This week we were given a lecture at Bethe House by Frank Rossi about food engineering and his ongoing course at Cornell. Given that the western diet is composed primarily of mon-agricultural crop, we were given to understand that agri-business was also increasingly in control of our western diets. I thought this was an important critique to the western food system especially given the relative investment in monoculture that such large agribusiness depends upon. To this end we talked about the massive research investments in genetically engineered foods as it has continued at increastingly larger rates after the end of World War Two. I thought that in an historical perspective, this was an important point to make, not because it was premeditated at the close of the war, so much as how an increasingly globally connected world became increasingly dependent upon large monocultures that could produce high startch foods at low prices.
We also learned about the average distance such a global agricultural business entails our food arriving to our plate has to make. More that fifteen hundred miles were taken for most of our food staples, more in cities even. As a midwesterner, I was surprised at this figure because I believe in locally grown food, and have easy access during the summer months to such food grown on small farms in the area that I grew up. However, in all of those years out in Wisconsin, I guess I was oblivious to the dozen or so companies that actually controlled much of the agricultural crop (not the ‘specialty’ locally grown stuff) but the large swaths of farms in Wisconsin that produced commodities for a dozen or so companies and applied with fertilizer for the other dozen or so companies that control nearly 90% of all fertilizers, I think while it is important to try to buy local, we should nevertheless be aware that the global food system is not going to change any time soon that would allow for increasingly many people on earth to subsists given the amount of waste that and mass consumption allows.