What is good for people to eat? In modern industrial society this question has too many answers. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes “…Somehow this most elemental of activities-figuring out what to eat-has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help.”(Pollan 1) Although the industrialization of agriculture allows consumers in North America to eat mangoes in the winter time, and supplies the one hundred pounds of corn to be grown and fed to cattle for the one pound or so of meat in return(Snyder), but most of the people in modern society take advantage of this industrialization of food every time they go into a supermarket, but don’t attempt to really understand the effect that it has had and will continue to have making food more; plentiful, cheap, and ultimately nutrition-less as a result. How can one change their diet to be less-supportive on an industrialized system and more reliant on local farms which attempt to work with the environment instead of against it? By supporting or practicing clean, local, and organic farming practices.
Environmental:
Industrial agriculture or factory farming: “refers to the industrialized production of
livestock,
poultry,
fish, and crops. The methods employed are geared toward making use of economies of scale to produce the highest output at the lowest cost.” (Wikipedia 1) While this sort of “advancement” can be seen as a great thing, it means that very little attention is paid to the well-being of animals and more importantly the enviornment, in order to achieve the highest productivity. large-scale use of petroleum for fertilizers and insecticides also leave soil in-fertle and in-arable, which is clearly damaging the earth.
Soil, air, and water polution are due to the Largely petroleum based chemicals that factory farming is dependent on. The Union of Concerned Scientists says in Sustiainable Agriculture-A New Vision: “All the crop land around you is doused with chemicals: herbicides to control weeds, insecticides to control insects, and fertilizers to stimulate growth.” (Sustainable Agriculture-A New Vision 2001). Obviously all this chemical usage to “protect” food does not come with out a cost to the environment, for example they are poisoning waters running off into the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the contamination of large-bodies of water, the air-quality, thanks to factory farming, is also greatly comprised. Alex Steffen further disscuses factory farming’s damaging affect on the enviornment in Spinach, Freedlots and knowing the backstory: “the only reason contemporary animal cities aren't as plague-ridden as their medieval counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.”(Steffen 1) This qoute means that factory farming is polluting our enviornment and the antibiotic is the inovation that keeps people in factory farm areas from falling ill. This qoute also brings up a second point about antibiotics. Intrestingly enough: “In the 1940s Dr. Thomas Jukes discoverd that chickens grew faster when fed the mash left over from the antibiotic manufacturing process. To this day no one really knows why antibiotics speed growth, but within years after Juke's discovery they became standard feed additives for poultry, cattle, calves and pigs.”(
www.animalsuffering.com). Antibiotics and growth hormones work in humans the same as they work in animals, speeding up growth of cells, both for good and bad. Many accredit the drop in the age young women are hitting puberty, resulting in extremely early development.
What if the problem was not simply antibiotics, growth hormones or that “farming in its current industrial manifestation is destoying topsoil and biodeversity…” (Hemenway 2006). What if the problem was that “…Agriculture in any form is inherently unstable.” (Hemenway 2006). Would this than mean that a life of foraging, once called “nasty, brutish, and short” by Thomas Hobbes, would in fact be the healthiest and most enviormentaly friendly? Toby Hemenway says in Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron? That: “…burial sites at Dickson Mounds, an archaeological site in Illinois that spans a shift from foraging to maize farming, show that farmers there had 50% more tooth problems typical of malnutrition, four times the anemia, and an increase in spine degeneration indicative of a life of hard labor, compared to their forager forebears at the site.(8) Lifespan decreased from an average of 26 years at birth for foragers to 19 for farmers.” (Hemenway 2006). This quote means that scientific evidence was used to prove that of the skeletons found at an archeological dig site, which went through a change from foraging to agriculture as its main way of getting food, actually lowered the general lifespan of the people of Dickson Mounds as well as made way for multiple health complications. This quote proves that a forager lifestyle is ultimately healthier than one of agriculture. Hemenway goes on to say that: “In virtually all known examples, foragers had better teeth and less disease than subsequent farming cultures at the same site. Thus the easy calories of agriculture were gained at the cost of good nutrition and health.” (Heminway 2006) This further proves the argument against agriculture as well as proves the earlier argument about a lack of nutrition in food produced through industrial methods.
Another argument for the hunter gatherer lifestyle is made in Jared Diamond’s The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race: “While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. …It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen (for example), who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.” (Diamond 3) This is a very important idea because it is strong evidence that nutrition-wise a hunter gatherer diet is fundamentally healthy, while the farmer’s diet is not.
The argument lifestyle free of industrial agriculture and factory farms is very strong; it is better for humans as well as the environment; it employs sustainable methods to feed ones self, and allows small local farms to operate. A switch to sustainable agriculture by it self would be a huge step toward working with the environment instead of against it, and a difference can be made by being aware of the different aspects of where your food comes from. Going to a green market and supporting a local farmer instead of a corporation is the perfect way to start making a difference.
References:
Union of Concerned Scientists, "Sustainable Agriculture-A New Vision." Food and Environment march 2001 Feb 22 2007
.
The Editors, Fatal Harvest, "The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth One." Alternet.org. 22 Aug 2002. 22 Feb 2007 .
The Antibiotic Argument against meat-eating." animalsuffering.com. 2006. 22 Feb 2007 .
Hemenway, Toby. "Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?" Energy Bulletin august 16 2006 23 Feb 2007 .
