In this episode of Hands in the Soil, we sit down with Andrew Flachs, associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University and author of two books that ask some of the most clarifying questions in food systems discourse: Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India and his most recent, Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields. Andrew grew up in a small Pennsylvania town with a grandmother's garden he admittedly didn't love as a kid, and found his way into this work through a chance encounter with urban gardening research, a student meal cooperative, and an advisor who sent him to India at exactly the right moment. Andrew brings the kind of rigor to this conversation that comes from years in the field with farmers across three continents, combined with a willingness to question the assumptions baked into how we talk about food. 

Tune in to learn more about:

• How Andrew went from hating picking beans as a kid to becoming a leading anthropologist of food and agriculture
• Why the fight to prove that small farms can match conventional yields is the wrong fight entirely
• The "iceberg economy" and all the care work, infrastructure, and labor that lies beneath the visible surface of our food system
• What his research across the US Midwest, Bosnia, and South India revealed about what small farming families actually share across different contexts
• The explosion of GM cotton seeds in India, from three brands in 2002 to over a thousand by 2012, and what that did to farmers' knowledge, livelihoods, and mortality rates
• Why farmers on organic cotton programs kept farming even when the economic math didn't add up, and what that reveals about what farming is actually for
• The true costs of "cheap" food: what isn't being counted in environmental degradation, public health, labor exploitation, and soil loss
• Why efficiency is often a trap, and how efficient technologies without systemic change just lead us to do more of the same harmful thing
• How the current Farm Bill debate and the Iran war oil disruptions reveal the fragility of just-in-time global supply chains
• What a resilient food system would require, and what we already know how to do

Books & Resources Mentioned

By Andrew Flachs:

• Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields
  (Use code AZFLR for 30% off. If cost is a barrier, email Andrew directly.)
  
• Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India
  

• Interactive Story Map: Cotton in India
  https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/20f488863e4a41a892f0dd7a346180c0

Referenced in conversation:

• Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher (1973)
• The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need School Food and How to Get It - Jennifer Gaddis
• Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond - Dr. Jahi Chappell
  

Connect with Andrew

• Website: andrewflachs.com
  
• Instagram: @drflachsophone
  
• Email: [email protected]
  
• University of Arizona Press: @azpress on Instagram

Connect with Hannah:

• Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@hannahkeitel ⁠⁠⁠