Smorgasbord for Uncritical Consumers

If you are what you eat, then it’s no wonder so many city folks have identity crises. Most people don’t have a clue how the food they eat is grown, where it comes from, what skills are involved in growing it or what chemicals it contains.

Rather, most urbanites view themselves as food consumers, putting their trust in agribusiness, just as they put their trust in the company that made their CD players. The average “industrial eater,” poet and essayist Wendell Berry says in the June California, is “necessarily passive and uncritical--in short a victim.”

Berry’s essay is just an appetizer in a full feast of articles on the subject of this state’s “clean food revolution,” with enough information to at least get eaters started as critical food consumers.

“After more than 40 years of waging all-out chemical warfare on nature, using toxic chemicals to kill aphids, redden apples and destroy weeds, California farmers have finally decided that there has to be a better way,” the magazine asserts. By the end of the decade, 10% of all California produce will be grown by farmers who have broken ranks with mainstream agribusiness, abandoning the so-called “cide sisters” (synthetic insecticides, herbicides and fungicides) in favor of more environmentally sound farming methods.

Much of the information contained in these largely bite-sized articles has been served up by other publications. Some of it, such as journalist David Steinman’s self-proclaimed low-toxin diet, needs much more scrutiny than the magazine offers.

The most encouraging piece is called “Local Heroes,” and tracks the stories of several successful organic farmers, including Paul Buxman, who abandoned chemicals altogether when his son developed leukemia (from pesticide contamination, his family believes).

Much less encouraging is the information turned up by Steinman in a very brief article about the Food and Drug Administration’s failure to test much of the produce that arrives in California from Mexico--where pesticide regulations are less stringent. And any optimism the issue generates will be tempered by Leora Romney’s insight into why biogeneticists who originally set out to produce pest-resistant plants have instead been persuaded to produce plants that can resist increasing doses of pesticides.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the whole package, however, comes from an apparently inadvertent juxtaposition of images. One color shot features a beautiful California orange, perfect except for a tiny, harmless blemish. It was caused by an insect that citrus farmers battle each year with 410,000 pounds of highly toxic chemicals. On the next page is a photograph of a proud farm worker and her young son, who was born without arms or legs--the result of his mother’s exposure to pesticides, she believes.

The responsibility for the use of the “cide sisters,” of course, comes full circle. Anyone who eats must understand, Berry writes, that “eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”

REQUIRED READING

* The subtitle says it all: “Our Magnificent Obsession with All-Star Stiffs.” The July Exposure package on “Dead Celebrities,” does some fine pop analysis of our culture’s growing fixation with show-biz types such as Elvis, Marilyn and James Dean--while providing plenty of excellent photography and art.

But in an age when celebs obsession often takes violent turns, the “Death as a Career Move” humor feature probably crosses the line of responsibility. Is the idea of Paula Abdul snapping her own neck “while tossing her head back during a photo opportunity” funny? Is it? The Spring issue of The Book-Los Angeles, that odd little paperback-sized quarterly, has arrived, well after Earth Day, with the words “Who Cares?” on the cover and one of the best environmental packages of the media blitz inside. The itty-bitty landscape photographs alone are almost worth the $5 cover price.

NOTEWORTHY

* Questions arise about Field & Stream, Salt Water Fisherman, Outdoor Life, Skiing, Yachting and other Times Mirror Co. publications (parent company of the Los Angeles Times), now that the Times Mirror Magazines Conservation Council has entered into a “partnership agreement” with four federal land and resource-management agencies.

A Times Mirror press release says the pacts with the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and the Forest Service were forged “to solidify the mutual goals of Times Mirror Magazines and the federal agencies to inform the public about important land management issues, promote the wise use of natural resources, implement natural resource education programs and work together on partnership projects.”

Times Mirror’s “leisure-oriented” magazines are hardly muckraking journals. But they may well be a major source of environmental information and ideology for their combined 33 million readers. Joining up with the agencies that manage--sometimes controversially--the resources they report on would seem problematic at best.

Francis Pandolfi, president of Times Mirror Magazines, said the agreements offer the magazines a chance to support responsible conservation issues for reasons of altruism and good business.

“I think we have a responsibility to see to it that resources are used wisely. If that happens, we’re going to have a healthy business,” Pandolfi said.

The magazines will be in a good position to publicize basic philosophies shared with the agencies, such as a belief “in multiple-use approach to resource management that includes economic development, outdoor recreation, and preservation of protected species,” Pandolfi said. But, he added, that does not mean they will agree with the agencies on specific policy issues.

“The agreements do not constitute an endorsement on the part of either party. In my remarks (at a recent ceremony announcing the pacts), I specifically said there would be times when we would disagree. I said we’d have to be tolerant of each other during those times. . . . That’s one way a solid partnership works.”

Pandolfi expects the pacts to provide editors and writers at the magazines with better access to the agencies, and he expects the magazines will be in a better position to express to the agencies their views on matters such as access to public lands.

Which raises another question: Will competing publications have to enter into similar pacts to get equal access to government officials?

“I would urge other magazines to do the same thing,” said Pandolfi. “We’re all out for the same goal, which is responsible management of resources.”

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

* Publishers’ statements in new magazines are invariably pompous. Claude Attias’ letter to readers in the premiere issue of ‘Scape is no exception.

This big, slick magazine for the Southern California and bicoastal elite arrives in our hands, we are told, “with the express intent of celebrating the achievements of the men and women who have shaped our lives, while embracing the themes that will dominate the next millennium.”

‘Scape is beautiful. It is nicely designed and the writing is fine. The art, design, and architecture photography is particularly well done--a spread on deconstructivist architecture, for instance, is stunning. And the pieces on Biosphere touch on themes that may very well dominate the next millennium. But has the guy who designed the intriguing restaurant Noa Noa really shaped our lives? Has Jeff Goldblum, who is also profiled?

At its core, this is just another pretty, rich folks magazine. Its true heart seems to be the listings for $5 million, $6 million and $7 million homes, which the publisher naturally refers to as “a revolutionary business concept in the form of a midsection real estate catalogue.”