Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
transforming inedible grass into high-grade protein. But today, in
the United States, to get just 1 pound of steak on our plate, we fun-
nel 16 pounds of grain and soy into cattle. In addition to all of the
other meat-connected assaults on the environment you've read
about in these pages, producing that pound also uses enough wa-
ter to supply a typical American with a daily bath for most of a year.
We humans are actually creating the very scarcity we say we
fear. This realization snapped me awake as a young woman. Why?
I puzzled. Why would this intelligent species do such a thing?
So I began to explore how the tragedy came to be. As I pondered
the post-World War II path to the grain-fed meat-centered diet,
it became for me not the problem itself, but a potent
symptom
of the underlying problem: the destructive premise of our entire
economy.
The roots of the environmental, health, and animal-welfare trav-
esties linked to factory-farmed meat, eggs, and milk (and detailed
in this topic) low inevitably from what I've come to call
one-rule
economics
.
And that one rule? Economic decisions driven by highest return
to existing wealth—to shareholders and corporate chiefs—all other
factors be damned. Driven by this one rule, economic life is ripped
from its place within human community, and wealth and power
inexorably concentrate. Concentrated wealth then infects and
warps political decision-making to serve the interests of the best-
off, including giant agribusinesses. Ironically, because it leads to
oligopoly, one-rule economics even undermines the open mar-
ket itself—supposedly the rationale for the whole set up to begin
with.
From this rule, the gap separating the world's richest fifth and
the world's poorest fifth has doubled in only forty years.
So how does the one-rule economy generate hunger in a world of
plenty? To understand, just start with those people who work the
