Not Now, But Soon: The Food System is Rigged
Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.
On this episode, host Malka Older explores food systems with investigative journalist Thin Lei Win. Win shares her experience of growing up in Myanmar, and how that has shaped how she sees the intersection between food production, climate, and disasters.
This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.
Resources
Follow Win’s weekly newsletter, Thin Ink, to learn more about food, climate and where they meet. Get started with her newsletter with these articles:
- “Moonstruck”: a critique of the focus of the food system’s focus on technology and productivity to solve food insecurity, at the expense of equity.
- “A System Under Strain”: a roundup of recent reports on food systems.
Win coordinated The New Humanitarian’s series on emerging hunger hotspots as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Find more of Win’s food system investigations at Lighthouse Reports.
- “The Hunger Profiteers”: how financial speculation could be fueling hunger.
- “Farmers Protest, Who Gains?”: Who is leading the farmers’ protest in Europe and are they truly representative of farmers?
Visit Kite Tales to read stories from Myanmar’s people in their own words.
Transcript
Malka Older: Most of us don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about where our food comes from. When we walk into a grocery store, there are aisles of products, most of them in multiple varieties, and we just have to choose. The food supply can feel infinite and easy, but all it takes is a small disruption to expose how vulnerable the system is. An impending storm can empty the shelves—at least of daily necessities like bottled water and toilet paper. A bigger disaster, like a pandemic or a trade war can keep them empty for a long, long time.
I’m Malka Older. In this miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, I’ll be talking with friends who like me think about and work on disasters. Together, we’ll expand the idea of what a disaster is and what to do about it, and imagine how we can build a more robust, resilient future for all of us.
In this episode, I’m joined by my friend, Thin Lei Win, a journalist from Myanmar who specializes in two different kinds of crises: food systems and the authoritarian takeovers of Myanmar.
Thin, it’s so great to see you. Tell us a little bit about what you do.
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Thin Lei Win: I’m a journalist specializing in food systems issues, looking at food in a holistic way, not just focusing on the production aspect of it or the consumption aspect of it, but the whole life cycle. Everything around how we grow it, how we eat it, how we transport, produce, process, and discard it. But also the policies, the rules, the actors and the environment.
And part of the reason I am so into food systems is because I grew up in an agrarian country. Myanmar was very poor. A lot of the agricultural sector is still not mechanized. Like when I was growing up, Myanmar was also a military dictatorship, and it was quite fascinating to grow up with these propaganda about how important farmers are and how important food production is, and also to see how poor actual farmers are. And this massive discrepancy between the rhetoric and the reality, seeing this hunger and malnutrition happening there allows me to see some of the discussions that happen in the Global North in the industrialized nations from a Myanmar perspective.
Older: What you say about the authoritarian propaganda around agriculture, to me it really resonates also. My mother is from Cuba, and so I’ve looked at it a lot and thought about it a lot. And there is this identification with certain crops, the sugar and the tobacco, and there’s been huge impact geopolitically because of the way those crops were used against them or imported or who wanted… It’s really such a powerful thing.
Win: You’re so right. In Myanmar, that’s rice. Successive governments have been obsessed with recapturing this glory that Burma, Myanmar used to have in the old days about being the rice bowl of Southeast Asia. Myanmar was a British colony for quite a long time, from the late 1800s until the middle of the 1900s. And then since gaining independence, everybody pretty much just wants to recapture that glory. But it can also have really, really detrimental impacts because that meant that successive governments have focused their agricultural policies on just subsidizing the production of rice and forcing a lot of the farmers to focus on rice, everything from irrigation to seeds to support services. And we are a nation obsessed with rice.
In Burmese, when we see each other, we greet each other asking “htamin sa pi bi la?”, which essentially means, “have you had rice?” It’s not, how are you? But that also means that we think rice equates nutrition when that is not the case. And if you look at malnutrition figures in Myanmar, they’re really terrible. And part of it is because we don’t have a nutritious diet. Obviously rice isn’t the only reason why malnutrition figures are high, but it’s definitely played a role.
Older: Are there ways in which that propaganda or those other ideas people have about food or production or consumption or any of those elements, do they affect how you’re able to do your work? Does it make it difficult for people to understand what you’re trying to do?
We really need to de-link the idea that hunger is only in poor countries or that if we’re not eating the right way, it’s our fault.
Win: Oh, that’s a great question. Yes and no, in the sense that I tell my family and my friends that I work in food systems, they don’t know what I’m talking about. But if I say I’m fighting hunger, they get immediately what it is. So that’s exactly it. We really need to de-link the idea that hunger is only in poor countries or that if we’re not eating the right way, it’s our fault. There’s a lot of consumer blaming and consumer shaming when it comes to talking about food and food systems. And I think that is completely unfair, and I think that’s why it’s helpful to look at it from a systems perspective. We are only able to eat what is made available to us. If you are in a place where there are food deserts, no matter how much fresh healthy produce you want, it’s just not available. It’s the policies, it’s corporate consolidation, it’s lots of different decisions that come together to reach that point.So I find it important to see it from a systems perspective because yes, as individuals we can do certain things, but if the system itself is rigged, there’s not a lot that we can do. It is the systems that needs to change.
But the number one propaganda, and I will say propaganda even though it’s probably going to be controversial, is this push that what we need to do is produce more food. “Oh, global population is rising. We need to produce more food.” The fact of the matter is, at this point in time, we produce enough food to feed the whole world. If we’re just talking about calories, we are producing more than enough. And for the past 50 years, cereal productions, potatoes, fruits and vegetables have been on a single upward trajectory. And yet people keep saying, “Oh, we need to produce more.” Or the fact that we cannot protect nature, or our environment is because we need as much water as possible to produce food.
Older: And I’d also say the other thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is there’s the kind of flip side of food deserts where that in some places there’s almost no seasonality anymore. You see fruits all year round. And remembering when I was a kid, that didn’t happen. And of course there’s lots of places where it doesn’t happen now, but if it’s just all there in front of you, it really does kind of disconnect you from the issues of where does this come from and how does it happen?
Win: Being in Italy in that sense is really interesting because people here still do eat seasonally. Not all of them, but it’s now everything is available 24/7, 12 months a year, you forget that there was a reason why we eat some foods at some times.
Older: We actually met at a disaster site. It was in Padang, in West Sumatra, in Indonesia. There had been an earthquake there. It was 2009, and I have this memory that we met on the stairs of some building. Was it the governor’s office where there was a lot of headquartering or maybe there was some meeting somewhere?
Win: It was definitely a government office because I think there were a lot of aid agencies there and people were congregating there because that’s where they could find information. And I think we stepped on the steps partly also because there was just nowhere else.
Older: Yes. At the time, you were reporting on disasters like earthquakes. How did you get from there to covering food systems?
Win: I was a Southeast Asia correspondent for quite a while, so covering humanitarian issues in the region and food insecurity was always a part of that, but it used to be almost like an afterthought, disaster coverage. You think about food security after an earthquake, after floods, after fighting, almost like an outcome. And then I got an opportunity to move to Rome where there are three United Nations agencies that are focused on food. So I got posted there to cover food security issues globally.
And one of the first interviews that I did was with a scientist, Andy Jarvis, who said that food production and climate change are like a couple in an unhappy marriage because they’re so intricately linked to each other, and yet they are also so antagonistic towards each other. Any change, any vagaries in weather, change in temperature, precipitation effects what we can produce and how much we can produce. At the same time, the way we produce food is having a massive impact on the climate. And that really helped crystallize, I really need to be talking about not just hunger, but looking at food and climate change. And then that was almost like a natural progression from there to looking at it from a bigger systems perspective.
Older: When I was in Padang that time for that earthquake, we had already been working in West Sumatra on some disaster preparedness programs, and one of the things that we talked about a lot in that field was like, okay, people think the earthquake is the disaster, but in fact, the earthquake, it’s a hazard. It’s a thing that happens. But if an earthquake happens where nobody lives, it’s not a disaster. The disaster comes at that intersection of the hazard and humans, what we build, how we relate to each other, where we decide to live, all of these things. And so once you start looking through this kind of framework, then the disaster is no longer this kind of exogenous thing that, oh, there’s nothing you can do. You just throw money at the survivors afterwards. It becomes really, how do we think about coexistence with disasters? How do we think about how to mitigate the effect of these hazards? And then you come into really questions of governance, which…
If you start connecting the dots, then you start seeing that this doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. This was years and years of policy and decisionmaking that has focused very much purely on efficiency and yield, not on resilience.
Win: Yes! Yeah, no, that resonates so much, I think, with some of the thinking around food systems. When Russia invaded Ukraine, suddenly there was this massive impact and the global commodity markets around food and food prices spiked, and this came also soon after COVID and the strain on the supply chain. So it was just multiple pressures. You can look at it and just say, “Oh, it’s because Russia invaded Ukraine and therefore Ukraine can no longer export and food prices rise,” and you can just stop it there.
But if you look deeper, there are many countries where they become very, very reliant on countries like Ukraine to essentially feed their populations. Experts call this double dependence in the sense that you are depending on a small number of crops to feed your population. You are then relying on a small number of exporters to actually get that grain from. That was one of the reasons, not the only, but one of the reasons why suddenly countries found that their food import bill went up. So if you start connecting the dots, then you start seeing that this doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. This was years and years of policy and decisionmaking that has focused very much purely on efficiency and yield, not on resilience, which is something very similar to disaster preparedness and risk reduction as well. So I think, yeah, I definitely see parallels.
Older: A lot of people don’t like that kind of thinking because it calls out some of the inequalities of our societies or highlights places where governments have failed to regulate things like housing in dangerous areas like flood zones. There are a lot of people who’d prefer to just see disasters as this thing that happens out of nowhere, you deal with it and it has nothing to do with our other decisions, when, in fact, it really does. Do you think our food systems globally are a disaster?
Win: Yeah, I’m not sure I would say disaster, but definitely broken. They work for a small group, not for the vast majority of us.
Older: Are they a potential disaster?
Win: Yes, I think I will be quite confident in saying that, yes, and I think that’s why there’s a lot of talk around transforming our food systems because I think people have realized, even people who are benefiting from the current system, that this is not tenable in the long run.
Older: Can you talk a little bit about some of those ideas about transformation and how that might look?
Win: Yeah, so pretty much everybody agrees, at least publicly, that our food systems need to be transformed. What they cannot agree on is how and also who gets to sit at the table that are making decisions. So there’s massive disagreements around where we want to be. Everybody says we want better systems, more resilient, more sustainable, definitely they should also be healthier and fairer. There’s this debate around land sharing and land sparing. Those who believe in land sharing believe that we can grow food, but that that land must be shared with other plants, animals, flora, fauna, et cetera. And keep it as sustainable as possible. Then there are people who think, no, no, no. We use technology and innovations to then focus food production on a small amount of land, and therefore we keep the rest to either rewilding or forests. And that’s just one debate among many where there’s a massive disagreement.
Older: I can imagine all these intense debates about different perspectives, but a lot of them haven’t even made it to the general public. I think a lot of people are just, “Oh, this is the way food is.” Can you talk a little bit about the stories that you think should be told or that you would like to see around the area of food systems to give people an idea of what it could be like?
Everybody agrees, at least publicly, that our food systems need to be transformed. What they cannot agree on is how and also who gets to sit at the table that are making decisions.
Win: I worry that not enough people know about what is happening, but I also worry that if more people know, they will just be like, “This is too complex, too difficult, too depressing.” So I think for journalists, for communicators, for people who are interested in this, I think it’s a really important balance that we need to be able to sort of say, “These are big problems and they really need to be sorted out,” and it can’t be just at an individual level. It just has to be at regulatory level and global level, national, sub-national, regional level, but also that there are some really interesting and inspired things happening. We need to sort of highlight some of those as well but without sugar-coating or making it all just seem like this is the silver bullet. There are no silver bullets. Unfortunately, there are none.
But for example, there is a state in India, Andhra Pradesh, that has been engaged in a form of farming, natural farming that takes care of the soil and sort of try and reduce or shun chemical inputs, and they have seen that that actually works. We just need to, again, to scale it up in other countries. Brazil has a really interesting example where there are stipulations in public procurement. So for schools, for example, where a certain percentage of food that you would procure for school meals has to come from family farmers growing food in a way that is friendly to nature. But there’s also a movement around what we call agroecology, which is not just about environment, but it also has social justice issues built in so that the farmers, the farm workers are also empowered. In Latin America, that is pretty big. In some parts of Southeast Asia, there are movements around it, but you don’t hear that in the Global North.
Older: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about food deserts on the one hand and food surpluses on the other, and how both sides of that coin can lack nutrition. The same can be true of information systems. You have some places where it’s very hard to get information and other places where there’s so much information, but most of it is really empty calories. The stories that are getting told and all of that surplus, they are getting really concentrated and narrow. And for me, this goes back to how important it is that we have authors and creators, that we have a lot of them from a lot of different perspectives, that we look for the people about whom stories aren’t getting told. That actually brings me to my last question, which is what are you reading? Do you read speculative fiction? Are there things that you do read that help you imagine things differently or even just get a respite from the intense work that you do?
Win: Unfortunately, a lot of what I read these days are very much around food systems, and I have a list of books that I haven’t finished reading, but having said that, I do really like fiction. One of my go-to authors is Ursula Le Guin. The most recent one that I had finished reading was her collection of short stories, The Unreal and the Real about different worlds. I think there is one part which was the outer worlds, and then the other one was imagining our world through different historical moments and if something else has happened.
Older: I love Ursula Le Guin. I mean, her essays are amazing, and I end up using her quotes all the time to talk about the power of speculative fiction and as well as the constraints. I think she was remarkably clear eyed about the genre and what it can do and its importance as well as what its limits are, but especially this idea of how we can feel free to think about different futures. Thin, thank you so much for taking all this time to talk. Really appreciate all the work that you do.
Win: Thank you. And likewise. Likewise. Absolutely.
Older: And thank you for listening. To learn more about food systems, subscribe to Thin Lei Win’s newsletter called Thin Ink on Substack. Find more stories about Myanmar by visiting Kite Tales, a project she co-founded to document the lives of people across Myanmar. Visit our show notes to find links to this and more.
Thanks to our audio engineer, Angelina Mazza and our podcast producers Kimberly Quach and Mia Armstrong-López. Music for this series was created by Stuart Leach.
Not Now, But Soon is part of the Future Tense Fiction Project, a collaboration between Issues and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Additional editors on the Future Tense Fiction Project include Joey Eschrich, Andrés Martinez, and Ed Finn. On our next episode, Julisa Tambunan discusses data justice and gender equality. Subscribe to our main podcast feed by searching for The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts.