The Michael Pollan Prescription: How to Eat Better and Avoid the Industrial Diet
(Page 3 of 6)
Nov. 4, 2008
By Betsy Model
It’s not like everyone has to move at once or the whole system has to change at once. There won’t be that kind of suddenness. We can individually declare our independence from the industrial food chain. We don’t have to do it all at once. And we don’t have to blow up the industrial food system, either! We just have to walk around it. Or pretend it’s not there.
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In the past decade alone there’s been enough consumer concern over pesticides and the quality — both in the food and its production — of food that terms like “fair trade,” “farm-raised” versus “wild-caught,” “free-range” and “grass-fed” are common grocery lingo. Plus it’s spawned a whole new retail business in the “organic” category. With that in mind, can consumer demand create new business and a whole new paradigm within the food growing and processing category?
Yes, and it’s happening right now. I know of one manager of a farmers market in Washington D.C., who’s scouring the countryside right now for farmers growing great produce and that encourages people to start farming because she has so much demand. So she’s out there like Johnny Appleseed selling seeds! And this has become the great (new) problem at farmers markets … satisfying consumer demand. The market response is felt on the farm and you have people who were perhaps growing commodity crops for the grain elevator suddenly thinking, ‘Hey! I’m going to take some of my land and I’m going to grow some actual food and bring it to the farmers market. I’m going to make some real cash that way.’ Or you have people saying ‘I’m not going to send all my cattle off to the auction house after they’re six months old. I’m going to finish some of them here and let them graze because there’s a market for grass-fed beef. I’m going to keep them on the farm and I’m not going to put them on corn.’ It’s astounding how much of this is happening. There is a food movement in every community I’ve visited. These are very good days for people selling local food.
What About Growing Our Own?
As recently as two or three generations ago, it was typical for every family to grow at least a portion of their food in some form of garden or farm. Today, less than 10 percent of all Americans have any food growing where they live, whether they have acreage, a home on a lot or an urban balcony or patio. How did we get so disassociated from our food and where it comes from? Is it because we’re such an affluent nation?
Yes, and we’re very busy — or we fashion that we’re very busy — and a lot of us don’t have land. That can be an issue. But the victory garden movement was a big chunk of the food supply for five years; something like half of all fresh produce consumed in America during World War II came from these gardens. There were 40 million of them! And how many people were there then? Not many more than 100 million probably. So it was something like half were growing these gardens and it made a huge contribution. It falls off really, really fast after 1946 … people just stopped growing food at home. Rationing was over and people embraced meat again. They embraced butter, eggs, sugar and all those things that they had been missing. And, by the way, public health went way down.
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