Food Policy

MUST READ: the NYT Magazine has an excellent article on how the environment, health care, energy, war, and trade all stem from Ag policy and our eating habits.

But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.

This article gets me all fired up. A man after my own heart. I've thought (and argued) that Food and Ag Policy can have many - wide ranging - positive effects on the BIG issues that we'll face over our lifetime. Remember, only 50 years ago all Americans ate local, organic, healthy, food that supported integrated communities and rural families and industry. Federal policy has great influence over food policy - and has forced the shift from local permaculture foods to cheap, unhealthy, bifurcated systems that sacrifice ecological efficiency for economic efficiency that only takes us as far as as cheap fossil fuels are willing to subsidize. Now that cheap oil is a thing of the past, it's time to return to a modern version of an agrarian society -- and the author has some fantastic policy proposals to get us there.