To begin, yes, the World’s Fair still happens, and yes, I’m talking about the same kind of World’s Fair that happened in Paris in 1889 and Chicago in 1933. It happens every few years, although the U.S.’s role has been very limited in the past few decades, which is why our generation imagines the World’s Fair as a relic of centuries past. But the event, known as Expo Milano 2015, took place this year in Milan, Italy where for six months, 147 different countries from around the world shared their interpretations of Expo’s theme: “Feeding the planet, energy for life.” In other words, what was each country doing to ensure food security and the sustainability of the global food system?
It was because of this theme that I decided to take three months off school to work for the USA Pavilion (USAP), from August through October the second half of Expo’s duration. My role, along with 50-some other young Americans, was to be a “student ambassador”—the “face” of the American pavilion—ideally sharing my own personal connection to food and the food system while proving that not all Americans are obese, McDonalds-addicted carnivores.
The themes of the USAP were promising; we called ourselves “American Food 2.0” and promised that we were all “1 in 9 billion.” In essence, we attempted to redefine the stereotype of American food (hamburgers) while invoking the language of technology and innovation (“2.0”) and committing our responsibility to a social contract. We emphasized every person doing his or her part to feed 9 billion people by 2050.
I suppose my expectations for Expo were nothing short of naïve. I hoped that USAP would reveal a government ready to turn over a new leaf on American agriculture, complete with policy promises that would provide concrete support for small, local, organic farmers, instead of the corporate industrial monocultures to which they currently give nearly all subsidies. I was sadly mistaken.
At least I can say that USAP focused on the themes of the Expo, while most other pavilions played their role as little more than a tourism boost for their relatively unknown country.
But although USAP did dedicate its space to the issue of food security and ways to feed a growing population, the pavilion’s content was woefully blind both to the realities of the food system in America and to the solutions that would help, rather than harm, the issue. There was no mention of monoculture, or of food waste, or even of the water crisis in California. Worse, though, were the intentional falsehoods.
Anyone who has watched a documentary on American nutrition (Fed Up, Forks over Knives) could tell you that our country’s nutrition education system is inadequate. It not only overemphasize the importance of animal protein and dairy in our diets, but also teach kids through the national school lunch guidelines that milk should have sugar in it and that pizza is a vegetable. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution became famous for a clip in which a group of young students misidentified tomatoes as potatoes, beets as celery, and eggplant as egg salad. Yet the section of USAP devoted to nutrition acknowledged none of these failures, and instead held up a handful of successful school programs as if they were the national standard.
Looking back, I shouldn’t have expected the “educational” content of the pavilion to be anything but PR. The biggest disappointment for me, therefore, was my favorite part of the pavilion, the vertical farm. Covering an entire wall of the pavilion, the vertical farm was composed of a series of rotating panels with 42 varieties of American crops growing horizontally out of narrow “ZipGrow” towers. Hailing it as the future of urban farming, we enthusiastically explained to visitors how vertical farms lining the sides of offices and apartments in big cities would help bring fresh produce to food deserts and other areas with little access to farmers’ markets.
Curious to learn more about the vertical farming system, I organized a trip to the farm outside of Milan where the ZipGrow towers were assembled, where we were shown how the process worked and told how the technology would never be viable in the way we imagined. Our own plants were only surviving because they were meticulously tended by a farm staff with access to a cherry picker, after having been transplanted into the towers already fully-grown. In short, vertical farms were only viable in controlled greenhouse environments, and we were feeding our visitors lies.
Perhaps it is too harsh to blame the USAP administration for not investigating too closely the claims they instructed us to make about the potential of their vertical farm technology. Perhaps they really believed in the forward momentum of certain school nutrition programs. But let’s take a moment to investigate where exactly USAP got its funding and see how that changes things.
In 1994, a law was passed that prohibited the U.S. from using federal money to fund an international exposition, which meant that the USAP at Expo was 100 percent privately funded. You can see where this is going now, can’t you? That’s right, some of USAP’s biggest sponsors included PepsiCo, DuPont, and Dow Chemical. How’s that for supporting a sustainable food system?
Now, maybe you could make a moral argument for accepting corporate money if the corporations wanted nothing in return, but unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way. In exchange for their generous donations, these corporations had the opportunity to edit the content of the pavilion in their favor. The effect of this editing was perhaps more ironic than dangerous with a company like PepsiCo, who made sure our pavilion was fully stocked with Pepsi and Lays at all times, and even installed computer monitors to educate visitors on their greenwashing campaign.
More harmful was DuPont’s input, which not only spun GMO crops like Bt corn as positive developments, but actually restricted the perspectives the student ambassadors were able to share with the public.
We could not offer own opinions on GMOs, even if our opinions were based on intensive research, lest we damage DuPont’s reputation and diminish the return on their investment in the USAP. Instead, we had to smile through our teeth and explain that the only way we could feed nine billion people by 2050 was to produce more, more, more. Forget the fact that when I attended the Slow Food Youth Network conference happening in reaction to Expo, Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, explained how that very production mentality fueled all the systems currently stripping the planet of its ability to sustain us. Forget the fact that the UN’s own pavilion admitted that the world already produces enough food to feed 12 billion people, with the main problems facing us being waste and distribution, not underproduction. Any of the indigenous farmers currently at Slow Food’s Indigenous Terra Madre conference could tell you from experience how damaging the Green Revolution has been to the identities and livelihoods of subsistence communities. Yet despite the fact that the USAP was designed to be a “forum for dialogue and discussion,” the corporate money interests kept most of the important and controversial topics off the table.
USAP’s only saving grace may have been the student ambassadors, handpicked to be the face of America: intelligent, ambitious, knowledgeable, and truly a wonderful group of people with which to work. Unfortunately, the majority of visitors to Expo just didn’t care enough about the event’s theme to engage us in discussion; they came for a Disneyland experience. A few had the opportunity to listen in on the USAP’s Terrace Talk series, where we hosted experts for an hour-long discussion of a pertinent topic a few times a week. But rarely did these experts touch on any of the truly salient issues: GMOs, farm subsidies and farmers’ rights, monocultures and industrial agriculture, nutrition education, the water crisis. Too often they represented the corporate interests themselves, like the man who invented the Arctic Apple. Only once, during World Food Week, were the student ambassadors given center stage to talk about our own experiences and commitments to the manifold issues of food security. And despite my frustration with a USAP so entrenched in the present corporate systems, listening to my colleagues’ stories filled me with hope for a generation passionate about making a difference in whatever way they knew best.