Mon 29 Mar 2010
Our Industrial Food System on Full Display
Posted by admin under Food Systems
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This past week has provided a lot of media coverage regarding our industrial food system.
Perhaps the biggest newsmaker has been the debut of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution this past Friday night on ABC. While Jamie might not do the best job hi-lighting the ongoing work of folks already working to improve school nutrition, for example Debra Eschmeyer; it’s absolutely exciting to have a network television station pick up a show focusing on the real implications of our current food system. Hopefully it will stimulate wider discussions in our communities over the coming weeks.
ABC also ran a story this weekend examining the destruction of surplus Strawberry crops, I’ll let the story speak for itself…
Our industrial food system is broken. While it has achieved dramatic success in producing amazing increases in yields over the past couple of decades; it has built this success on the unsustainable use of fossil fuels for fertilizers, heavy application of harmful pesticides, unfair labor practices, and a general neglect for producing and distributing healthy foods to everyone in our society. A case in point is the widescale adoption of High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) as a sweetner in processed foods. Numerous studies are beginning to show the negative health implications of HFCS in our diet: see this web story about research at Princeton University and Dr. Joseph Mercola’s terrific appraisal on the Huffington Post a few weeks back.
What are some of the solutions? Traditional sugar for some; though in 2008 we started planting GMO sugar beets in the U.S., opening up another conversation altogether (I know farmers who stated that without the introduction of GMO technologies for Sugar Beets they would have quite producing sugar beets altogether). For a small group of growers and bakers in the Northeast it’s a return to heritage wheat and local grain production. Though I have a hard time imagine any serious scale production of commodities that are comparatively easy to ship from the breadbasket. For your consideration… according to the Mass. Dept of Ag. Resources the state of Massachusetts has a little more than 500,000 arable acres available for agriculture. In comparison Cass County in North Dakota cropped a half-million acres in soybeans alone this past year. The production in Cass County contributed to the estimated 77 million acres of soybeans planted in 2009 in the United States. Let’s recap – The united states plants more than 150 times the arable land in Massachusetts in one crop: soybeans.
Relocalization of grains in the Northeast is an interesting idea to consider, but it will necessarily involve production in the larger production areas outside of Massachusetts (i.e. New York State, Aroostook County in Maine). Continuing to improve access to fresh fruits and vegetables makes sense; but we should be aware that there are many reasons fruits and vegetables cost more at the grocery store… especially if you exclude tomatoes and potatoes the cost per calorie produced is much higher for most vegetables than commodities like corn and soybeans. A farmer may be able to survive (sic) selling a bushel of feed corn for as little as 10 cents/pound (note: the current price is around 7 cents), but as the ABC story shows when prices for fresh market strawberries drop to 25 cents/pound it doesn’t make sense for the growers to spend money harvesting the crop.
Sometime in the coming weeks I’ll try to contribute a post on the thriving and essential importance of our local food systems; which should be celebrated for not only what they currently contribute to our community health, but also their role in stabilizing our economic systems…
