There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
Though the industrial logic that made feeding cattle to cattle seem like a good idea has been thrown into doubt by mad cow disease, I was surprised to learn it hadn't been discarded. The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June.
Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.
Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.
We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.
Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.
When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.
Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food,
Polyface is proof that people can sometimes do more for the health of a place by cultivating it rather than by leaving it alone.
So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.
So that's us: processed corn, walking.
So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.
Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.
The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.
Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.
Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.
Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.
I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food.
I said before that McDonald's serves a kind of comfort food, but after a few bites I'm more inclined to think they're selling something more schematic than that--something more like a signifier of comfort food. So you eat more and eat more quickly, hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or French fry as it retreats over the horizon. And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.
Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most.
Perhaps as the sway of tradition in our eating decisions weakens, habits we once took for granted are thrown up in the air, where they're more easily buffeted by a strong idea or a breeze of fashion.
As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.
But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.
Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring - to the carelessness of both producers and consumers.
Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.
Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.
Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.
The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn't have. It's very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that's going wrong in society.
When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods.
In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.
A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
When Wal-Mart and McDonald's start selling organic food, it will drive down the price to farmers and risk growing a new monoculture.
I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.
The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.
At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.
Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.
Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.
The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.
High-quality food is better for your health.
My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.
When the choice comes down to industrial organic or local, I opt for the local, because it supports much more than good agricultural practice.
Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.
Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.
In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.
I don't think it's a journalist's job to issue shopping lists or policy descriptions. We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are the environment, your health, animal welfare the answers are going to be different for every person.
Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.
The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories