The Future of Food

If you have not seen the new movie Food, Inc., you should run, not walk – well, you can drive – to the nearest theater where it’s being shown. According to the website:

Food, Inc. filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults… (At the same time) Approximately 1 billion people worldwide do not have secure access to food, including 36 million in the US. National and international food and agricultural policies have helped to create the global food crisis but can also help to fix the system.

Like the makers of Food, Inc., KedgeForward shares a passion for overhauling food systems. At this time, we are in the midst of a global (and local) food crisis. In early 2008 – even before the economic meltdown – food prices rose by about 50% globally and domestically due to rising fuel & transportation costs. While this was highly inconvenient for many of us, this has been fatal to the world’s ‘bottom billion,’ doubling the amount of starving and ‘food insecure’ people to nearly 2 billion – or one in three people on the planet. This is only the latest tragedy in a truly dysfunctional food system which leverages price and supports economic sanctions designed to impose virtual colonialism and slavery onto the world’s poorest to enrich the rest of us, primarily in the West. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank, while at times meaning well, have nonetheless rewarded the worst agricultural and meat-raising practices while making it impossible for farmers to conduct themselves in ways that honor the earth, their customers’ health, and their workers’ well-being – not to mention the integrity of their business. Today’s food system produces toxic food that travels unfathomable distances to enrich out-of-touch “organized crime monopolies” on the backs of forced labor while outsourcing the true costs of growing, eating, and distribution to a crumbling infrastructure of health care, petroleum, and public tax base – all the while destroying the environment, and driving poor farmers around the world to commit suicide by swallowing the pesticides they’re forced to use on their crops. It’s that serious.

However, as stated on the Food, Inc. website, we are also “Hungry for Change,” and we believe that there is a way out. At KedgeForward, we want to work toward bringing transformation to the “powers that be” (the Monsantos, the Cargills, the IMFs and World Banks), forming structures and strategy that is educational, and social entrepreneurial. We can work at both the grassroots and the policy level to re-educate farmers toward humane, ecologically sustainable, nutritious/delicious/regional farming practices, and give them the strategic and practical means to carry out this truly counter-cultural approach. On a policy level, we can work to remove the unfair privilege that agribusiness corporations have used for over half a century to snatch up control over the world’s food system, to our global detriment. This could be accomplish through means such as the formation of an ethical for-profit innovative farmer lending body, as well as a nonprofit that empowers farmer-educators into a network of apprenticeship in the ways of bio-intensive farming, such as the super-sustainable, super-profitable Polyface Farms of Joel Salatin in Virginia as a template.

I’ll be writing more on this topic, but for now I wanted to give you a “taste” of our desire to work with local and global organizations and social initiatives to transform our global food economy, developing a healthy, sustainable, equitable, and poverty-free future for everyone!

Thanks,

Mike Morrell, Consultant / KedgeForward

Photo: cambodiaforkidsorg (Flickr)