Time Magazine Wants To Fix America's Food Crisis

Very interesting front page article in this week's issue of Time Magazine. Many of the questions they raise will be familiar to readers of Kurashi, but I hadn't thought this would be so suddenly put so high on the public agenda. While we often complain about Big Media, perhaps there is hope. The food crisis is real, and Bryan Walsh at Time Magazine deserves credit for a very bold and urgent article. Let me quote the entire opening paragraph:

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

They note that America's "energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy." They remind us that "the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil — which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills — our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later." They even wade into issues like manure and antibiotics (an issue that we have worked on in Sweden and over at Japan Offspring Fund and more recently at Consumers Union of Japan):

Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leads, inevitably, to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the same bugs that infect animals can infect us too. The UCS estimates that about 70% of antimicrobial drugs used in America are given not to people but to animals, which means we're breeding more of those deadly organisms every day.

There is more, and a lot of talk also about people who are doing things better, in a more sustainable way. This is worth reading this weekend, if you care about the food on your table and how it affects your health and our planet.

Time: America's Food Crisis and How to Fix It