Food

What's happening with food right now is the lynchpin that links city people and country people, all around the world.

As city consumers, we can help set the parameters for what food is grown, and how. Food is something we all consume, our universal connector. Health and a thriving environment are the by-products of how we consume food. The more demand we make for real, healthful food - as opposed to processed, soy-and-corn-syrup based foods - the more of it will be grown. Theoretically.

"Increasingly we can see the wisdom of diversified farming operations, where there are built-in relationships among plants and animals. A dairy farm can provide manure for a neighboring potato farm, for example, which can in turn offer potato scraps as extra feed for the herd...To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a nostalgic bid to revert to the agrarian ways of our ancestors. It is to look toward the future, leapfrogging past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms that take advantage of the sun's free energy and use the waste of one species as food for another." (Dan Barber, NY Times Op-Ed 5/11/08)

Nature is genius, Nature understands how energy recycles itself symbiotically. Greed, impatience, excessively indulged appetites - these are what threw us off, worldwide. I don't know what's in the mind of farmers, perhaps they felt it was their due to cash in on ethanol as fast as they could; regardless, gigantic subsidized corn-farming is wreaking havoc on both food supply and prices.

City people eat. A lot. Join movements for more small-farm foods, make the consumer demand. Sign petitions to your elected officials when the farm bill comes up, voice against inefficient subsidies which support farming practices that do not benefit health or the environment in the short or long run. Buy real food and cook it. The more diversified farms that can thrive, the more likely you can buy local foods which do not require cross country trucking or international transport (more fuel).

I'm not sure what the right balance is between eating locally and international free trade. If our importing of South American bananas and mangos is helping to keep those countries' economies afloat. The economics of it I find hard to grasp. But at the least, it seems we can buy and eat the foods which grow naturally in our regions from local sources, and learn about the growing practices of the West coast farms from where our oranges come.

It has to get bad enough, I suppose, for the movement towards diversified farms to take a serious turn, and for Americans to change the way we eat and buy food. How bad, I wonder.