Food writer Frederick Kaufman isn’t shy about attacking the role of big business in food production. His July cover story for Harper's was subtitled “How Goldman Sachs and Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It” (tell us what you really think, Fred). So when he penned a feature story for OnEarth’s Fall 2010 issue that demonstrates how megafarms could help lead the way to global sustainability (see “What’s New for Dinner”), people who care about food and farming took notice -- although some of them had a hard time stomaching the idea.
“This is greenwashed bull____,” commenter Bert Harvey opined at TreeHugger, pulling no punches. “Monoculture, large-scale agribusiness ... no matter how 'green' ... by it's very definition does quite a bit of harm to the environment.” The TreeHugger article itself was more open to the idea, saying that “with climate change, peak oil, overpopulation and overtaxed aquifers posing serious threats to our civilization, we need to be tackling these issues from every angle possible.”
Others were optimistic -- cautiously so -- about the Walmarts, PepsiCos, and Unilevers of the world participating in an ambitious consortium called the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops. Kaufman’s account of the initiative “restores faith in big agriculture,” writes Stacey Slate at the Civil Eats blog. “If megafarms take measures to calculate and reduce their costs (in efficiency, water waste, electricity, nitrogen-use), their cash concerns will simultaneously support sustainable gains for food production.”
Leon Kaye at TriplePundit emphasizes a point from Kaufman’s piece about the reach of industrial agriculture: “Organic foods are becoming more popular -- (by) some estimate their sales have tripled or quadrupled over the past decade -- but only about 1% of the farms in the US -- and 0.5% of pastureland -- is certified organic. Will the remaining 99% of farmland really switch to organic?”
On a personal note, as a recent refugee to the cheaper housing prices across the Hudson River, I give a hearty “hear hear!” to business writer Heather Clancy at SmartPlanet, who starts her appraisal of Kaufman’s piece thusly: “My husband swears that New Jersey corn -- harvested in August and shucked and eaten as quickly as possible off the stalk -- is the sweetest that money can buy.” Finally, a legitimate reason to call my new home the Garden State.
