“The industrialized agricultural system of the 20th century was one of the greatest mistakes of mankind. Only the most misguided of us would point to it as a triumph of anything other than hubris.” H Farmer

Llpoh should have picked a better example of the success of industrialization than agriculture. If eating was simply a matter of producing the highest number of calories from a specific plot of land with the lowest investment of labor regardless of the amount of energy expended to do so, he’d be right. The problem with our current system of agriculture should be obvious to anyone with two eyeballs and heartbeat, but for some reason only the smallest minority of people are able to see the holistic panorama of industrialized agriculture and it’s downstream effects on the population.

Let’s examine some of the issues in greater detail before we decide what makes something successful as opposed to efficient.

Food is more than calories. I’m not a nutritionist or an MD, but I do know that calories are simply a mechanism for delivering energy to an organism, not a measure of nutritive value. If a toddler needed 500 calories a day and was offered a choice between a 500 calorie soft drink or an equal amount of vegetables, meat and fruit, only a sadist would feed the child the soft drink as a steady diet based on cost alone. `A single handful of fresh greens picked right out of the garden brings greater value to the life of a human being than a 2 liter Mountain Dew with ten times the calories. Continue reading →