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By Larry Klein
The present
system of food and agriculture in America is based on three
premises:
1.
Food should be cheap
2. Farming
is something that people do not want to do.
3. We should
not have to spend our time deciding what foods are good for
us and for the land.
These premises have led to a system of
agriculture characterized by extensive and highly mechanized
monoculture of corn and soybeans, cheap because of overproduction,
but dear in the toll on the land and human health.
Overproduction dates from the years when
government-funded irrigation projects created large surpluses
of grain. Fertilizers and hybrid seed contributed to this
trend. Monocropping required toxic pesticides and herbicides
but farmers now worked in offices or air conditioned tractor
cabs, a convenience that protected them from facing hard choices
between use of poisons and the price of exposure.
As a corollary, a new system of livestock
farming-dairying, beef, poultry and pork-became the norm,
a system that would absorb the surplus grain produced. It
was after the Korean War that the beef-cattle industry changed
from grazing to finishing beef for market at large-scale feedlots.
Cheap and plentiful water meant cheap
grain. By 1975, for example, 42% of the water in California
irrigated feed crops.1 Finished beef became the standard and
dairy cattle were relegated to barns.
The new system
created strong economic reasons for farmers to use hormones.
Feedlot animals were castrated for handling
ease, although bulls can, in fact, be handled safely. And
even though a bull has clear advantages in terms of rate and
efficiency of growth over a steer, it is worth significantly
less on the sales floor than a castrated animal.
When bulls are castrated they must be
given hormones to stimulate growth. And because the grain
cartels have succeeded in convincing consumers that cheap
vegetable oils are preferable to more expensive animal fats,
the type of hormones now used directs the growth into meat
rather than fat.
These implants show the greatest gains
on feedlot diets-grain instead of pasture. Hormone implants
conform the animal to feeding conditions and to the market.
For
every dollar spent on hormone implants, there are returns
of seven to ten dollars to the rancher.
Plant foods
are not exempt under the industrial system.
Modern pesticides are hormones, mostly
estrogen-type hormones, and the typical crop gets ten applications
of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, from seed to storage. Monocropping
makes pesticide use essential. The push for GMO's is simple
a push to build hormone-based pesticides into the structure
of the plant.
Modern soybeans produce hormones in the
form of phytoestrogens. These are marketed as panaceas-a good
way to profit from the excess of soy.
"We're planting too many acres of
soybeans," says Tony Vyn, University of Guelph crop scientist.
"It's bad for the soil and it's bad for the pocket book."2
Let's return to our premises. The first
is that food should be cheap.
Cheap for
whom?
It is certainly not cheap for those who
live outside North America and live in poverty because their
countries' agricultural land and resources are producing cheap
sugar and bananas for export to America.
It is not cheap for those who are sick
and for the society that absorbs the costs of their sickness.
It is not cheap food for those whose wells, lakes and rivers
are contaminated. It is not even cheap for huge segments of
the American population, living in depressed rural areas.
Is farming
a profession to be avoided?
It is if the farmer cannot get a decent
price for the fruits of his sacred labor. It is if the barriers
posed by health, safety and zoning laws prevent him from selling
directly to the consumer. And it is for the large-scale producer
who must seal himself off from the toxic clouds that envelop
his fields. He is no longer a farmer but a businessman. Laborers
do his work. "And strangers shall stand and feed your
flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and
your vinedressers."3
Does it matter
what we eat or how we farm?
Does it matter if the fat on our steaks
and the cream in our coffee is white instead of yellow? Does
it matter if our butter and egg yolks are golden or gilded
with vegetable dyes. Does it matter if our cheeses and our
tamaris and our pickles are created by artisans or spewed
out by factories. Does it matter if our fruits and vegetables
are grown in rich and living soil. Does it matter that hormones,
nature's precious regulators, are being used in a profligate
way?
Weston A. Price
teaches us that it matters.
These three
premises have led to food that is cheap but worthless and
a medical crisis that is massive in scale.
These premises have pushed the yeoman
farmer off the land and littered our prairies with ghost towns.
These premises have poisoned our land, our crops and our livestock.
How do we
divest ourselves of the industrial food-farm paradigm?
We start by changing the way we shop and
the way we put food on our tables.
A friend from Ghana had this to say about
America: "You mean that you eat food grown by people
unknown to you?" He was appalled at the thought.
Our ancestors spend most of their waking
hours in the production and preparation of food. Today we
spend almost none. We have gone too far.
We need to
spend more money on food and more time finding food that is
produced locally in sustainable and intelligent ways.
We need to purchase and prepare our food
with love and wisdom, not fear and abandon. If we do not want
hormones in our salads, bread and meat, we must be committed
to purchasing plant foods grown in traditional ways and animal
foods that have come from pasture-fed animals.
We must
spend our food dollars in ways that allow conscientious farmers
to make a decent living.
Our economic system, our landscape, our
minds, our bodies can be transformed-and that transformation
starts in the marketplace and at the dinner table.
References:
1. Orvelle Schell, Modern Meat,
1985
2. Farm and Country, February
16, 1998
3. Isaiah 61:5
Weston
A Price Foundation
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