Problem:  Our food system has been industrialized and centralized by large corporations who care about profit above all else.

Why We Should Care:  This complex and far-reaching problem creates many reasons for us to care about it.  Small farmers are put under by agribusiness corporations; local communities suffer; food quality suffers on the freshness, tastiness, and nutrition fronts; industrial farming practices, processing, and transportation create massive amounts of pollution; the near monoculture of corn or soy that today's American farmers produce depletes our soil and makes us dependent on imported food; the industrial, unnatural production of meat, milk, and eggs gives rise to new diseases and unethical treatment of animals; our food's diminished variety and nutrition contributes to the decline of our health; the list goes on and on.

What We Can Do:  While the problem may be huge and complex, the solution is fairly simple.  Support local food.  Join a CSA or shop at a farmers market (click here for more info).  Adjust eating habits to eat more seasonally.  Grow a garden.  If you live in a rural area, raise some chickens or start a herd of dairy goats.  Avoid buying produce and other products from across the globe - for example, apples grown in New Zealand or Guatemalan bananas.  Buy organic or beyond-organic foods.

In Depth:  What is food for?  The most basic answer is that food is what keeps us alive; food is for nourishment of our physical bodies.  We need food to live - unlike the sci-fi dreams of some people in the middle of the 20th century, we cannot simply take a pill, complete with all our necessary nutrients, and do away with food altogether.  Food is inextricably tied to nature, to the earth, to the dirt from which we all came and to which we will all return.  Food is also a source of enjoyment for us.  Traditionally, we gather at mealtimes for nourishment both physical and social.  There is little else that we enjoy more than an excellent meal.  This is what food is for, to satisfy both our most basic needs and our most subtly nuanced and cultured tastes.

In sharp contrast to both the basic and most artful reasons for food stands the American food supply system.  It is neither basic nor artful.  Rather, it is industrial, machine-like, serving to produce, process, transport, and sell vast quantities of substandard food and highly processed, chemical-laden "food".  The increasing urban and decreasing rural population, the increasing detachment from nature, certain government policies, free rein capitalism, and corporate greed are all responsible for our dysfunctional food system.  Dysfunctional is truly an accurate way to describe our food system, for this is a system that:

- Depends extremely heavily on finite fossil fuel resources for long-distance transport, large-scale farming, artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, when all of these create health-hazardous pollution.  We routinely fly or truck food from one end of the country to the other, or from one side of the globe to the other, at a massive pollution and dollar cost, when food more appropriate to the location in question would be fresher, tastier, more nutritious, and less expensive

- Uses dangerous chemicals as a matter of rote in all manner of foods, citing them as necessary preservatives, artificial colors, artificial flavors, stabilizers, thickeners, etc.

- Breeds plants for ability to withstand the rigors of transport rather than for taste or nutrition

- Depends absolutely on a tiny minority of the population to feed the vast majority, all the while making it extremely hard to make a living as one of the tiny minority

The list goes on.  There are so many problems with the current food supply system in America that it would take several books to cover them all in depth.  Michael Pollan's excellent book The Omnivore's Dilemma covers only a portion of these, but is a must-read for anyone interested in how our food system operates.  As Pollan's book describes, a huge percentage of farmers in America today grow solely corn, soybeans, or a combination of both.  The reasons that this has come about are many and complex, but the end result is that we produce a huge surplus of corn and soy.  The American farmer now sells his corn for less than it costs to grow it; federal subsidies (about $5 billion annually) are virtually all that keeps the typical farm up and running in the 21st century.  To absorb the excess of corn and soy, we use it in all kinds of products, including an awful lot of food.  Out of the 45,000 items in the average supermarket, 25% of them - including non-food items - contain corn or byproducts of corn.  Sixty-six percent of processed foods contain soy.  We Americans eat more corn and corn byproducts than any other people on earth.  We may think our modern diet is varied, but in reality it is composed largely of corn and soy.

Modern agriculture uses a spectacular amount of fossil fuel to go about its business.  According to the Institute of Science and Society, 17% of the petroleum used in the USA is for our industrial food system.  An industrially-farmed acre of corn, for example - an area only 209 x 209 feet - requires about 50-65 gallons of oil to grow the corn from seed to harvest.  Some of this is used for planting, cultivating, harvesting, and transportation; much of it is in the form of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.  Much of our farmland today is so nutritionally depleted by years of monoculture that the soil serves only as a physical medium for plants to take root in - the plant's nutrition comes solely by chemical means.  Many of these chemicals wash off the fields, drain into rivers, and eventually end up at the Mississippi Delta, at the Gulf of Mexico, where they are creating a huge marine dead zone that is over 7,500 square miles in size.

While facts about industrial agriculture may be disturbing, facts about industrial meat, milk, and egg production are often downright disgusting.  Industrial chicken farms, for example, stuff 20,000 birds in a single building.  Without room for movement or exposure to natural elements, the birds must be de-beaked so that they don't severely injure or kill one another.  Even so-called "Free Range" eggs and meat - all the rage in supermarkets today - often simply refers to a small open door in the side of a huge building that leads to a small strip of fenced-in grass.  This way, the chickens "have access" to the outside, even though since the door remains closed for the first half or two-thirds of their short lives, they don't take advantage of the door once it finally is opened.  Should they actually venture outside, the yard would quickly be over-crowded, for it isn't nearly big enough for all those chickens to spread out and "range".  In such unnatural and unhealthy conditions, chickens don't last very long.  Egg layers are kept for only a short time, until their absolute peak production point has passed, and then they are slaughtered.  Meat birds are fed an extremely high-protein diet and, fattened as quickly as possible, slaughtered, packaged, and sold.  Neither type of bird eats the type of diet it should - instead of a mix of foraging and the typical small-farm chicken feed, industrial chickens are fed an unnatural mix of grain (there's that surplus corn) and protein, which often includes parts of already-slaughtered chickens.  We're feeding chickens to chickens.

We also feed cows to cows.  The typical American beef cow spends much of its short life on an industrial feedlot with thousands of other cows, eating a grain-based (more surplus corn!) diet, complete with protein which comes from - you guessed it - the leftovers of the last cows that were slaughtered.  (There is a body of evidence that suggests that the so-called mad cow disease is a direct result of this human-perpetuated cow cannibalism.)  The biggest problem with this diet of grain and protein, which is used for its ability to make cows gain weight very quickly, is that cows aren't supposed to eat grain and protein.  Cows are supposed to eat grass.  Their stomachs are uniquely evolved, along with the other ruminants - goats, deer, etc. - to process raw forage very efficiently.  However, when thousands of cows are kept together in a confined area, the ground beneath their feet doesn't even remember what grass looks like.  Industrial cows stand on, walk on, sleep on, and eat off of a landscape of their own manure, and grass is nowhere to be found.  When cows are fed grain-rich diets, as they are in our industrial food system, their health and entire well-being suffers.  A steady stream of antibiotics and growth hormones keep them just "healthy" enough to stand around, eat, and walk.  Given a long enough time on this unnatural diet, a cow would die of organ damage; unfortunately (or perhaps luckily?), cows don't have a chance to live this long.  Artificially fattened by their man-made diet, cows are slaughtered young.

Industrial cow milk production is more of the same.  Take several hundred cows, shove them in a huge building, keep them in individual stalls with slatted floors for waste disposal, feed them the same surplus-corn-grain/protein/antibiotic/hormone diet, and milk them three times a day with automated milking machines.  The milk that results is watery, nutritionally poor, and full of man-made chemicals.  We tend to think that milk is milk is milk; that milk from one cow is the same as milk from another.  However, milk from an animal that spends its days outside, grazing on quality pastureland, with plenty of room to move, breathe, and be healthy, will be of much higher quality than milk from an animal that spends its limited lifespan in a stainless steel cage with poor food and no chance of being outside.

The animals aren't the only ones suffering.  The American small farmer is feeling the crunch perhaps most of all.  The number of families living on farms has decreased by orders of magnitude over the past sixty years, and many of them were forced out by agribusiness firms with industrial farming practices.  As increasing amounts of farmland are eaten away by strip malls and suburbia, and economies of scale make huge industrial farms more profitable, most of the remaining family farmers are hanging on by a thread.  In fact, half of the average small farmer's income comes from government subsidies.  As farmers scramble to "modernize" with expensive equipment that uses increasingly expensive fuel, they are left struggling just to survive.  How has this come to be?  We cannot live without food, and one would think that farmers should be treated as extremely important, for they are the ones growing our food.  Instead, farmers are marginalized; we are so urbanized, disconnected from nature, from our food source, that we have become almost absolutely detached from reality.  Not only are we losing high-quality, diversified, nutritious food, but an entire network of rural society as well.  Our centralized food supply is just as harmful to the social and cultural sphere as it is to the sphere of physical sustenance.  And to what gain?  The answer is simple:  Corporate profits.  The ones growing the food aren't benefiting from this system.  We, the consumers, aren't benefiting from this system.  The earth we farm and the animals we use aren't benefiting from this system.  So who is?  The few at the top.

We are what we eat.  Our industrial food supply system feeds us substandard, chemical-laden, nutritionally poor food.  Is it any wonder that chronic disease rates are on the rise, or that so-called "food allergies" run rampant?  Our entire web of rural communities, the communities that hold this nation together, is disintegrating slowly before our eyes.  The people responsible for our most basic need - nutrition - are treated as peasants.  Long-distance transport of food and chemical fertilization is a major contributor to an already huge pollution problem.  Is this a system we really want to support?

There is another way.  A common misconception is that historically traditional farming methods produce less than modern industrial methods.  This is simply not true.  A small farm run in resonance - as opposed to dissonance - with the way nature works produces between 2-10 times more than the typical factory farm.  Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia provides a shining example of how things could be; this beyond-organic farm models all its processes and methods off of the way nature does things, with stellar results in both production and profits.  Selling directly to consumers, Salatin cuts out all the middlemen present in the modern food system, keeping profits up while offering good prices to the consumer on nutritious, delicious, and fresh produce, meat, milk, and eggs.  The farmer wins; the consumer wins.  Across the country, farms modeled after Salatin's are beginning to appear; however, these small numbers are overshadowed by the towering corporate scepter.

Although our food system problems are many and complex, we can all take simple actions that truly help.  Shop at farmers markets; buying directly from the people who grew or raised your food will keep prices low for you and profits high for them.  Join a CSA at a local or regional farm (click here for more info on CSAs and farmers markets).  Plant a garden in your yard.  Get some chickens or goats, or cows or pigs, or all of the above!  Produce your own food, and have plenty left over to share with your lucky neighbors!  Stay away from supermarkets as much as possible; avoid highly-processed foods; reconnect with your human roots and remember that food comes from the earth.

If we all could just take a few simple steps towards a more sensible food system, we'd all be healthier, happier, better fed, more socially connected, and with the exception of a few fat cats at the top of the corporate ladder, wealthier!  Why not go for it?