The most overlooked political issue of our time is food. With books (and now films) like Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me there would seem to be a growing awareness. Seems to be until you walk through Safeway and observe what’s in people’s shopping carts. The Nation magazine asked a group of writers with varied expertise in the area of food to comment on the subject of “One thing to do about food.” The series of short essays can be read here.
Some highlights:
Eric Schlosser: “What single thing could change the US food system, practically overnight? Widespread public awareness--of how this system operates and whom it benefits, how it harms consumers, how it mistreats animals and pollutes the land, how it corrupts public officials and intimidates the press, and most of all, how its power ultimately depends on a series of cheerful and ingenious lies.”
Marion Nestle: “From a public health perspective, obesity is the most serious nutrition problem among children as well as adults in the United States. The roots of this problem can be traced to farm policies and Wall Street. Farm subsidies, tariffs and trade agreements support a food supply that provides 3,900 calories per day per capita, roughly twice the average need...”
Michael Pollan: “Right now, the school lunch program is designed not around the goal of children's health but to help dispose of surplus agricultural commodities, especially cheap feedlot beef and dairy products, both high in fat.”
Wendell Berry: “And yet most of our food is now produced by industrial agriculture, which has proved to be immensely productive, but at the cost of destroying the means of production. It is enormously destructive of farmland, farm communities and farmers. It wastes soil, water, energy and life. It is highly centralized, genetically impoverished and dependent on cheap fossil fuels, on long-distance hauling and on consumers' ignorance. Its characteristic byproducts are erosion, pollution and financial despair. This is an agriculture with a short future.”
Troy Duster and Elizabeth Ransom: “Individuals rarely listen to health messages and then change their ways.”
Winona LaDuke: “Wild rice is the only North American grain, and today the Ojibwe are in a pitched battle to keep it from getting genetically engineered and patented.”
Peter Singer: “There is one very simple thing that everyone can do to fix the food system. Don't buy factory-farm products.”
Vandana Shiva: “With genetic engineering, production has narrowed to three crops: corn, soya, canola. Monocultures are destroying biodiversity, our health and the quality and diversity of food.
Carlo Petrini: “As local citizens, though, we can make our own choices--choices that influence everyone's future. By producing, distributing, choosing and eating food of real quality we can save the world.”
Elliot Coleman: “Like chemical agriculture, our economy is based on selling symptom treatments rather than trying to correct causes. For example, the medical profession peddles pills, potions and operations rather than stressing alternatives to destructive Twinkie nutrition, overstressed lifestyles and toxic pollution”
Jim Hightower: “(Agribusiness) actually torture(s) food--applying massive doses of pesticides, sex hormones, antibiotics, genetically manipulated organisms, artificial flavorings and color, chemical preservatives, ripening gas, irradiation...and so awfully much more.
Hi, thanks for the related links.
If interested Organically Speaking a Seattle-base website has released a conversation with Michael Pollan podcast (audio conversation). Interesting tidbits on farmers markets, CSAs, and more!
Some Podcast Show Note Questions:
Q) Why the price difference between conventional food and organic and how do we go about bringing down organic food prices?
Q) How can small local organic farmers remain local in a capitalistic system?
Q) What is the "Food Web" you briefly touch on in your book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.
http://OrganicallySpeaking.org
All the best,
-Ricardo
Holistic Conversations for a Sustainable World
Posted by: Ricardo Rabago | August 30, 2006 at 11:42 AM