Soaring Perspective on the Global Food Chain

A camera became his excuse to capture and convey ways of living that were once foreign.

“I wanted to go and discover those worlds and decode them for people in my world,” he says. 

His push for panoramic perspectives soon led him up into the air. Long before drones became a viable option for photographers, he pioneered the use of motorized paragliders, soaring high enough to capture the ordered beauty of agriculture, an enterprise that has shaped 40 percent of the world’s landmass, but low enough to interact with the people whose lives he was seeking to illuminate. 

His first book, 2008’s African Air, validated his approach, and he continued to land high-flying assignments that took him to 100 countries and through the occasional arrest—in Libya, China and Finney County, Kansas—which showed him “that there are parts of our food system some of our bigger players don’t want us to see.”

Along the way, Steinmetz has been driven to uncover how the intricate patterns he sees from above reflect the land-use policies crafted by people below—often with drones. “From above, you can grasp the geography of land, and the enormous scale of feeding humanity,” he says.

In his latest book, Feed the Planet: A Photographic Journey to the World’s Food, Steinmetz pursues this theme to its extreme in nearly every corner of the world, holding aloft for fresh observation the interconnected global system that comprises our individual choices around subsistence—including, notably, a section on the viability of aquaculture—and how readers can “vote with their forks” on the kind of world they want to cultivate.

He spoke to AramcoWorld.

AW: This book is sweeping in its scale and scope. When did you realize an ambitious book like this was both possible and necessary?

GS: I was working on assignment in China, the world’s biggest importer of food, looking out how this growing demand influences the most industrialized supplier nations: Brazil and the US. China has turned to the sea to feed their people, and [along] the coast of the East China Sea, many areas are covered in fish farms almost as far as you can see, like floating villages. And I would get a boat out to the fish farms, and I look at the sacks of fish meal and see they came from a Chinese company in Peru.

I was just scratching the surface, and I realized that to really tell the story, it had to be global. Food is kind of an infinite story because food is produced in virtually every country, and everybody eats, and it’s done in different ways. I realized that to give a sense of how global it was, I had a lot of traveling to do.

AW: The book is an anthology of individual visual stories about how the world of food works in various locales. But what is the larger narrative you’re trying to convey?

GS: I wasn’t trying to look at food from the aspect of gourmet or taste. It was more from an environmental perspective—most people don’t know where their food comes from except the supermarket.

Being a curious person, I was also interested in the spectacle of food. And I think there are all these stories that people just aren’t aware of.

AW: You encountered a lot of manual methods of farming and bringing goods to market. Where did you see these being sustained even amid the onslaught of modern technology? 

GS: We’re a long way from having a robot that can pick out the stamens on saffron flowers, and those flowers only blossom for a few days per year. There’s like a two-week season. It’s virtually impossible to mechanize that. It’s also the most expensive food in the world.

And so it is quite beautiful to see that, with all the flowers, but generally, you find that in it’s in low-wage environments—the Chinese aren’t competing very well with the Indians of the Kashmir Valley.

AW: Were there places where traditional methods ended up being more desirable or financially sustainable? 

GS: The almadraba, a 3,000-year-old fishing method used off the coast of Cadiz, Spain, is a really good example. It was invented by the Phoenicians. Basically, all the tuna that are coming through the Straits of Gibraltar to breed, they hug the coastline to avoid the killer whales that are predating on them in the deeper water. 

Fishermen realized they could set up a kind of a labyrinth of nets to trap the tuna, and the Atlantic bluefin that they’re getting are some of the most prized for sushi in the world. These fish are massive—hundreds of kilos, beautiful fish.

Because Atlantic bluefin became so overexploited in the open waters, the numbers were plummeting, and they started using the almadraba as almost like a scientific census but also as a sustainable way for the local people to make money and continue their tradition.

AW: The book contains a key section on aquaculture, also called aquafarming. How globalized has the international fishing supply chain become, and how does this kind of trade affect local communities? 

GS: Well, it’s very complicated. The biggest complication is that it’s a shared resource, and a lot of the seafood that we consume is migratory. In the course of its life cycle, it will move from one country’s territory water to another to international waters. When you have a shared resource, it’s very easy for it to be overexploited because nobody really takes responsibility for the loss. It’s the tragedy of the commons.

How did that play out in places like Senegal and Mauritania, where you photographed hordes of pirogues (small boats) on the shores? 

The problem the local people are in is that as a fishery declines, that puts even more pressure on people to go out and fish harder, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do to maintain your fish stocks. They go further, and they get more and more desperate, and then people start using smaller, finer nets, so you start catching the breeder fish, and you rapidly head towards collapse.

AW: Did you see places with some insulation from these global megatrends? In some places, were traditional methods helping people sustain their way of life? 

GS: Well, if you have ownership of the resource, then you can have management. In Bungin Island, Indonesia, I didn’t talk to the fishermen, but in that photo you can see that there’s rapidly increasing population pressure, and generally people end up having to go further and further to fish to feed their families. 

In Southeast Asia and the Bay of Bengal, you talk to older farmers, look at their records and you see how meager the catches are there compared to what they once were. In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where people don’t have refrigeration and they dry fish at large drying yards, I remember seeing about half the racks being empty. It was really a sign that we’re past peak fish, and you see this phenomenon repeated. It’s fairly global. 

AW: Do you see tension between sustaining traditional aquaculture methods with the idea of improving productivity and adding new technology, as in the developed world?

GS: You find solutions on both the megascale and the microscale, like the artisan work with seaweed, which is a real bright spot in aquaculture because you’re growing food in a very sustainable way and hardly deforming the food chain. In Bali, people go in and harvest it by hand, so it provides jobs for the local community.

But you also see large-scale solutions. I was really impressed in Alaska, seeing how they’re managing the fishery there. They have scientists in towers on every river the salmon come up, and they don’t open the fishery until enough fish have gone past the checkpoint upstream so they’ll lay enough eggs for next year. Then, boom, by radio, all of a sudden, all the fishing boats start fishing.

AW: Your book dives into various other aspects of food, from meats to grain production. What message do you want readers to take away?

GS: I’d like people to think more about their food as an important environmental choice and that there’s a cumulative effect of their decisions. Food webs are very complicated, but as people start thinking about the source of their food and how it’s produced, that actually points in the direction of finding solutions, and it starts to put pressure on producers to make things with more environmental responsibility.