Mrs. Cargill

              I have a confession to make. I have a Cargill connection. It’s a bit tenuous, but still, the connection is closer than I suspected. It’s put a face on that corporate giant called Cargill, that pervasive transport and ‘agricultural’ monolith which has swept across our Canadian and world landscape changing what and how we eat.
             Lets step back a few years...close to thirty years to be exact. At that time I was working as a publishing consultant and food stylist on a cookbook project, a collection of recipes and reminiscences from a famous Canadian prairie restaurant.             
            This restaurant inhabited several locations over the years, beginning with a few tables in the author’s home on the edge of the Alberta foothills. When it came time for the food photo shoot, this rustic, screen-doored, two story, wild rose surrounded, weather beaten home-place could not be reproduced in the cold confines of a big city photo studio.
            Thus it came to pass that for an intense week in a hot July the production crew and a team of cooks laboured in Bett’s southern Alberta home. All in all we created some remarkably evocative food photos with a plethora of farm-raised corn, zucchini, potatoes, squash, poultry and a whopping forty-pound side of beef. 
            With the addition of a wagon wheel table, an old sideboard, wire egg baskets, collectible plates, decorative serving trays, checkered table clothes, canning jars from the cold room and a cheese wheel secured from a neighbouring cheese factory, the setting evoked nostalgia like a hay-rick at sunset. 
            Barn-board walls and a window view of southern Alberta sky made an impossible-to-reproduce backdrop for a cornucopia of mouth-watering ranch food. And yes, we ate it all.
            Late each day, when the hothouse atmosphere of location shooting was complete and all quiet in the house, Bett and I would spend the evening chatting and looking at her photo albums. A devotee of all things food related, Bett’s albums were filled with food photos and the people who enjoy it.
            Lively scenes of weddings, birthdays, holiday celebrations, community events and happy people chowing down on Bett’s legendary menu, cascaded across page after page. Well finger photos revealed local folks from town, area ranchers, friends, celebrities from near and far including, as I was often reminded, John Wayne and Bing Crosby. 
            Several albums documented Bett’s annual trip with an international gourmet club, each photo accompanied by a commentary on the who’s who of the culinary world, with chefs and dinner guests seated before plates of sumptuous food served in extraordinary settings…here castles in Spain, there a sun burnt palazzo in Italy.
            Pointing at a photo, Bett might say, “Here’s Prince Vladimir of _________ with Paul Bocuse at Paul’s restaurant in Paris. And this is Lord and Lady _________.  They were so funny! Oh, and here’s Mrs. Cargill at a dinner party on the SS France”. 
           Mrs. Cargill?  Of the Alberta Cargills?  “Yes, Mrs. Cargill, you know, the grain people”.
           I leaned closer to peer at this startling image. What I knew of Cargill, “the grain people”, was of a monstrous corporation devouring small town Alberta. The Cargill centralization of grain collection and distribution, and the large Cargill granaries, three and four times the size of garden variety grain elevators, were reducing once viable towns and farms to dust.
            I looked down at the 4 x 6 inch photo, a patch of bright colours against the black album page. I wanted to know what people look like who are building an agricultural and marketing monopoly and, in the process altering our food and our relationship with its production? How do such people look?
            Surprisingly, they look much like you and me. Tucked under faded photo corners I saw a prim, well dressed, grey-haired woman who looked a lot like my mother…if my mother were to be found dining with European royalty on a luxury liner in the mid-Atlantic.
            Fascination bound me to the page. I asked Bett to point out Mrs. Cargill in a series of opulent shipboard dining photos. Despite the wealth and array of exotic food, Mrs. Cargill continued to look very much like you or me. And why not? She was someone’s mother and grandmother, a wife. Still and all, it was difficult to reconcile this proper older woman with the wreckage of lives and rail lines that I knew to be occurring. 
            Only a few weeks prior to finding myself perusing photo albums in an Alberta farmhouse, I had visited an artist friend in north central Saskatchewan. Magda had hopes of creating an ‘artist’s colony’ in the remnants of a small town decimated by the Cargill juggernaut...the town elevator merely awaiting demolition to finish the job.           
            For $200, Magda had bought a church for a studio and home, offering choir loft benches to visiting overnight guests. With a couple of old codgers they constituted the entire town.
            Despite the depopulation, my visit to Magda coincided with a community reunion. By the afternoon of the second day, the nearby playing field had filled with people milling about or eyeing long tables sagging with potato salads, meat loaves, buns and biscuits and breads, juices and jams and jellies, hot dogs and cold cuts. Over three hundred people had come home on a summer afternoon to eat, talk, drink beer and play ball…just plain folks sitting around on lawn chairs telling tales and remembering. 
            I noticed eyes drifting to the derelict elevator and the line of trees where the grain cars used to run.
            When I stopped in at Magda’s a number of years later, the elevator and railway tracks had disappeared. Now Magda had the town to herself. It had been so since the last of the old-timers passed on. With a couple dozen sheep, a small wheat field swamped by nearby agribusiness over-spray, and a shop by the road filled with relics of how it used to be, Magda managed to hold on.
            It is easy to feel nostalgic for the demise of a small town in the vast Canadian prairies, for a way of life that kept people in touch with the land. But there are even larger issues at stake here, issues that are large and frightening because Cargill and like-minded corporate interests are reaching far beyond a monopoly in transportation. 
            In the late 90’s I came across a news release published in the Ram’s Horn, an 'occasional journal of food system analysis,' sadly now defunct. In its hey-day, the Ram's Horn was a clarion call for our attention to eroding food safety and control.
            The Cargill press release trumpeted the intent of Cargill and Monsanto to form a worldwide joint venture, first to create “a system that links biotechnology research and development from seeds through processing to the customer.... with plans to explore future opportunities to expand the partnership into agriculture and food.”
            As we know, these pronouncements have largely come to pass.  More centralization of transport, terminator seeds, cattle cloning and genetic engineering…a process that violates species and organism boundaries.
            To be honest, I was initially taken in by the propaganda of genetic engineering; appreciating the idea that genetic engineering is merely a step beyond natural selection, a tweak here and a tweak there, and voila, a marvelous pest free, self fertilizing, sunshine producing agricultural marvel. I liked the media reports that extolled GE and its offer of abundant and overflowing crops for the starving masses. 
            When I learned how genetic engineering introduces genetic material into a cell that would not normally accept such an addition, I felt shocked. It is done with great violence. In fact, the Ram’s Horn article likened it to rape.
            My mind flashes back to Bett’s photo album and pictures of her gourmet dinner companions. I see Mrs. Cargill lifting a fork to her mouth, glancing casually at the camera. Granted, this Mrs. Cargill may have had little to do with the decisions being made to dramatically and violently manipulate our food. Somehow I envision the people behind such threatening science, such mono-focused, bottom-line oriented thinking as dark-suited power brokers with leering grins. 
            What intrigued me then and intrigues me now, is a frightening suspicion that the Cargill’s are real people, who eat, travel and live their lives, just like you and me. 
            The only difference that I can imagine is not superficial. It’s not in the clothes they wear or the trips they take. It’s deep inside where different values about our independence, our food safety and nutritional needs reside. Where money and a willingness to use harsh methods and even violence to change our food and food systems is uppermost.
            Addendum: I wrote this many years ago. Today, May 6, 2020, a social media post caught my eye. It revealed Cargill’s manipulation of their meat processing staff to stay on the job despite numerous cases of Covid 19. The objectives have not changed.

Copyright Dianne Bersea