Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Time magazine: high cost of cheap food

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Time magazine: high cost of cheap food
  • Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:07:16 -0600



Time magazine: high cost of cheap food
* Tom Laskawy
Posted 5:57 PM on 20 Aug 2009
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-08-20-sustainable-ag-meets-the-msm-and-wins/

TIME Magazine‘s current cover story wants you to know that our fossil-fueled,
chemically intensive industrial food system is destined to fail. Granted, the
second part of that sentence isn’t news to Grist readers. But the first part
of that sentence is news. Personally, I wouldn’t have expected to read the
following positively Philpottian (if not Pollan-esque) prose in a national
newsweekly cover story:

With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the
inevitably rising price of oil — which will affect everything from fertilizer
to supermarket electricity bills — our industrial style of food production
will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of
millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich
diet that has made Americans so unhealthy — demand for meat and poultry
worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 — but the earth can no longer deliver.
Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they
face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs,
higher health costs — and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist
reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants — and as
every farmer knows, if you don’t take care of your land, it can’t take care
of you.

TIME Magazine talking about exhausted soil? Whooda thunkit? The importance of
Bryan Walsh’s piece, of course, isn’t in the particulars of its insights or
its prescriptions. The importance (aside from its very existence as a cover
story) is in its declarative nature. For openers, Walsh offers a whirlwind
tour of industrial ag practices which covers swine tail docking,
sub-therapeutic antibiotic use, manure lagoons, ag subsidies, nitrogen
fertilizer run-off and the Gulf of Mexico deadzone—all in the first
paragraph. And better yet, Walsh doesn’t fall back on that tired journalistic
trope of the “third party fact.” “Experts” don’t “claim” nor do “critics”
“observe” nor even does “Michael Pollan” “relate” this or that fact of
industrial ag’s excesses: they are instead plainly stated as established, if
awful, truth. How refreshing.

Indeed, in these two paragraphs Walsh brings into stark relief the very
issues over which Big Ag willfully and relentlessly refuses to engage. One of
the more surprising aspects of the article is a total lack of any boilerplate
denials from Big Ag of all responsibility for the ills of industrial food
that typically get some play whenever the topic of food production gets
attention from the MSM. I don’t think it’s an oversight that we didn’t hear
from the National Corn Growers Association or the American Farm Bureau or
Monsanto or Smithfield or any other Big Ag mouthpiece in this article—it’s
likely that nothing they said was worth repeating.

Honestly, the best you can expect to hear from them is some paean to American
agricultural ingenuity and productivity such as in soy farmer and AFM
official Blake Hurst’s Omnivore’s Delusion (though after you read it, be sure
to rinse your brain with Tom Philpott’s able riposte). Hurst, as it happens,
manages to ignore or elide just about every damaging issue regarding
industrial agriculture that TIME Magazine has so pointedly raised. And it’s
no coincidence—the fact is that Big Ag doesn’t have the answers to
sustainability. What they do know about is succeeding in a status quo of
abundant oil, chemicals and subsidies. Change the rules of the game—spiking
fuel prices, fertilizer shortages, superweeds, superbugs, etc.—and they no
longer know how to play.

If I have a regret about this piece, it’s in the conclusion. Walsh invokes
the concepts of “conscious” eating on the one hand, versus “selective
forgetting” of the consequences of our food choices on the other. Consumers
must be open to change, he declares, if we’re to move toward a more
sustainable system. This is no doubt true. But I would have liked a final
invocation as well of industrial agriculture’s “ticking clock.” Right now,
consumer choice is surely a crucial factor. But if, for example, worldwide
demand for meat is in fact set to rise 25% by 2015, it seems to me that we’ll
be having unpleasant “choices” thrust upon us much sooner than we may expect.
And after 2015 things are only going to get worse (Peak Oil, anyone?)
America’s Food Crisis and How to Fix It may have been one of the most
thorough and alarmist articles on the industrial food system ever to appear
in a major magazine. Sadly, it may not have been nearly alarmist enough.




  • [Livingontheland] Time magazine: high cost of cheap food, Tradingpost, 08/25/2009

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page