What do YOU eat?

What we eat as Americans has a direct relationship to the health of our planet. Our “national eating disorder” is unsustainable, unhealthy, harmful to our planet, and seriously needs to be addressed. Michael Pollan illustrates our impact on the Earth through our eating habits by taking us on a journey through different types of meals: industrial, organic/alternative, and food we hunt or gather ourselves. The new Green Agricultural revolution through fossil fuel based fertilizers has brought Americans a higher standard of living and a tool against natural carrying capacity. It has also poisoned our land. 

Omnivores are the highest animals on any food chain. Meat production and consumption are ecologically expensive. This human activity of eating meat is hardwired in our nature, and the shape of our teeth can illustrate this, but we can now survive without it. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and Agribusiness profit from a business model that supports the “get big our get out” ideology. This paradigm is changing with the acknowledgment that these activities contribute to diminishing biodiversity, water pollution, toxicity, and salinization. Pollan argues that these industrial meals need to become less frequent, and America must change their agriculture policy. World meat production will continue to rise as developing nations acquire a higher standard of living, but this production needs to move away from CAFOs, and towards smaller, sustainable, and diverse operations.

A change in incentives need to occur in agriculture policy. The Naylor Curve “purports to show why falling farm prices force farmers to increase production in defiance of all rational economic behavior.” Farmers today receive massive governmental subsidies to overproduce corn in America. The massive surplus of mono-cropped is then fed to cows in CAFOs. Food travels an average of 1,500 miles from cultivation to consumption. Transitioning from fossil fuel based agriculture to smaller local farms can help in addressing the problem of sustainability. The Slow Food movement tries to address the problems with today’s industrial food chain.

“Slow Food is fundamentally about supporting local farmers, preserving cultural customs, promoting organic agriculture, and teaching people to rely on themselves - not on franchised eateries - for their sustenance.”