For all the grumbling you do about your weekly grocery bill, the fact is you’ve never had it so good, at least in terms of what you pay for every calorie you eat.  According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Those savings begin with the remarkable success of one crop: corn…But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs.

via America’s Food Crisis and How to Fix It – TIME

A decades long conversation about the sustainability of our food system has moved from books and blogs and food activist listservs into mainstream media.  Wherever you look there’s an article, a movie, a TV or radio segment about our broken food system, about food safety, about how our eating habits are making us sick.

And about how much organic lettuce the White House Garden is producing.
The White House Garden gets a lot of press and, while much of the coverage is feel-good fluff, as Obama Foodorama points out, “It’s been remarkable to watch Mrs. Obama’s influence and the global foodprint of the White House Kitchen Garden grow. What began as a simple object lesson in teaching children about nutrition and healthy eating has reverberated widely across cultures and countries.”

Michelle Obama is using the garden to outline a food policy that addresses “food deserts, local food economies, food security and food justice; getting more fresh and nutritious foods into the USDA’s Child Nutrition programs; the critical issue of reducing diet-related disease; supporting local and smaller food producers; encouraging urban and community gardening.”

And the latest – good food and economic opportunity for local farmers integrated with the health-care discussion!

President Obama said on Thursday that he and the the First Lady are looking into setting up a farmers market just outside the White House, which might sell food from the White House garden or from local farmers.  The president said it could give the city of Washington, D.C., “more access to good, fresh food, but it also is this enormous potential revenue-maker for local farmers in the area.” Obama mentioned the idea while answering a citizen question at a health-care forum.

via Grist

The Time Magazine cover story, by Bryan Walsh, is among the best of the mainstream media pieces that moves beyond the garden, reaching a broader base of eaters who are starting to realize that industrial agriculture and the core problems we’re facing are deeply interconnected.  If we’re going to improve health care, repair the environment and tend to the well-being of local economies, we have to fix the food system.

The story describes the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where most of the animals we eat are raised.  It follows the flow of food chain waste products – manure, fertilizers, antibiotics – from industrial farms in the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, where they create a “dead zone” that destroys fish and other aquatic life, pointing out that “Even as we produce more high-fat, high-calorie foods, we destroy one of our leanest and healthiest sources of protein.”

Walsh minces no words as he connects food system problems to health care and even job loss, calculating the real costs of cheap food.

It’s also got a terrific slide show from one of my favorite books, Hungry Planet.

The core argument:

So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It’s clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down — a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones. Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million — with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.

It’s that very efficiency that’s led to the problems and is in turn spurring a backlash, reflected not just in the growth of farmers’ markets or the growing involvement of big corporations in organics but also in the local-food movement, in which restaurants and large catering services buy from suppliers in their areas, thereby improving freshness, supporting small-scale agriculture and reducing the so-called food miles between field and plate. That in turn slashes transportation costs and reduces the industry’s carbon footprint.

A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits — and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades — that’s hardly a bad thing.

Local Orbit is working on the “scaling down” piece of the food system puzzle.  We’re  building tools to help make the decentralization more efficient, creating technology infrastructure that connects regional networks of buyers and sellers in ways that can be sustained over time.

As Walsh points out, “What we really need to do is something Americans have never done well, and that’s to quit thinking big.”

UPDATE:

Just read Tom Laskawy’s take on the Time story in Grist :

TIME Magazine talking about exhausted soil? Whooda thunkit? The importance of Bryan Walsh’s piece, of course, isn’t in the particulars of its insights or its prescriptions. The importance (aside from its very existence as a cover story) is in its declarative nature.  For openers, Walsh offers a whirlwind tour of industrial ag practices which covers swine tail docking, sub-therapeutic antibiotic use, manure lagoons, ag subsidies, nitrogen fertilizer run-off and the Gulf of Mexico deadzone—all in the first paragraph. And better yet, Walsh doesn’t fall back on that tired journalistic trope of the “third party fact.” “Experts” don’t “claim” nor do “critics” “observe” nor even does “Michael Pollan” “relate” this or that fact of industrial ag’s excesses: they are instead plainly stated as established, if awful, truth. How refreshing.