NYT: The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st-Century Agriculture

[proverbialwisdom]

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/09/magazine/big-food-photo-essay.html

The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st-Century Agriculture

Photographs by GEORGE STEINMETZ
OCT. 5, 2016

Our industrialized food system nourishes more people, at lower cost, than any comparable system in history. It also exerts a terrifyingly massive influence on our health and our environment. Photographer George Steinmetz spent nearly a year traveling the country to capture that system, in all its scope, grandeur and dizzying scale. His photographs are all the more remarkable for the fact that so few large food producers are willing to open themselves to this sort of public view.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/09/magazine/obama-administration-big-food-policy.html

Why Did the Obamas Fail to Take On Corporate Agriculture?

By MICHAEL POLLAN
OCT. 5, 2016

Eight years ago this month, I published in these pages an open letter to the next president titled, “Farmer in Chief.” “It may surprise you to learn,” it began, “that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food.” Several of the big topics that Barack Obama and John McCain were campaigning on — including health care costs, climate change, energy independence and security threats at home and abroad — could not be successfully addressed without also addressing a broken food system.

A food system organized around subsidized monocultures of corn and soy, I explained, guzzled tremendous amounts of fossil fuel (for everything from the chemical fertilizer and pesticide those fields depended on to the fuel needed to ship food around the world) and in the process emitted tremendous amounts of greenhouse gas — as much as a third of all emissions, by some estimates. At the same time, the types of food that can be made from all that subsidized corn and soy — feedlot meat and processed foods of all kinds — bear a large measure of responsibility for the steep rise in health care costs: A substantial portion of what we spend on health care in this country goes to treat chronic diseases linked to diet. Furthermore, the scale and centralization of a food system in which one factory washes 25 million servings of salad or grinds 20 million hamburger patties each week is uniquely vulnerable to food-safety threats, whether from negligence or terrorists. I went on to outline a handful of proposals aimed at reforming the food system so that it might contribute to the health of the public and the environment rather than undermine it.

A few days after the letter was published, Obama the candidate gave an interview to Joe Klein for Time magazine in which he concisely summarized my 8,000-word article:

“I was just reading an article in The New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the meantime, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our health care costs because they’re contributing to Type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity.”

Was it possible that the food movement — the loose-knit coalition of environmental, public-health, animal-welfare and social-justice advocates seeking reform of the food system — might soon have a friend in the White House?

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[underpants]

1. I like food

Marking to read later

[sinkingfeeling]

2. Not exactly the 210-acre farm I grew up on. I personally named

all of the 100 pigs I raised.

[jberryhill]

3. Just some back of the envelope from numbers in quick searches

Quickly googling US per capita pork consumption (around 51 pounds), how much pork one gets from a pig (120 pounds), and US population (318 million), I come up with 135 million pigs needed to satisfy domestic consumption.

So if 100 pigs are raised on 210 acres, then we're going to need 1.35 million 210-acre farms, which works out to around 443,100 square miles, or just under 8 Iowas (without anything else in them).

At some point, the consumption needs to go down and/or the price go way up. But people seem to think that there is a magic planet somewhere that can continue to meet consumption without either (a) continued density of production or (b) price stability.

The magic in all this is having such a wide separation between people and what they eat, that most people have no idea how or where their food is produced and what is required to produce that much at that price. Because food comes from 'the magic food place' for most people, then we are not going to be able to make rational choices about what we eat or how we produce it. I have no idea how this story is going to end.

[awoke_in_2003]

4. October is National Pork Month

please, shop accordingly I had pork chop and eggs for breakfast.