Author, farmer and Carleton grad Thomas Pawlick launched his latest book at the Main Farmers’ Market on Oct. 17 (Photo: Marie-Danielle Smith)
“Get big, or get out,” Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, once told American farmers.
This is the attitude Thomas Pawlick said is killing the family farm and the rural way of life.
In his new book The War in the Country, Pawlick condemns current government policies that he said support big factory farms to the detriment of the small, rural, family farms.
Pawlick, who received his master’s degree in journalism from Carleton in 1997, launched his book in Ottawa Oct. 17 at the Main Farmers’ Market.
“The rural world is being wiped out, and nobody seems able to stop it,” Pawlick said.
“I wrote [the book] because I just got really angry – really pissed off – about what was going on. . . . It was like watching a criminal activity,” he said. “And no one was paying it any attention or yelling for the police. So I thought I’d yell.”
Pawlick said the rural population is so small that no politician will pay attention to their cries for protection.
“What politician is going to give a damn about what 2 per cent of the population thinks?” he asked.
If city people, the majority of voters, become aware of what is happening and begin providing political pressure, they can turn things around, he said.
“Until that happens, nothing will change, except the quality of our food – which will get worse,” he said.
In his 2006 book, The End of Food, Pawlick discusses what he considers an “alarming” trend in the food we consume, which he ties to factory farming practices.
In the 1970s, Pawlick said he began having these concerns as member of the back-to-land movement and an editor at a counter-cultural agriculture magazine.
Later, he went on to work for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and their magazine Ceres.
“I saw that what was happening in Canada was happening elsewhere as well,” he said.
So, Pawlick said he began looking at government documents that recorded food nutrition levels and contaminant levels of food bought off grocery store shelves.
He said he looked at goods such as tomatoes, poultry and eggs.
Across the board, he said the nutrition levels in foods have been decreasing – without exception.
“In some cases, the decreases were astounding,” he said.
In white potatoes, for example, he found a 100 per cent loss in vitamin A and a 57 per cent loss of vitamin C across the years he examined.
“I could see that if I were to put all this on a graph . . . there would be a constant trend-line downwards representing nutrients,” he said. “And, at the same time, there would be a line going up, representing toxic contaminants.”
It was then that he published The End of Food.
“But, it was only half the story,” he said. “It was the story of what was happening to our food, but not why.”
And that is where his second book, The War in the Country, comes in.
Pawlick said he blames government support of factory farm practices on what he saw happening to our food.
“I’ll probably be croaked by the time the worst of these effects are happening. I’ll be safely dead and gone,” he said. “But, young people who are in schools now are going to have to face this stuff and deal with it. They’re going to be damned pissed off at the generation that preceded them for putting them in that crappy situation.”