Vladimir Lenin liked to say that every society is only three meals away from chaos. I remember thinking about that while driving past lines of cars trying to get into Costco and Walmart during the first weeks of lockdown last year. Thankfully, the fear of shortages turned out to be overblown and most Canadian farmers enjoyed a better than average year in 2020.
Covid had no effect at all on field crop production. Farmers could still climb into their machines and go about their work in splendid isolation. Nor did it stop the transportation system from moving their crops around the country and the world. The average person in North America, if they were not already mired in poverty for some other reason, survived the year without missing a single meal, let alone three in a row.
Food systems are surprisingly resilient in the face of natural calamity. When the Black Death swept over England in 1348, killing one third of the population, society had to scramble to cope with severe labour shortages in the fields. Surprisingly, agricultural production recovered from the pandemic very quickly, returning to its pre-pandemic levels within five years.
A low-level state of chaos continued among its ruling class for decades, but the life and diet of the average peasant did not change all that much.
Man-made food shortages are a different matter entirely. The Ukrainian famine of the 1930s created by Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward in the 1960s killed untold millions and shaped public thinking in those countries for generations to follow.
When Covid struck last year, everyone dashed to the store to stock up for shortages that never materialized. A few gaps did appear in the supply chain for beef, chicken production quotas were cut and some milk was poured down sewers, but these episodes were minor and temporary. That is because one man operating a John Deere X9 combine for 60 days can harvest the equivalent of the entire wheat crop of England in 1350. Losses in the field have dropped to 1 per cent. One container ship operated by a handful of crew can carry more than England’s entire merchant shipping fleet of the 14th century and deliver it anywhere in the world. The only part of agriculture where human hands are essential is the fruit and vegetable sector. Our own ruling classes did experience a low level of chaos in the form of paralysis in Washington and dithering in Ottawa, but for the rest of us there would be no descent into anarchy. Instead, many of us took up jazz piano and attended Zoom weddings.
Which leads us into the temptation to think that big is better after all. The industrial food system performed very well in this crisis. Why then should we be so concerned about reforming it? The answer is that it worked well during a natural calamity. But the historian and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari warns us that nowadays we face much greater danger from catastrophes of our own invention. The force most likely to remove food from our tables will be a collapse in our digital infrastructure. A cyber-attack or accident could bring our electrical grid to a halt, paralyze transportation and make us unable to talk to each other. That would produce chaos instantly because a system designed to operate hands-free would mean our hands would no longer be able to help us in a crisis.
Here at Larkspur Farm, we still rely on an old-fashioned analog food production system that makes people smile because it seems to belong to the distant past. But over the last year, between the eggs, pork, beef, chickens, potatoes and a mountain of zucchini that came to us from with 100 yards of the front door, this system contributed nearly seventy-five per cent of the calories we consumed. It is a system that still flourishes in Russia and China, or any other place that has suffered a man-made food crisis in living memory.
On my last trip to Cuba three years ago I visited a friend who fattened several pigs in his back yard, kept a flock of sheep and a big garden. All his neighbors were doing the same thing. He drove a taxi and rented two apartments and seemed to be doing pretty well. Why would he want to be a farmer, too?
“I was 30 years old before I ate my first steak,” he said. “We learned as children that It is not a good idea to rely on the government to feed you.”