We’ve been noticing that we are paying more to stock our freezers and refrigerators with food – 75 percent more in the last six years. But are we paying attention to the fact that these changes in food prices have governments facing riots born of shortages and hunger, that obesity is on the rise while poorer nations are facing greater shortages and hunger, that diabetes and heart disease are “dis-eases of affluence” and that fresh water is fast becoming a rare and precious commodity?
But here’s the good news: If you are an eater who cares about where your food comes from (and there are a lot of us out here), we can have a hand in making food for the future clean, good and fair for all. We have to. We no longer have a choice.
Farming has the potential to go through the greatest upheaval since the Green Revolution, bringing harvests that are more healthful, sustainable and, yes, even more flavorful. The change is being pushed along by market forces that influence how our farmers farm.
Until now, food production has been controlled by big agriculture, with its fixation on “average tonnage” and “record harvests.” But there’s a cost to its breadbasket-to-the-world approach. Like those big industrial age factories that once billowed black smoke, American agriculture is mired in a mindset that relies on capital, chemistry and machines. Food production is dependent on oil, in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, in the distances produce travels from farm to plate and in the energy it takes to process it.
For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded that if we’re feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible can our food system be?
Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil up, small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer.
In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costs on the rise, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it’s grown.
The high cost of oil alone will not be enough to reform American agriculture, however. As long as agricultural companies exploit the poor and extract labor from them at low wages, and as long as they aren’t required to pay the price for the pollution they so brazenly produce, their system will stay afloat.
If financially pinched Americans opt for the cheapest (and the least healthful) foods rather than cook their own, the food industry will continue to reach for the lowest common denominator.
But it is possible to nudge the revolution along – for instance, by changing how we measure the value of food. If we stop calculating the cost per quantity and begin considering the cost per nutrient value, the demand for higher-quality food would rise.
Organic fruits and vegetables contain 40 percent more nutrients than their chemical-fed counterparts. And animals raised on pasture provide us with meat and dairy products containing more beta carotene and at least three times as much C.L.A. (conjugated linoleic acid, shown in animal studies to reduce the risk of cancer) than those raised on grain.
Where good nutrition goes, flavor tends to follow. Let’s pay attention to the facts and in this election year, let’s continue to learn how to make small and medium sized farms successful and support them every way, as community, that we can.