the US food wars

Michelle Obama's White House vegetable garden got agribusiness worried. Photo / AP

The latest skirmish in the United States food wars erupted last month, when Washington State University announced it had dumped a common reading programme in which first-year students would read The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan's scathing critique of agribusiness.

Officials, who had bought 4000 copies of Pollan's book, a bible for the organic and locally grown food movements, cited budget cuts. The blogosphere erupted, with critics talking darkly of political censorship by agribusiness. When Bill Marler, a local lawyer who has litigated against agribusiness, offered to pay Pollan's fee to speak at the university, it backed down.

But if the grassroots are on fire - Pollan wants President Barack Obama to reform the "entire food system" - then Big Food shows no signs of surrendering. Last year biotech giant Monsanto, which markets genetically modified (GM) seeds and the herbicide Roundup, began an advertising campaign that stressed its sustainable credentials. "How can we squeeze more food from a raindrop?" one ad asked, suggesting the solution to hunger and water scarcity was genetically modified food.

For a war is raging over what we eat, where it comes from, who benefits, and the cascading environmental impacts caused by global food chains. Its footsoldiers are grassroots activists, writers and agribusiness marketers.

It is a war for the hearts and minds of consumers and policymakers, with food a key factor at the connection between climate change, health care, energy use, water scarcity, collapsing ecosystems and hunger.

It is also a struggle over the identity of food. Is it what you buy at the supermarket - Pollan's advice is to never buy food that you've seen advertised - or what you can buy at a farmers' market or grow in your backyard?

In this analysis it's a battle between the grassroots and the corporate food business, with the latter the biggest trencherman at the table. And critics claim that agribusiness is indulging in "greenwash", by dressing up its products with green language, without regard for any negative impacts on the environment

A key word in this debate is "sustainability". It sounds laudable enough. But one man's sustainability, when it comes to this contentious food fight, is another's poison.

At heart it is a clash of two irreconcilable farming systems: one seeks sustainability via harmony with nature; the other seeks to impose a technological fix.

Agribusiness has used sustainability to push those technical fixes that it says are critical to enhancing food production in the 21st century.