If You’re Not Concerned About Our Food System, You Should Be

This is not about fear and worry, it’s about taking responsible action

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First, I’ll start with a quick story.

It’s a popular story among writers. And it goes something like this…

Writer Nora Ephron (of “When Harry Met Sally” fame) is quoted as sharing this story about her own writing journey. She tells that when she was in her high school journalism class, she learned this important lesson from her teacher.

He told the class that in the opening sentence of their story, to clearly and concisely share the most important information about the story – the lead.

Then he read aloud the following:

Next Thursday, May 28, the faculty of this high school will attend a special training in Sacramento, featuring the anthropologist Margaret Mead and others. The faculty will learn new teaching methods, the principal announced today.

He then told them all to write down their idea of the lead.

They worked hard and handed in their papers, most of which made the appearance of Margaret Meade the lead.

As he read the papers, he became irritated. 

“You all buried the lead,” he scowled. “You didn’t give them the information relevant to them.”

He continued…

"The lead to this story is this: 'No school next Thursday!'"

Obviously, in the telling of this short story, you can see why–all the locals needed to know how to organize and orchestrate their lives around not having school. They needed to change their expectations and shift behaviors to accommodate the shut-down that the visit would cause.

It makes sense.

So here you go…

Your ability to access and pay for your family’s basic food needs is headed for catastrophic failure.

Prepare now or you will likely experience and definitely see widespread famine and mass starvation or malnutrition.

In some places, malnutrition is already causing serious damage.

I’m not being hyperbolic and I’m not using sensationalism and I’m not trying to fear monger.

The writing is in the soil, so to speak.

And no, for the issue of food security, it doesn’t matter who becomes our next president or whether Congress is “blue” or “red.”

Because “they” cannot fix this.

The only way to fix what’s broken is a shift in mindset, prioritizing a decentralized system, learning from those with experience, and being dramatically community-and- action-oriented.

The summation is thus: our food systems will fail many of us unless we course-correct quickly.

Our food system is currently highly centralized. Just over 1% of Americans are “farmers.”

According to census data from the 2017 census of agriculture, there are “3.4 million "producers" or the farmers and workers involved in making decisions on [the] farms, from planting to harvesting to marketing.”

One must begin to wonder, of that 1%, how many of these farmers are producing non-food commodities such as corn, soy, tobacco, canola, and cotton.

Put more simply, how many people in America are actually producing food for Americans (and our guests) to eat?

I'm unable to find a clear delineation on that.

But one could correctly assume that since that 1% number includes production of all the non-food commodities, there’s nowhere near even 1% of Americans who are participating in a significant way towards food for Americans.

I’m equally sure that this statistic doesn’t include small, front/backyard gardens.

Although extremely helpful, most of the time those gardens do not support a significant portion of calories for even a single household. 

But yes, we should absolutely be gardening.

I strongly believe that becoming a producer–on any level–is one of the strongest antidotes to the current doomed system.

Decentralized, hyper local food security is the ultimate solution we need to be envisioning.

And small dairies are a vital component of that.

Let’s take a quick glimpse at the past 50 ish years of dairy farming.

In 1970, according to the USDA stats, America boasted over 648,000 dairies. These were primarily small dairies with an average of 20 cows per farm. 

Now, 50 years later (2022 data), there are fewer than 24,000 dairies with an average size over 120 cows per farm. And that number keeps declining.

Not just that, but an estimated 60% of all the milk produced in America, comes from farms with more than 2,500 cows. (pgs 16, 19

That’s a lot of centralized control.

Good luck having any traceability or transparency with those farms! 

We are losing our local dairies. Cows–and milk production–are being aggregated into fewer, larger dairies consistently. 

All of this emphasizes the importance of keeping the few small, truly sustainable farms that we still have, even as we work to create more small, hyper local dairy options.

But why do I say small dairies are important for food security? Can’t we all just grow gardens?

Because cows, goats, and sheep can turn grass and forage that we can’t eat into milk and meat that we can. And that’s pretty important.

One can easily imagine keeping 1 or 2 cows, goats or sheep on a small area of land. This is the absolute best way to ensure that communities – even isolated or rural communities – have access to food no matter how high prices go, or who hacks into our digital infrastructure, or what kind of physical infrastructure collapses we see in the next 10-100 years.

None of this even touches on the environmental benefits that grazing herbivores offer an ecosystem or how much local food systems reduce our carbon footprints…

All those details are for another day…

I know that the hand-wringing public health folks who have zero exposure to local food systems are starting to hyperventilate at even the thought of people being responsible for their own milk production.

Or, ya know, processing their own meat.

“But foodborne illness,” I hear them crying… And “the children….”

And hey, I know illness can happen.

But what we’ve done to our food systems as a whole is beyond atrocious.

We depend on chemical inputs to even produce the plants anymore and then spray them with massive amounts of toxic glyphosate to keep the other plants from growing, then we wonder why our chronic disease epidemic is so bad… and all the while, we continue outsourcing our food production.

I don’t know about you, but there are far too many bags and boxes of food at any grocery store that say “product of China” or “product of Argentina” for me to find comfort or security in knowing where and how our food gets to us.

It’s deeply disturbing.

What could happen if another big shipping company has a setback? Or a nefarious character hacks into a logistical companies database?

What would it look like if there was another Evergreen ship problem? Or a hack at a meat processing company?

What if the whole world shuts down for a few days or weeks and people aren’t allowed to go to their jobs?

A Government Accountability Office report from many years ago (I’ll have to dig this one up later), said that the biggest risk factors in our food system are centralized production, centralized processing and long distance transportation.

Looks like we’re creating our own recipe for disaster.

The risks are real.

Yet it isn’t the most urgent threat.

I understand folks are worried about a lot of things RIGHT NOW and the biggest fire gets the water.

I get it.

But we’ve got to support our local producers who are cultivating the soil, healing our ecosystems. 

We’ve got to keep these farmers on the land, and keep the land in sustainable production.

And the biggest, best ways to do that?

Empower the farmers to set their own prices–give farmers options for selling their products and offering the highest value for their expertise and experience.

Sounds simple, right?

There’s a staggering indictment of our current food system in that many of the prices of conventional products are set by the industry or industry-government collusion.

The way you can support farmers in setting their own prices is by shopping directly with *local* farms. I stress local because at the end of the day, yes, you can get your meat and milk, and even vegetables, shipped thousands of miles and delivered to your front door from “pastured” or “organic” farms, but even that conscientious action doesn’t cultivate a local food system and thus local food security.

We are vulnerable to many catastrophes that could damage or paralyze the centralized system–or vital components of it.

It’s time to cultivate local community farms and gardens everywhere we are.

Ask yourself this:

How can I/we responsibly produce, process, and prepare more of our own food in my/our household, community or state?

And then take action on that answer.

That is the only way to step back from the edge of this cliff that is about to collapse under us–and in some cases has already collapsed under many Americans.

Yes, we can build a better food system. But it’s up to you.

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