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Docile Oxen & Happy Peasants

Writing in The Weekly Standard, Blake Hurst notes continuing problems with Cuban agriculture and criticizes those he sees as its American proponents: Yet today people hold up the Cuban food system as a model for the rest of the world. Sustainable, largely organic, community-based, and healthy food production in post-Soviet Cuba is offered by critics […]

Writing in The Weekly Standard, Blake Hurst notes continuing problems with Cuban agriculture and criticizes those he sees as its American proponents:

Yet today people hold up the Cuban food system as a model for the rest of the world.

Sustainable, largely organic, community-based, and healthy food production in post-Soviet Cuba is offered by critics of “industrial agriculture” as an example of the sort of system that we should aspire to in the United States.

I have read two of the books that Hurst mentions: Deep Economy by Bill McKibben and The End of Food by Paul Roberts. While both mention the way that Cuban agriculture changed to be come deindustrialized and somewhat more market oriented, neither fawn over it in the way the Hurst imagines.

Hurst’s mischaracterization of The End of Food is particularly absurd:

Paul Roberts is another writer who finds much to admire in Cuba. His book The End of Food (2008) is a paean to the banishing of the evil tractor and the awful fertilizer, the wonderful diversity, the docile oxen chewing their cud, the peasants happily hoeing as peasants ought to do.

Oddly, for a writer finding “much to admire in Cuba,” he only mentioned it on three pages. I reviewed the book for Chronicles last year and described it as,

a searing indictment not only of the dominant methods of food production, but, implicitly, of the political and media culture, which does a great job of reporting on flag pins and flip-flops but drops the ball when it comes to serious issues.

Roberts makes numerous claims about the American and international food system—none having anything to do with the “evil” of tractors— that Hurst doesn’t mention or dispute. Roberts’ just-the-facts-ma’am style leaves no room for docile oxen or happy peasants. I have no idea what book Hurst had hidden between the covers of The End of Food.

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