Food, We all Need It
The FT's Rana Foroohar has a nice video about the American food system, and that's what it is, a system. It’s worth watching if only because it’s on the FT saying corporate globalization is done and everything needs to be rethought, literally from the ground-up. Correctly underlying the piece is the contention our present food practices are not sustainable
The piece leaves the impression the established food system developed only in the last forty years, but really it’s more usefully understood to have developed in the last 150 years. This is when the industrial corporation, represented by the banks and the railroads, began consolidating American farming. In this time, the US went from the majority of the population involved in farming to today, with only 1.4%!
The best part of the video is her talking to several of the last small farmers in the Midwest. Lord, she plowed deep enough and overturned a few actual citizens of the old republic!
The last farmers rightly point to corporate control of American politics as a big part of the problem. Unfortunately, the piece doesn't explore solutions to this, but then who does? That's America's vast political desert.
It does give, as our age is tragically prone, two technology solutions. The first provided by a stereotypical San Francisco tech-boy. The second by some bioengineers in Wisconsin. I'm not sure who is more distressing, the tech guy who you know doesn’t understand our energy predicament, but then none of them do, or the Madison bioengineers, who you’d bet don't really understand natural selection, but human selecting they ago. But this is not so much a fault of the piece, but representative of where we are as a culture. Here’s another option.
So, kudos to the FT and Foroohar for doing this. It's about as good a political piece, and I’m not damning with faint praise, as I've seen in establishment media for a long time. The times they are a changin.
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