Where Has Your Food Been?

Gasoline may be $4.00 a gallon, GWB may be about to start another war, and politicians seem on the money dole of business, but these are less serious than what is happening to our food supply.  Blue Girl has an excellent blog post, from which I've taken this post, entitled "Do you know where your food has been?"

I urge everyone to follow that link and read her post.  Here is an excerpt.

For a while now, a few journalists have been making the case that our return to The Jungle is a fait accompli but the stories don't get much traction, given the American addiction to $.99 double cheeseburgers. Still, the case could be made that they were understating the true, base ugliness of the American meat-based diet.

Let's start with where most meat comes from.

Have you ever heard the term CAFO (pronounced kay-foe)? A CAFO is a Contained Animal Feeding Operation, or, in the common vernacular, a factory farm, and they are not merely monstrously inhumane, they are an environmental nightmare. This is evidenced by data collected in South Missouri in counties where chicken operations supply local processing plants.

In McDonald County, down in the southwest corner, they have CAFOs and processing plants for MoArk, Tyson and Simmons corporations, and every single body of water in the county is contaminated to a sufficient degree that they are all on the impaired water bodies list. Hog operations in the northern part of the state have a similar record of environmental degradation - to the point we have to ask "are you sure that it's worth it?"

<snip>

Lack of genetic diversity  courts famine

Just ask the Irish what can happen when a country relies too heavily on one food staple  that has very little genetic diversity.

As diversity in seed crops dwindles, and Monsanto gradually takes over every facet of seed crop production, to the point that they send investigators acting like Pinkerton thugs to farms owned by people who are not even using their products, demanding records and threatening lawsuits because wind blows pollen beyond property lines and fence rows, the risk of catastrophic famine as a result of the resulting decreased genetic diversity ticks up.

<snip>

Americans aren't likely to suffer, but developing nations are.  Even before those nations went biofuels insane, smoking the crack of a potential " Green OPEC"   and converting all their cereal grains to fuel for cars instead of people, they were getting shafted by big ag.

Read the entire post,  and while you're at her blog, read the preceding post. It is equally damning of big ag, with further details of what companies like Monsanto are doing.

We are being shafted, and are shafting the third world even worse.  These Blue Girl posts should receive a huge audience, and I hope this small blog helps get the word out.

I wish I were smart enough to understand whether the world's populations can be fed without genetically modified food or factory farms.  I don't know how the quantities of food necessary to feed the world's population can be produced, but I am sure that the way it's being done now is both dangerous and not up to the job, and that its primary purpose seems to be to enrich big business.

I believe we may have gone over the tipping point, and are now moving toward a famine in Africa and some other countries beyond anything we've ever seen.  I dislike being such a pessimist, but water resources, and food production are a greater danger to world peace than Iran or Syria getting a nuclear weapon.

Comments

[Felix Grant]

She's quite right, throughout.

JMP> I don't know how the quantities of food necessary
JMP> to feed the world's population can be produced...

Bluntly: only by reducing the amount of animal based food in the world's population's diets.

There IS NO other answer, in the long run. Sadly, it doesn't seem likely that this will ever be done voluntarily - only when disaster strikes and destroys factory farming (of both animal and vegetable produce) will the survivors turn to a sustainable diet.

j

jmp's short qauestion and Felix's shorter answer were, "MP> I don't know how the quantities of food necessary
JMP> to feed the world's population can be produced...

Bluntly: only by reducing the amount of animal based food in the world's population's diets."

Yesterday while at a 4-year old grandaughter's birthday party, we had some delicious hamburgers made of turkey. Three of my four kids who were there have essentially become vegetarians. I guess the turkey was a compromise. Felix obviously has the cause in his closing comment, "will the survivors turn to a sustainable diet.". Until society changes to one where we eat to survive (be sustained) rather than enjoy ourselves, we won't solve the problem problem, . He seems at somethwng of a loss as to how to solve it other than an occasional war or famine.

Mac