Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
from 'convenience' stores. The sarcastic quotation marks around convenience are in-
tentional, for convenience food translates to increased rates of obesity, heart disease
and diabetes. Wallinga (2010) connects the US 'heap food' policies to the increasing
rates of hildhood obesity due to structural issues that reward processors who pro-
duce faty, sugary 'food' with minimal nutritional value. And here too quantitative
views of food security fail us. Advances in breeding and animal husbandry do noth-
ing to break this addiction to nutritionally empty 'foods', except to make them even
heaper and more prolific.
Food security through the lens of quality
Now that we've identiied that the quantitative approah to food cannot (and, hones-
tly, will not) adequately address today's food problems, we turn our atention to the
qualitative approah - those ideas that recognize the cultural importance of food and
how it is produced, as opposed to just having enough. These quality concerns tend
to focus more on the forest than the trees; on all the stuff that makes food socially,
culturally, and politically meaningful. Often this focus involves a turn toward the
local, but 'quality' and 'local' are not equivalent. A country of origin label, for ex-
ample, relies heavily on quality imagery without being local in the traditional sense
(the last time Mihael had New Zealand lamb was in California).
To be clear, we fully support the goals of movements like Slow Food, local food,
and protected designation of origin (PDO) shemes. hrough food, things like cul-
ture, community and identity are created, enacted, and reinforced. We also believe
food needs to be produced in socially, environmentally, and economically just (it
needs to be affordable) ways. How do we produce food that respects community
and the environment but is also economically efficient? Let's be honest: it's a luxury
these days to be a conscientious consumer; last time we heked, free range hikens
and fresh local produce cost more than the quantitatively orientated food provided
by the conventional food system. Admitedly, these 'costs' are in a signiicant degree
the result of bad accounting: an artifact of externalities that others will be paying for
generations. But price is price when you're living pay heque to pay heque.
Organics, permaculture and agroecology
Organic farming (and the related agricultural methods) provides the obvious coun-
terweight to quantity arguments (Rosin and Campbell, 2009). In many forms of or-
