Institutionalized

Over the summer, I mooched a book about adult learners, specifically, how adults learn musical instruments, and how it differs from how children learn them. The author, John Holt, is an expert in learning himself, and has done much work on different learning styles, and how many children are failing, not because of themselves, but because the system fails them.

As a leading thinker, he has had the opportunity to meld minds with others in his field, and a South American colleague put his finger squarely on our tendency to create institutions. At some point, nearly every field where we used to "do it ourselves" has become institutionalized: we are being raised to believe that this is good, while a few questioning souls poke around the ragged edges and point out that the scale in the economy of scale is not a human scale.

Holt's point was that learning institutions often fail people who don't fit in the mold, and especially adults, who know themselves well enough to know how they learn. But what he says also applies to other institutions: Health care, from childbirth to medications, with the establishment trying to loosen the grip of centuries of wisdom. And then there's the food industry, for an industry is yet another institution.

Along the narrow lanes of Ireland and even the more civilized Britain, we often see signs of small food producers--literally. Hand-made cardboard signs for free-range eggs, more elaborate wood-burned signs for farm stands, even a hand lettered sign in a window advertising homemade ginger-rhubarb jam. Some farm stands even have meats and cheeses, and occasional sundries like flour and honey.

That window sign for jam makes me think of the hundreds of jars of jam on my shelves at home, how I throw fruit from our plum tree away every year. I could easily make up another hundred jars every year, but there is no way we would be able to eat it, and because mine is not a commercial kitchen, I cannot legally sell it. I ran into much the same thing when I made the wedding cake for friends. I toyed with setting up a limited shop, making the occasional special cake as it fit in my life, but an investigation of the regulations revealed that there is no place for the very small producer.

The irony, of course, is that this affects things that we proclaim as Good, such as the organic standard and reducing waste and even (what some would call Christian) charity. Since the institutions we have allowed to become gigantic place the onus on even small producers to conform to regulations that really only apply to large producers, we all miss out: the person with a few grass-fed cattle who cannot slaughter them because he would need to provide two washrooms for FDA inspectors in his facility; the home baker who makes just few heavenly rhubarb pies and jam; the ambitious gardener whose bumper crop of zucchini and tomatoes end up in the garbage because even the food bank isn't allowed to accept it.

This institution-driven culture of fear is not a new idea, but we have finally given it a name. Strip searches for airline travel are only the latest manifestation, as we have allowed so many institutions to grow beyond their intended purpose. The argument for the institution in the food industry is nearly always safety: to keep our food supply safe, we must hold every producer, large and small to the same standard. But we are seeing exactly the opposite: as we push toward more and more food-as-a-commodity and factory production, our food supply has never before been so fragile. These self-same centralized practices contribute to equally large-scale outbreaks of pathogens that didn't even exist a generation ago. But the small, human, scale makes sense: if you know who grew you food, and they know you (or you are one and the same), it becomes obvious that it is in everyone's interest to bring safe food to the table.

The other argument is that at no time in our history have we been able to provide so many calories to so many people for so little money. And yet this claim is undermined by the revelation that not only are a great many of these calories empty ones that contribute to a huge health crisis, but these same savings are realized through unbalanced subsidies lobbied in back rooms by two large institutions, government and industry.

It is not a mortal error to entrust an institution with a task we do not feel up to: but the institution we are free to choose must be worthy of our trust, and we must understand just what part of us we are abdicating to that body.