PART 1
Click the image above to read Food Now as it appeared in the paper, or scroll down to read the full copy below.
FOOD NOW
In 1987 I wrote:
“Our food supply is in trouble.”
In 1992 I wrote:
“There is revolution in the air.
It is not a revolution of armies and generals,
it is more Copernican than that,
it is a revolution of our thinking,
thinking that knows good food
comes from good farming
and that good farming depends on
a healthy environment.”
So, where is food now?
What follows is a summary of published reports on the state of modern food
with some personal observations.
For most of the history of agriculture the great majority of food people ate was grown near where they lived by neighbors who farmed. Food was personal, and in many ways defined communities and their cultures. Food took many hands and was a great deal of work. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution food production gradually became more mechanized which allowed fewer farmers to feed more people. For a time, food remained fairly local but toward the end of the 19th C. as further mechanization and transportation developed, there was an increasing centralization and scaling up of food processing. Food began to be commoditized and depersonalized.
DEPERSONALIZED FOOD
After World War II, and accelerating in the 1960s, there was a great depersonalization of American food. It became rare for people to know farmers, to have walked on their land, or to have helped with the harvest. The butchers and bakers, once common pillars of their communities, were replaced by machines or sequestered behind distant corporate walls. Our fish increasingly came from foreign shores, fresh perhaps, but devoid of the faces and stories of fishermen. Farm land increasingly became corporate investments.
With these social and economic changes food changed. It stopped being something personal, something nurturing, something loving. Food became commoditized: it became a widget of commerce and an experiment of science. Lost was its meaning to human health and happiness, lost was the cost of its production to Nature, and most tragically of all, we lost small farms and farm families. For the most part this is the food I grew up on and remains the dominant food paradigm in America. It has its defenders. It is cheap and plentiful and that makes more food available to more people which is no small thing because human hunger and malnutrition are real - even here, and modern farming has taken some of the back breaking toil out of producing food, but it has come with unintended consequences, the effects of which we are still coming to understand.
NEXT WEEK Part 2: how even with an abundance of food available our food systems are broken
Food Now is a serialized essay from George Schenk, Founder and CEO of American Flatbread at Lareau Farm and Forest on the state of modern food.
PART 2
Click the image above to read Food Now as it appeared in the paper, or scroll down to read the full copy below.
BROKEN FOOD
Much of modern American food is broken. Modern agricultural practices - heavy tilling, synthetic fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides - have contributed to the massive loss of fertile topsoil, air and water pollution, climate change, “dead zones” in lake and marine ecosystems, and to an Epoch defining rate of wildlife decline and extinctions. Extensive irrigation is rapidly draining finite and irreplaceable aquifers, and montane glaciers, which provide water for agriculture and personal use to an estimated one billion people a day, are shrinking due to changing weather patterns. Confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) force animals to eat unbalanced diets, often require antibiotics, produce substantial waste problems, and because they so severely limit the expression of an animal's natural behaviors, are arguably unethical. Residues of persistent synthetic pesticides on fruits and vegetables, antibiotics and hormones added to the diets of livestock, and a wide range of highly processed novel molecules including preservatives, stabilizing gums, emulsifiers, flavorants, deodorizers, bleaches, thickening agents, and “natural flavors” (for which there is no legal definition allowing food processors to use ingredients that stretch the meaning of “natural”) - now referred to as Ultra-Processed Foods (UPF’s/NOVA 4) - have changed our food ecosystem in ways that are increasingly seen as threatening the functionality of the biosphere and problematic to human health. And the great marine fisheries of the world, which have historically provided high quality protein for hundreds of millions of people a day, are, in many places, near collapse because of the dual pressures of overfishing and environmental degradation.
EATING NOW
At the moment the world has an abundance of food, though we still have not learned how to share it so that everyone has enough. The irony of this abundance is that it does not always contribute to our wellbeing. It is easy to eat too much and too much of the wrong things - too much sugar, too much salt, too much fat, too many highly processed ingredients, too little whole ingredients. It is all a little strange, really. It is as though we have forgotten how important good food is to our health and happiness, and to the wellbeing of our children.
It has been suggested that we be more intentional about how and what we eat: to better know what we are putting in our mouths - of where it came from, of how it was grown and processed; to eat more slowly and chew our food more deliberately; and to be truly grateful because food comes by the efforts of many hard-working people and at a great cost to Nature.
NEXT WEEK Part 3: reconciling the need for good food, good land stewardship and a growing population
Food Now is a serialized essay from George Schenk, Founder and CEO of American Flatbread at Lareau Farm and Forest on the state of modern food.
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