Civil Eats

A few months back, I picked up a book by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton from a stack of review copies on my table, opened it and began to read. There had been very little press coverage of this book, but the title boldly re-created the world the food movement is working towards, and thus attracted my eye – A Nation of Farmers: How City Farmers, Backyard Chicken Enthusiasts, Victory Gardeners, Small Family Farms, Kids in Edible Schoolyards, Cooks in Their Kitchens, and Passionate Eaters Everywhere Can Overthrow Our Destructive Industrial Agriculture, and Give Us Hope for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness in a Changing World. That is a huge subtitle, to be certain, but even bigger is the authors’ request: for 100 million farmers and 200 million cooks. The book details the state we find ourselves in (peak oil and general resource scarcity, climate change, lack of political will, soil depletion), takes on the false ideas that keep us stuck in the current system, and discusses the potential and context for a paradigm shift in how we approach these crises — and, dare I say it, creates a vision of a future more gratifying than our current status quo. Read More

Norman Borlaug — best known for winning the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his role in the Green Revolution (the transformation of agriculture to an industrial, monocropped system, which increased the amount of food being produced in Mexico, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and elsewhere) — died this past weekend at age 95.

Borlaug’s life was dedicated to ending hunger through technology, and increasing yields was his single-minded aim. Though I do not doubt his sincerity in seeking to prevent famine, what he failed to recognize was that hunger did not persist because of a lack of food. That in fact, the root of hunger issues in the world have had more to do with a lack of equal food distribution. (As the BBC recently reported, elimination of food waste alone in the UK and the US could lift 1 billion people out of hunger if that food were instead better distributed.) Technology brings with it both bad and good; and in fact, climate change could be the worst end result of our dalliance with it. But in believing that somehow technology will only perfect us, we’ve stayed in denial about the potential for technology to also destroy us, whether quick (think atomic bomb) or more subtle — through the destruction over time of our soil. Read More