Food politics | Voting with your trolley | Economist.com

I just read an interesting article in The Economiist which discussed the merits of 'green' food and would like to get some others views on it. It takes a look at organic, Fairtrade, and locally grown foods, and what impact they have on the evironment. The article suggests that these 'green' foods are not as environmentally friendly as one would think. For example, organic foods are much more land intensive due to lower yields. To produce the same amount of food as conventional farming practices would require three times the land.

I tend to agree with what most of the article says. I think most of the concerns about conventional farming practices and genetic modification of food is overblown and largely unfounded. I'm also highly critical of agricultural subsides and think people concerned about the environmental impact of agriculture would be better off pursing changes down that avenue.

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"Some years ago I had a sobering realization about women, which was that there are just too many nice ones. One simply can't fall in love with, sleep with, or marry all the nice women...One of the saddening facts of life is that there is always going to be a delightful woman somewhere who, for whatever accident of timing or attraction, simply slips by and recedes to return only in a dream."
-Larry McMurtry in Roads

Does anybody here make a point to buy organic or food with the Fairtrade label?

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"Some years ago I had a sobering realization about women, which was that there are just too many nice ones. One simply can't fall in love with, sleep with, or marry all the nice women...One of the saddening facts of life is that there is always going to be a delightful woman somewhere who, for whatever accident of timing or attraction, simply slips by and recedes to return only in a dream."
-Larry McMurtry in Roads

The greenest food is local food. Food you get from a farmer's market or a store that gives room for local farmers. Local food is more likely to be from small family farmers who pay attention to keeping the soil and water healthy becasue they depend on it to make a living. Local food is not transported hundres or thousands of miles on ships,trains, and semi trucks. So there's not all that fuel used in bringing it to market. Local meat is better because it is more likely to be from smaller flocks and herds and raised on pasture and not in factory confinement. Because of the amount of fuel used in long-distance transport, local produce, even conventionally grown, is "greener" than certified organic produce trucked across the country.

Dr. Norman Borlaug, a man whose works have saved millions of lives, pointed out that with strictly organic methods, we cannot feed more than 2/3 of the world's population.

All this organic hoohah is nice and trendy, but as Dr. Bolaug puts it, ""some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"
(http://www.aworldconnected.org/article.php/311.html)

People like the "green" concept. When you're well fed, it's a trendy, hip thing to advocate.

But the simple fact is that while we in the first world have abundant food, the developing world does not. Embracing methodology that reduces the food supply only increases the cost of food and ensures that while the first world continues to enjoy the luxury of turning down food, the third world spends most of their time trying to get any food at all.

As Penn Jillette so aptly put it when discussing the "green" movement trying to restrict food technology, "Unless you and yours are starving, you need to shut the #$%& up!".

Matt

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The organic food movement was never meant to exist on a major corporate scale.The Organic Myth It is meant as a local ideal, and one that is likely not pursuable in sub-saharan africa. where it can matter is america where our food is practically all chemically altererd corn in various states and hormones. The ability to do so in prusuit of profit has made us less healthy. That said, much of the "organic food" on the market in the US is organic in name alone. I purchase based on cost and quality. For many, shopping at Whole Foods is simply an ego boost.

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maybe if i used mono-syllabic terms?

If I recall the Ecoli outbreak was traced back to the CA farmer. Instead of using high cost chemical fertilizer they used cow manure.

I have read claims that most third world farmers are unable to grow food crops which can compete with the taxpayer funded industrial farms in the US. Could it be that the loss of productivity resulting from cutting off subsides or reducing the industrialization of US farms would result in more food being proudced in third world countries? Food costs for US consumers would go up but at least we would know what the real cost of that food is rather than paying part of the cost in taxes for subsidies and environmental cleanups like we do now. Agribusienss profits might decrease and the ability of the US to use our food surplusses as a foreign policy tool would be impacted.

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A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the utmost extremes of injustice and oppression.
Edward Gibbon

I could be wrong, but that is not what I heard (and I live in the same area where this happened). They said the vector was wild pigs who broke a fence from a cattle farm into a spinach field. Aparently, that's how the manure got to the spinach farm. Not sure if that's true or a cop-out, but that's the word on the street here.

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--Sun Tzu

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--African proverb