We think we’ve been earnestly increasing our crop yields using industrialized agriculture in order to feed our burgeoning human population. Daniel Quinn says it’s the other way around.
Populations grow because we produce more food. And yet the starving around the world are still starving. We’re growing the starving population also. That’s how badly human civilization has misinterpreted its survival requirements.
All of these assertions require citations to sources of course. I’ll get them here for you eventually, not today.
For now I’ll just add that we’ve developed a relentless agri-business machine that only knows how to follow the industrial model of continually increased production.
Never mind that yields are falling, our inherited soil-nutrient base is depleted, our seed archive is precarious, and the fossil fuels that drive it all are becoming unaffordable.
Never mind that it’s all for nothing, that this whole unsustainable machine doesn’t reach to the starving, that it externalizes our biofuel costs to cause famine in the third world, while the hungry die from complete lack of nutrition, and the well-fed, by the greatest irony of all, get sick and die of chronic illness brought about by today’s civilized form of malnutrition.
Here’s a slightly nuanced story in the Washington Post about a DC restaurant called Founding Farmers (lovely name!) that claims it’s all about “sustainable” food. Turns out they rushed into print a little too soon on that score however, considering the amount of quality control they still had to learn. Oops.
I’m not going to outline the story here – it’s worth a read because it gives a pretty balanced weighing of the pros and cons of the restaurant’s operation compared with its menu claims. It’s hard not to sympathize a little with Founding Farmers – and the comments to the article from readers frequently say things like, why pick on people trying to do some good? But the message here is that the devil is in the details, and we have to pay attention to the details if we want to survive.
Because, as the story shows, it can be a treacherous thing just trying to eat healthy. And by the way, “farmwashing” doesn’t appear in the story once, although it should. It’s like greenwashing, the telling of fibs by companies trying to ride the sustainability wagon without actually being, well, sustainable.
(You get it already, but if you want more collateral, in my old town of Santa Fe they can explain farmwashing to you and make it entertaining.)
In the end, it comes down to if you can believe the claims made by anyone or anything that tells you a product is organic, or sustainably grown, or healthy – or even free of poison (which might have been easier in a less polluted, earlier age).
Local Food Grid takes as a working rule of thumb that the entire food chain is poisoned. This is the basic ground zero that we have to start from. Everything is poison – except, what might not be?
How about food from a farmer I know personally? Grown in soil I’ve seen. From animals pastured on grass I’ve watched grow. How about food offered to me by people who look me in the eye, and have a vested interest in my not getting sick?
As a concept it’s very simple. Just a matter of building the local infrastructure, and the local economy woven in, snug against all storms.
Here’s a slightly nuanced story in the Washington Post about a DC restaurant called Founding Farmers (lovely name!) that claims it’s all about “sustainable” food. Turns out they rushed into print a little too soon on that score however, considering the amount of quality control they still had to learn. Oops.
