Ok, there are already enough books (at
least 30 years worth) detailing the failings of our agricultural system. I
don't expect this one to have any more impact than the others.
At another level, although there are plenty of
books about how to garden (or farm), there still isn't much to bridge the gap
between gardening and eating. In other words, if you're already convinced,
what, precisely, should you grow to feed, first your family, then
others?
For any given area, there must be crops that give
the most nutrition. Surely someone can tell me what open-pollinated
species and varieties to grow without me spending 10 years learning the hard
way. By way of example; I want to grow the Three Sisters (corn, beans,
squash), so I asked at The Natural Gardener, Austin's best nursery.
The lady working in the seed department had grown many of the varieties there,
but had never heard of the Three Sisters. I also asked online: One
reply, and only about corn (samples, but no name). I don't understand: I'm
convinced and I know how to grow stuff, but I can't find out WHAT to grow.
"Everything" is not an option I can pursue.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 1:06
PM
Subject: [Livingontheland] DIET FOR A
DEAD PLANET
I said it too, but I bit my tongue to keep from sounding
overly dramatic. I've insisted on the seriousness of our food production
problems and with others offered practical solutions. Food growing has to
be done in ways that the masses can afford and in ways that sustain the
farmer. Cook lays it out in a more damming story than I could. Thanks to
Alan Lewis for the heads up. Feel free to forward this everywhere.
paul tradingpost@lobo.net --------------------
"We
need a whole new way of thinking about food, one that encompasses health,
affordability, accessibility, ecological sustainability, and an economics
that enables farmers to
keep farming."
---------------------- "Just about every arm of
our food production system has a heart monitor beeping with the warning
signs of death. Cook's title, it turns out, isn't the exaggerated scare
tactic it at first seems to be."
DIET FOR A DEAD PLANET http://www.dietforadeadplanet.com/
A
new book by Christopher D. Cook About the book
More than 75 million
Americans fell sick last year from the food they ate, and 5000 of them
died. Obesity and diet-related diseases are soaring to record levels. Mad
cow disease has spread to the United States. The issue of food safety has
never been more stark. Now, Christopher D. Cook's riveting and timely
investigation takes us beyond fast food and GMOs to explain why our entire
food system is in crisis. Corporate control of farms and
supermarkets, unsustainable drives to increase agribusiness profits,
misplaced subsidies for exports, and anemic regulation have all combined
to produce a grim harvest. Food, our most basic necessity, has become a
force behind a staggering array of social, economic, and environmental
epidemics. Yet there is another way. Taking heart from the promising surge
in organics, farmers' markets, and slow food, Cook argues cogently for a
whole new way of looking at what we eat -- one that places healthy,
sustainably produced food at the top of the menu for political
change.
----------------------
http://www.dietforadeadplanet.com/food.html
Food
by the Numbers: A Few Facts from the Book
CONSUMER HEALTH
* Some
325,000 Americans are hospitalized each year for food-related illnesses;
more than 5000 die annually.
* Two thirds of Americans are overweight,
and 30% are medically obese. The rate of obesity among children and
adolescents has risen from 4% in the 1970s to nearly 15% today.
*
Diet and physical activity are now the second leading cause of preventable
deaths in America, after tobacco.
* Medical costs to treat these
diet-related ailments, such as diabetes and heart disease, run $78 billion
a year -- nearly 10% of all US medical
expenditures.
ENVIRONMENT
* Factory farms, packing thousands of
animals into barns and feedlots, produce more than 1.3 billion tons of
waste each year -- enough to fill 52 million 18-wheeler semi
trucks.
* US agriculture dumps nearly 500,000 tons of pesticides --
many of them carcinogenic -- on food crops each year.
* Agricultural
pesticides kill an estimated 67 million birds annually.
* Over the
past 30 years, nearly half of all pesticides studied have been found in
stream sediment and in 64% of edible fish and other aquatic life.
*
In California's Central Valley, 2.6 million cows have become the region's
top emitter of reactive organic gases, a major
smog ingredient.
WORKERS
* Roughly 20% of meatpacking workers
are injured on the job each year, many crippled by carpal tunnel
syndrome.
* Sixty-one percent of farmworkers earn incomes below the
poverty level.
* Nearly 500 farmworkers suffer acute pesticide
poisonings every year -- in California alone.
* The federally
approved line speed limit for chicken processing plants is 91 birds per
minute.
FOOD AND FARMING, INC.
* More than 17,000 farmers go out
of business each year -- one farmer every half an hour.
* Four
corporations control 80% of the American beef business; four firms control
67% of the US seed market.
* The top five food grocers in America, led
by Wal-Mart, take in nearly half of all retail food sales.
*
Supermarket markups of farm produce run as high as 900%. For instance,
farmers in February 2004 were getting $.19 for a pound of lettuce for which
consumers paid up to $1.92.
* There are now as many prisoners in
America as there are farmers.
(Note: All source information is
available in the
book.)
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/revicontent_deaddiet.htm
Diet
for a Dead Planet
Reviewed by Erica
Wetter
06.21.05
Christopher D. Cook's new book Diet for a Dead
Planet is definitely not for the weak of stomach. From mad cow to
meat packing and pesticides to farm subsidies, the book offers
a troubling but comprehensive overview of the many ills
plaguing America's diseased food industry. Beginning with the
supermarket and ending with the global agricultural market, Cook inspects
each facet of our complex food system and reveals that the
cheap, processed food we enjoy daily has costly social, economic,
and environmental consequences that reverberate globally. His
findings are alarming, to say the least.
Consider some of the
numbers that reveal the startling scope of the problems we face. Each year,
75 million Americans are sickened by the food they eat; an estimated 67
million birds are killed by the millions of pounds of toxic agricultural
pesticides sprayed on crops; and factory farms confining cattle, hogs,
chickens, and turkeys produce enough manure waste to fill 52 million
large 18-wheeler semi-trucks -- a "convoy of excrement," as Cook
says. Corporate agri-giants like ConAgra, Premium Standard Farms
(PSF), Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland increasingly dominate the
food scene, devastating small family farms and wreaking havoc on
the environment. Every half hour, one small family farm folds under the
pressures exerted from the increasing corporate control of agriculture.
Those farmers that remain take home only about 19 cents per food dollar
spent by the average consumer (this is in comparison to 37 cents in 1980
and 47 cents in 1952). Expensive slotting fees charged by grocery stores
for product placement destroy the hopes of any independent producers who
try to sell their products directly to grocery stores. Government
farm subsidies, mostly directed to the wealthiest producers,
further handicap small-scale producers.
Taken all together, the
message couldn't be clearer: Just about every arm of our food production
system has a heart monitor beeping with the warning signs of death. Cook's
title, it turns out, isn't the exaggerated scare tactic it at first seems
to be.
But Diet for a Dead Planet goes well beyond a
statistical catalogue of the horrifying problems disrupting the
food production system. The book also provides a critical summary of the
history of farming in the US and the way food production has turned into
such a mess of pesticides, factory farms, subsidies, and corporate control.
Whether it be the injustices done to migrant farm and factory workers, or
the effects of exporting heavily subsidized American foodstuffs to rural
communities abroad, Cook attempts to touch on it all. As could be expected
in a project of such breadth, Cook gives grateful nods to many of
his food and environmental muckraking predecessors, referencing
and relying upon Rachel Carson, Frances Moore Lapp, (who blurbed
the book and whose famous work, Diet for a Small Planet, inspired
the title), Michael Pollan, and Eric Schlosser to state his case.
He also makes a convincing, if disturbing plea that our current
food system is in dire need of a complete turnaround. The problem
is trying to envision a new path, which Cook somewhat feebly attempts to
do in one short end chapter and a resource guide.
Frankly, after
reading 12 chapters graphically detailing the history and scope of the
problems afflicting our food system, I wasn't optimistic about the world's
ability to forge a more sustainable, healthy, and just approach to food.
Sure, there are farmers' markets, organic products, and numerous
nonprofits working to bandage the sick system, but, after 200 pages
of depressing news, it was hard to muster any hope that people will ever
be able to unravel the nightmare. Cook acknowledges the difficulty of the
situation, and argues that in order for us to change course, we need to
focus on fixing not just one problem -- like the exploitation of migrant
farm and factory workers, or agricultural pollution -- but the entire
system. In his words, we need "a whole new way of thinking about food, one
that encompasses health, affordability, accessibility, ecological
sustainability, and an economics that enables farmers to keep farming." In
short, we need to make dramatic changes to our national priorities
and recognize that food is more than a profit-producing object --
it's an essential element of life.
While Diet for a Dead Planet is
certainly not uplifting, it does inspire a certain amount of rage, fear,
and nausea-all of which may be necessary to shake America out of its glazed
complacency in regard to food. With mad cow disease, genetically
modified organisms, and agricultural-related pollution increasingly
all over news headlines, Cook's book is definitely a timely
reference for those hoping to delve into the food hell we've found
ourselves in, and begin the process of re-evaluating the role of food
and farming in
America.
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9315
Food
for Thought
Book Review by Kelly MacDermott, March 2005
Review
of 'Diet for a Dead Planet', Christopher D Cook, New
Press o14.99
Recently I went shopping with a friend of mine. He had
just returned from a lengthy stay in eastern Europe, and as we
walked into my local supermarket he gasped in astonishment at the
array of fresh fruit and vegetables. We take it for granted -
rare delicacies and convenience foods from every corner of the
globe without season or limit. It seems too good to be true, and
this book proves beyond doubt that it is.
Christopher Cook looks at
the US food industry, but the same methods he details and the same drive
for ever-increasing profits dominate the British food industry
too.
That extraordinary bounty of fruit and vegetables I described
is produced by eroding topsoil, polluting rivers with millions
of gallons of pesticide, and allowing tons of toxic manure to run
off from factory farms.
In meat packing and poultry plants the
intense speed and volume of output maim and cripple tens of thousands of
workers every year. Many of them are immigrants and are discarded and
replaced every few months.
The system that produces and transports
this superabundance runs on oil and diesel. In total more than 100 billion
gallons are used per year in food production.
Just a handful of
powerful corporations exercise increasing control over what we eat, how it
is made, how much it costs and who profits from it. Twenty thousand farmers
go under each year in the US.
As Cook argues, these are just some of
the immense costs on our grocery bill that are not itemised but which we
pay in taxes and public spending to treat food-related illnesses like
diabetes, obesity and heart disease. There are other costs too -
for cleaning the environment, for unemployment and welfare payments
to injured and laid off workers. Cook provides a damning account of the
rise of agribusiness and its effects in all areas of our lives. But this is
not a depressing book: he details growing resistance against the food
industry's power, through union organisation, protests, lawsuits, 'penny
auctions' - and even shootings!
In the final chapter Cook looks at
ways forward. He recognises that there are no individual solutions. Despite
its growth, organics remain a niche market of 2 percent of foods consumed
in the US. And already the corporations have moved in - Horizon,
for example, is a $127 million public corporation that controls
70 percent of the retail market in organic milk. While an
organic variety is less toxic than conventional farming, it still fails
to sustain the soil the way diversified farming would.
While Cook is
inspired by growing protests like that of José Bové against 'bad food' and
wants 'a larger commitment... that takes into account the needs of the
whole society - consumers, workers, farmers, the environment', he makes no
attempt to link the struggle against agribusiness with the wider movement
of anti-capitalist, anti-war activism. Yet without challenging
the totality of the system we cannot hope to provide the
sustainable food industry that we and the planet need.
Nevertheless
I would recommend this book to anyone. It's a comprehensive exposé of the
food industry and underlines the urgency of the need for
change.
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