Tuesday, March 19, 2013

eenteresting...


From Fast Company's website. I truly believe America could use an attitude readjustment towards how and what it eats. I was going to ramble about it some, but this basically sums up exactly how I feel plus pretty pictures.

A few reflections from me:

It's human nature to be afraid of not having enough food. I get that. But in our quest to eradicate hunger, we've taken a blunt force approach, focusing our efforts primarily on making as much food as possible, as cheap as possible. Nowhere is this more evident that here, in the resource-rich U.S.

I liken our approach to heating a freezing house by lighting a bonfire in each room. Effective? Yes. But goodness, is that the best solution we can come up with? Central heating or even radiators would be far more efficient. Plus, there's the whole burning the whole house down on accident thing to consider. Even a fireplace would be an improvement over open bonfires. Besides the house burning down, other, more insidious problems like soot and smoke are byproducts of the blunt-force heating approach. Similarly, it's not just obesity we're fighting; it's also lethargy, attention problems, loss of the collective pool of farming knowledge, loss of topsoil, pollution of the environment, waste of resources (e.g. burning corn instead of a eating it or dumping milk down the drains because it's cheaper than selling it), etc.

My point is, we have proven capable of producing enough food for ourselves, which is a great step in the right direction for our country. Now that we've managed to heat the house, let's figure out how to do it better. After all, penny-wise, pound foolish never made anyone wealthy.

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