Our food supply has undergone an unprecedented change in the past century; the drive to decrease consumer costs while maximizing profits has compromised the quality of our food supply to an astonishing degree. This phenomenon is reflected in the actual words we use to talk about food. Words that describe food have come to mean something quite different than what they meant just a few generations ago.
Despite the country meadow scene on the cartons, you can be sure that the dozens of eggs for sale at conventional supermarkets were laid by chickens that never saw a sunny day. If you’re looking for eggs from chickens raised the old-fashioned way, you’re looking for “free-range” chickens. Inasmuch as our fragile, centralized food industry depends heavily on fertilizers and pesticides to increase crop yield and protect against insects and other predators, strawberries and potatoes grown without such interventions are “organic” or “pesticide-free.” “Wild” salmon are the kind that swim upstream and grow strong and healthy, not to mention nutritious, on what salmon have always eaten. Plain old milk, without any of the butterfat removed, is now “whole” milk.
The list goes on and on. Old-fashioned oats, pastured lamb, whole-wheat flour, hormone-free milk. These are retronyms, objects or concepts whose original names are now used for something else. If the more typical examples of retronyms (e.g., rotary phone, analog watch, black-and-white TV, cloth diaper, biological parent, tap water) reflect a century of explosive technological change, what are they doing in our food?
Steaks at conventional supermarkets come from steer raised in a feedlot, or confined animal feeding operation [CAFO], on grain, growth hormones, and antibiotics. If that’s not the kind of beef you want, you have to go to a different type of store and specify “grass-fed” beef. One hundred years ago my great-grandfather, who made his living as a butcher, had no reason to advertise his beef as grass-fed. All cows ate grass, and none of them received antibiotics or steroids. That’s what he meant when he advertised “Beef for Sale” in the front window of his store.
Although we continue to describe foods with the same words we have always used, the words no longer mean what they once did. “Wheat,” the staff of life, no longer refers to the entire grain, with its bran fiber coat, starch core, and wheat germ intact. Now it means only the starch core of the grain, the “endosperm.” The intact wheat, including its fiber and germ, is “whole-grain,” a retronym.
Before the industrial revolution changed the American landscape, most goats, cows, hogs and chickens lived in the barn, or alongside the house. Vegetables grew out back by the kitchen door. Families fertilized vegetables with compost, and leftover vegetables found themselves back in the animal feed. That world, in which people lived within an endless chain of recycled biomass, is virtually extinct in the United States. Our food supply has been redefined.
