For the Love of Food
A Sumptuous Sundry
Who doesn’t love food? You might as well ask, Who isn’t human? It’s a bit hard not to dig digging in when your life depends on it (for sure). Plus, food’s just delicious. So what can be said about it? Start with a few basics: it’s usually tasty, smells swell, and we eat a lot of it. Also, a fascinating, underrated place births it (somewhere we live, breathe, talk, and do most of what we do): the land. Without food, we can’t do business, play piano, tune into Next Top Model, or defend against telemarketing solicitations. We can’t love one another, sing, evade rampant road rage, or fulfill ourselves reading People. As a consumer species, we are indefinitely and inextricably bound to the land. Without food, we are nothing. Now grab my hand, and we’ll take a waltz down the history of food in modern times.
The Green Revowhat?
After World War II, the fossil fuel-based chemical industry blossomed. From Saran® wrap to baby bottles, chemicals-based products – especially those derived from fossil fuel oil – nudged their way into not only American households, but the cultural consciousness as well. Oil-based chemicals found their way into our food system, too, as farmers & corporations began applying artificial fertilizers, pest- and herbicides to industrial agriculture. In fact, large agricultural businesses – agro-businesses – predicted that using such oil-based chemicals to remove pesty plants and bugs could revolutionize global food production. In essence, they said, their products could feed the world. Humanity bought it.
What, then, did the advent of industrial & chemical agriculture do for food? It created monoculture, which entails growing a single crop for mass production over large areas. These monocultures appeared in fertile soils worldwide, transforming ecosystems into factories of food production. In the current system, for example, America produces much of the world’s wheat. California produces most of America’s almonds. Brazil’s soaring beef and soy production have sent its economy skyrocketing; it now supplies much of the burger-meat Euro & US carnivores enjoy. Thanks to globalization, out-of-season food is available to billions around the world, often at little cost. But as millions around the world are beginning to understand, monoculture comes with sharp ecological, social, and economic problems.
The ecological consequences are harrowing. For example, the Brazilian beef explosion has stoked deforestation in the Amazon tropical rainforest, which creates 20% of this planet’s oxygen. Rubber and palm production in South-east Asia have had similar effects on tropical forests there, harming global biodiversity. Similarly, harmful seafood harvesting practices caused by global demand degrade marine ecosystems, which preserve 50% of all life and produce half of our oxygen. Clearly, the current global food system threatens our very life-support systems – those that provide us with oxygen, filter our air & water, maintain our soil, and give us inspiration.
McFood®: Taste all about it
More viscerally shocking, however, are the closely related social and economic ramifications of globalized food production. America has entered what is likely to be a gradual decline in life expectancy as a result from the most severe health crisis it has ever experienced. In 1950, 5% of our population was obese; in 2009, that number has risen to more than 30%. Why? Captains of the sustainable agriculture movement observe that the lure of cheap, unhealthful food invites “frugal”-minded folk to indulge. Continued consumption of mal-nutritious food, however, leads to more expenses in the long run because of long-term health problems associated with poor eating habits. Temptation and lack of nutritional knowledge leads to indulgence, which kills us. Even scarier, as the rest of the world becomes wealthier and assumes lifestyles of luxury and cultures of capitalism similar to the U.S.’s, their diets change with them. See: global obesity epidemic.
What about the hungry? According to the UN Food & Agricultural Organization, in 2008, the number of hungry people on this planet increased from 850 to 925 million people. They furthermore report that world grain supplies have decreased in the past decade. A strange thought when you consider America and Europe’s abundance of food. So, in a world where food easily travels from South America to the bellies of wealthy Westerners, why do South Asia and Africa experience rampant malnutrition and hunger? The problem, many say, is one of distribution, and it’s curable.
But it isn’t my charge to fear-monger, as if that ever equated to progress. Indeed, I write to you with a message of hope and encouragement, for millions are learning of reality: that transporting food over large distances (the average product in your supermarket traveled 1,500 miles to get there) is both uneconomical and contributes to climate change; that conventional methods of raising livestock require egregious sums of energy, degrade the land, and stir ethical debate; that a globally interdependent food system does not encourage self-sufficiency and is thus far less hardy than independent, localized food economies.
As with any large social injustice, a handful of people discover the harrowing truth it and rise up to spread the word. Regarding corporatized agriculture, we can count on the foodies over at Slow Food International to lead the way. Slow Food Int., the foremost global movement for sustainable agriculture, is rapidly gaining momentum. And students have caught on, too. Only a few months ago U.S. students created the Real Food Challenge (RFC), a national network that spans 300 institutions across the country – including our own. But wait, real food? Don’t we all eat that?
“No,” says Kelsey Meagher, President of the Real Food Challenge at UC Irvine. “Food must meet four criteria to qualify as real. First, it must be humane, or produced in an ethical manner; equitable in that it fairly compensates those who made it; community based; and ecologically sound, or organically grown.”
Increasing millions around the globe are asking themselves where their food comes from, how it grew, and frankly, how good it tastes. How we treat food – and thus ourselves – may well be the defining act of our time, so why not start now? Happy eating!
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The problem is that in many areas is that locally grown is often too expensive or (believe it or not)hard to get, or both. Where I live there are barely any local grown produce merchants(as most of them are trapped under contract and EU laws from selling locally)and those few that do sell local grown do so at prices that simply are not affordable to me(I have 6 in my household inc myself), until the prices come within my budgetary range I simply hve to compromise between what I want and what I can have, one of the great stupidies we have is that when a surpus of bulls are born in our country the farmer cannot afford to keep them any longer, originally they used to raise them on milk for veal, but then all the animal lovers got in on the act screaming that it was cruel and barbaric(the nearest most of these idiots got to a farm was their toy farms when they were kids), now because of these morons the farmers simply sell them to be killed imediately and turned into dog food and the price of veal has skyrocketed. I hope that things do turn aroung, but as long as there are blinkered people who just want us to be vegetarians and let all the poor animals free(incidentaly, I wonder what they’re going to feed all these saved animasls, after all if we are all eating the veg, what does that leave the animals?)then frankly I highly doubt that anything will really happen.
Good luck