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Points to Ponder - Commentary from Joel Salatin

CHEAP FOOD VERSUS PRECIOUS FOOD.
If one thing defines American agriculture, it is dedication to cheap food. American per capita expenditure on food is the lowest in the world; our per capita expenditure on health care is the highest. Cheap food promised to give us spendable cash to attend football games and casinos, cruises and movies.

        It created a love affair with Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOS) that became incubators for disease.  Floating on a sea of cheap energy, these facilities promised mechanized farming and pharmaceutical health.  Subtherapeutic antibiotic use created a world of superbugs like mRSA and cDiff.  A brand new lexicon burst on the American vocabulary:  campylobacter, lysteria, E. coli, salmonella, food allergies, Type 2 diabetes:  these are nature, beaten and abused, on its knees, pleading and begging “Enough!”     
  Instead of God’s designed decomposition driving fertility, petroleum-based chemical fertilizers substituted, like an intravenous feeding tube replacing edible food. In short order, our agriculture system created a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico, infertile frogs, and three-legged salamanders.  And now our life expectancy is dropping; we’re addicted to pharmaceuticals; physical and emotional maladies plague our nation.
     Perhaps cheap food policy’s most damaging effect is on farmers themselves.  The primary custodians of our natural resources, not to mention food, feel marginalized and unappreciated.  When’s the last time you heard about a school guidance counselor advising:  “Mary, you’re really sharp, with great grades and honors credentials.  You should be a farmer.”  Burdened with the unnecessary and ridiculous responsibility of feeding the world, American farmers now number fewer than our prison population.  It gives me pause to realize that my book You Can Farm would have much bigger buyer interest if it had been You Can Be a Successful Inmate.  Stewarding our air, soil, and water with our best and brightest will only come when we have a precious food policy. That’s up to consumers, not farmers.
      Can you imagine a cheap religion policy?  A cheap road-building policy?  A cheap information technology policy?  Dear folks, you cannot abdicate precious food respect without serious consequences.  As a culture, we must leave this cheap food universe and get in the escape pod of precious food.
BDair 8 Nov 16
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