The whiffs of social engineering made me pucker up though. It's not like that hasn't already been going on with the current framework and corporate/national franchise shilling. Certainly FOOD has an almost intrinsic social component to it all the way down the delivery, preparation, consumption line. Me and mine, in fact, are already practicing the line the author proposes and certainly fall into the group he mentions as the available market group for his ideas. I suspect an awful lot of us here do, gauging by the food discussions we get into.
But man do I have an aversion to policy as a stick to prod social behaviour. The public health issues the author raises make me think this is a not small pillar to his support of the proposal.
I'm also not sure I buy how blithely the necessity for labor to migrate from urban areas to the farmlands is covered. Crop harvesting isn't exactly cherry picking [wink wink] work. Neither is re-tilling, fertilizing (with the raw product) and all the other manually intensive labour that goes with it. The sort of programs necessary to support this kind of relocation, adaptation and retraining are not a small item, I'm thinking.
I should probably read the article before responding but...
The US Farm Bill that just got passed again this year (heads up, in 5 years it'll happen again) is a huge and confusing program of subsidies and regulation. Much more of the former, mind you. It covers things from agriculture to cattle production to loans and disaster relief and what your kiddies eat at school. The crops subsidized are cotton, wheat, soybeans, corn, (and rice?) etc. Mono-culture crops that require intense irrigation and chemical treatment with increasing fertilizer use due to deminishing crop yeilds but that are fairly easy to harvest and store with little requirement for transport deadlines. Anything else is a "commodity."
I don't know about you, but I do not eat cotton T-shirts for breakfast. I derive some protein from wheat gluten in my mostly vegan diet, but primarily I'm buying "vegetables." We have corn syrup in everything we consume because farmers and (more importantly) HUGE agribusinesses like monsanto and its subsidiaries reap huge profits off ag subsidies because they produce so damn much. And some chemists determined that you can make everything from sugar substitutes to packing material with all that corn the big producers grew too much of and now these artificially cheaper ingredients are used all over. But if we were paying a real price for corn your meat wouldn't be so cheap so you'd be less but higher quality animals, international markets would be more stable because immigrants wouldn't be fleeing their crashing economy due to lower crop prices thanks to our artifical price floors and the hard work of family farms would be focused on producing diversified products to sell year round and in competitive markets where true quality (nutrition and choice) would be the selling point as these commodity crops would be funneled into local markets and not stored in a warehouse in Florida by the millions and shipped out across the country all at once.
My point: If you read through the Farm Bill, especially sections like the WIC program (all the food welfare programs are under this bill) or the school lunch budget, a federal program is determining what can or can't be bought for food and how. You bid for year's supply of shitty cardboard pizza the same the custodians buy their toilet cleaner in bulk. Simply freeing up how budgets are allocated without an policy-as-a-prodding-stick approach can make a huge difference. It is really difficult (or impossible) for local governments to get approval for changes to their school budgets when fed money is at stake, but imagine if the buyer for a whole district wanted to improve the quality of the slop kids are getting these days by hiring a chef or two to write and teach recipes based on seasonal (local, to ensure freshness) produce?
In Louisville groups have been advocating for a central processing facility so that farmers out in the state can take non-subsidized produce and make value added products to cover their costs, and in the same way a central kitchen could prepare incoming local food for mass consumption. More nutritious, more environmental responsible, money goes to struggling local farmers, and your kids have better attention spans, less sick days, and when kindergardners are eating butternut squash for free lunch, they're gonna keep expanding their pallet. While the spending policy changes, most everything else to process and prepare this food is in place.
More and more I am amazed at the connections of food with health, community, and the evironment. It makes sense that in our society the process we use to feed ourselves reflects and shapes our community. Food is the fuel for body and mind cycled through our system of human ecology. "vote with your fork" is a slogan central to my everyday life.
