I Wasn't Gonna, Honestly

But, well, I posted it to an email list recently, and these two articles seem worthy of comment.

Article 1 gives encouraging news to those who've been insisting that surely organic farms could yield as much in the long run as non-organic, and that the richer (in available nutrients) soil would translate into more nutritious food.

Here's a simplified version of the argument: in order to produce vigorous plants organically, farmers have to cultivate the best soil possible for their crops. Soil that's rich in available nutrients for plants (nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium) not only encourages healthy, productive plants, it means that those same plants are able to make their fruit chock-full of the nutrients that we eat fruits and vegetables for: vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients which are the darling of nutrition studies lately. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that non-commodity crops are where organics really excel among production and nutrition.

Article 2 presents an imperfect version of an economic argument for non-industrialized food. Mine won't be great, but here goes: the government currently subsidizes crops such as corn, rice, soybeans and peanuts, crops traded as commodities and used to produce industrialized food. Commodities are designed to be identical regardless of the climate, area or methods used to produce them. Emphasis is on yield at all costs: dumping nitrogen into the water supply, producing a crop with low nutritional value and shipping and processing yields with fossil-fuel intensive methods are considered the norm.

Subsidies and the prevalence and profitability of industrialized food encourage monoculture, a type of farming that historically fails, decimates the soil and terrain, and requires greater and greater quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizers to be dumped on crops.

The farmers, the companies that sell their seed and buy their product (often the same, considering global ownership of multiple levels of production) and the consumers who buy industrialized food don't pay the costs of environmental damage from their methods, nor do they support farmers who produce ready-to-eat food in the way that subsidies support commodities.

In case it isn't evident, this is not an economically feasible model. The government must pay, via taxes, not only to produce commodity crops, but also to clean up the mess they make, and must pay more as commodity crops inevitably yield less and less.

Local food, sold ready to eat, usually at farmers markets or through CSAs receives no subsidies. The cost of transport to urban areas is built into the actual price of the food one buys. Further, the people who farm the food pay far less for seed, and little or nothing for distribution of their crops. Thus, while the cost for a bag of local sweet corn may be higher than that of a box of corn flakes, more goes to the farmer, stimulating the local economy and evening the keel in uncertain economic times.

I won't make the argument that we shouldn't buy tropical fruit in winter, or that we must sort less- or non-perishables such as olive oil and flour from our neighborhoods. Trade is generally good for everyone involved, but when you're trading with a large multi-national company, you're not giving as much of the product price back to the producers. Since we arguably want the producers of food we like to continue making it, such tradeoffs should be carefully considered.

Furthermore, as less-processed food becomes more profitable and accessible to people with lower incomes, sustainable production will be more attractive in economically struggling markets where agriculture is a newly developing industry.

Many people believe that rising commodity prices are good for increasing the demand for local, sustainably produced food, particularly produce and meat; I'm among them. I would love to see fewer children raised to only drink their milk through cereal straws, fewer adults dieting via Lean Cuisine or Atkin's certified products, and more people taking a holistic view of their food. Why is it that colonics and intensive juice fasts are reasonable, but fresh fruits and vegetables a burden?