Since people are going to be spending a large portion (hahahahahaha! Large portion, get it?) of their day eating, I thought I'd throw up a link to this frankly fascinating Newsweek article on the 'food gap' and how we can bridge the divide between those that have access to delicious and nutritious food and those that don't….
Behold (and read) the article, here.
OK, now that's done: I'm a fan of buying locally. We go to the Farmer's Market on a semi-regular basis and next year, I'd like to go more often, because well, it's important to support local growers and producers. But capitalism isn't always so friendly to these goals, mainly because the hard and fast truth of the matter is that buying organic, buying local, buying from a grocery store like New Pi or Whole Foods is damn expensive for a large chunk of the country. Then what we see is the stratification of food along class lines, with the rich who can afford to eat organic and have faaaaawncy veg getting it and the poor people being poorly nourished. (Which is what the above article talks about.)
Problem is, I'm not down with the 'holier than thou' attitude that so many 'locavores' seem to bring to the table. I mean, read the article… they get into fights with her husband's family because they insist on bringing their own, special organic apples to Thanksgiving. Who does that? Seriously now… one non-organic apple ain't going to kill you and at the end of the day, good food is good food. It drives me nuts when people wrap themselves in this pseudo-vegan cloak of righteousness and think we should tax soda, junk food and cut trans-fats out of food in the name of the collective good of the nation.
No, no, no… that's not the way to go. If you're serious about developing local markets and organic farming and spreading it wide, you need to get big retailers to catch on (like Wal Mart is) and make it affordable. Organic and locavorism will remain fads for the rich until the big corporations take it and make bank off it. That may seem like a sad reflection on the capitalist society we live in, but it's the way it works. (Same thing goes for 'green technologies'- when a big company figures out a way to make serious bank off this stuff, then it'll blow up in a major way.)
There's something else that goes right along with this issue though and that's the state of agriculture overall. We subsidize to beat heck and back all in the name of 'protecting the family farmer' and what do we get? Monocultures, GM and corporate farming everywhere we seem to look. I know it's not as simple as that- and I think it's ridiculous that I've lived most of my life in the farm state of farm states and don't really know all that much about agriculture (something I want to change.) If getting organic and local markets to pop in the overall economy rests on getting big corporations to see the potential for money in them, then overall sustainability in agriculture means we need an influx of innovation to change the way we do business in this country. So if I was Terry Branstad or Tom Vilsack, I'd be brushing up my Portuguese and heading south for a trip to the cerrado and Brazil.
That's right: Brazil. Brazil has gone from a food importer to a food exporter in a ridiculous amount of time and there's a genuine agricultural revolution going on down there that we should be learning about and watching very closely. Technology, innovation and changing entire paradigms have worked wonders for the Brazilians and could serve as a model for new agricultural revolutions here in the United States and beyond.
Changing the way we eat in this country, is therefore going to involve more than just preaching the wonders of organic produce and local markets. But it's certainly a discussion worth having and a subject that I'm dying to learn more about.
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