Culture, Community, and Sustainability - Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems - page 330

FIGURE 23.2 A monoculture of pineapples growing near Buenos Aires, Costa Rica, in an area once covered by tropical rain
forest. Fruit will be exported through a vertically integrated commodity chain, where a transnational owns or controls most of the
steps from the field to the table.

indeed increasingly important as agriculture becomes
more capital intensive. However, as we have seen
throughout this topic, most of the ecological elements of
sustainability on farms are lost or compromised as scale
becomes too large. Rarely are the ecological costs of this
scale of farming taken into account in normal cost
accounting; but when this is done, it turns out that for
many crops, actual production costs are lower when the
crops are grown on relatively smaller farms. But larger
farms, because of their volume, can afford to sell at a
lower margin if forced to do so — as indeed they are —
by the food buyers in the food chain. As a result, the bulk
of the financial benefit gained by the giant farm over the
small one goes to the buyers and processors, not the
farmer or the farm community.

produce, shipped rapidly by air or truck, often under refrig-
eration, is often picked before it is ripe. And when surviv-
ing transport and storage is the major consideration, the
breeding (or genetic engineering) process that produces the
seeds is likely to have sacrificed taste and nutritive content.
Other types of food must be packaged and processed to
survive long-distance transport and storage. They have
added preservatives and a variety of other added ingredi-
ents — such as salt, sugar, and fats — that are linked to
obesity, cancer, and other health problems. As a result, we
have more food choices than ever before, but much of that
food is less fresh, less tasty, and less healthy.
Other losses are less concrete but no less important.
Regional and cultural differences in cuisine and diet are
slowly disappearing with the homogenization of the food
supply. Related to this is the loss of place-based identity.
The regional foods that define the places we live in are
either being lost or overly hyped as marketing tools.
And finally, there is the unquantifiable but real loss
we experience when food consumption is completely
detached from the processes that got it to our tables. When
we lose all connection with the people who grow our food,
we lose touch with all the biological and social facts of
the food's existence, and eating is stripped of much of the
context and meaning it has had since the long-ago origins
of the human species.

T HE I SOLATED C ONSUMER

From the standpoint of food choice and availability, con-
sumers have never had it better. But the same global food
system that forces out small-scale farmers and exploits
Third-World peasants has brought a variety of negative
changes to food consumers. Many of these changes have
happened so slowly that we are not conscious of them.
Because much of the food we eat must travel a long
distance to get to us, it is not particularly fresh. Even