Slow Food for a Dying Planet

[EC]

Slow Food for a Dying Planet
By Mark Winne



In This Article
Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us
By Christopher D. Cook
New Press · $24.95

Slow Food(The Case For Taste)
By Carlo Petrini, William McCuaig, John Updike
Columbia University Press · $24.95


Take I-40 east from Albuquerque, N.M., for about three hours and hit the brakes just before the Texas border. Don’t worry if you don’t have a road map, the smell of cow manure will tell you where you are, and if you have your windows down to enjoy the scent of the high plains, the flies will soon be helping you drive. Welcome to Clovis, N.M., home to Cannon Air Force Base, the Santa Fe Burlington Northern Railroad, 65 dairy farms, five feedlots, what will be North America’s largest cheese plant, and approximately 200,000 head of dairy and beef cows. If you want to see America’s industrial food system in action, you’re in the right place.

The train tracks give the feedlot operators and dairymen—many of them forced out of California by local health officials who deemed them polluters—a direct pipeline to the Iowa/Nebraska Corn Belt. The grain elevators located along the tracks unload 110 train carloads at a time, or a little over 20 million pounds of corn. The cows, held in open pens and milked three times a day, never graze on open pasture. In return for free room and board, each cow produces 75 pounds of milk a day and four tons of manure a year. For now, the milk is shipped to processing plants all over the Southwest, but when the cheese plant is operational in late 2005, the milk will travel only a few miles. There it will be turned into Velveeta-style cheese at the rate of one truckload per hour. When the 200,000 black and white Holstein cows are past their prime—about two to three years—they are sent off to a large slaughterhouse in Texas where they are ground up into beef patties for guess who: McDonald’s, America’s largest buyer of spent dairy cows.

Suspend disbelief for one moment and admire this system for what it is: a modern miracle of agriculture and food science, the triumph of capital over the limitations of man and nature, and a multistate food factory that has optimized the relationship between inputs and outputs for the near-perfect commodification of mankind’s sustenance. But look again and you’ll see the reality that Christopher Cook lays out in Diet for a Dead Planet: a food system that, like cows in a feedlot, is down on its knees in the muck, unsustainable, unhealthy and dangerously close to extinction. With a well-deserved bow to Frances Moore Lappe’s classic Diet for a Small Planet, Cook goes after the oligarchical forces of multinational agribusiness with guns blazing. His take-no-prisoners style targets the evil-doers, junk-food purveyors, and despots of deception and greed whose system of mass food production and distribution will leave the earth in ruins and us humans simultaneously obese and starving.

Cook paints a grim picture. From the skull-and-crossbones on the book’s cover to its penultimate chapter, he unrelentingly disembowels Wal-Mart, the Bush administration’s Department of Agriculture, Archer Daniels Midland, and, of course, McDonald’s. He reminds us that Americans have purchased their cheap food supply (we spend less on food as a percentage of our household income than any nation in the world) by depleting our topsoil and polluting our water, using growth hormones in livestock and pesticides on crops, maiming workers (many of them from Mexico and Central America) in our meatpacking plants, and using more energy resources than any other country on the planet.

more http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1913/

[Tinoire]

1. Thank you. And yet another book to order now!

As if Fast Food Nation wasn't bad enough. Have you read "Diet for a Dead Planet" yet? Everytime I go overseas and come back here, I'm disgusted by our food industry.

[EC]

2. I've pretty much gotten to the point where

I grow my own and can it...and order grass fed beef off the web...and free range, natural grain feed chickens from a farm 60 miles away...it's expensive but I cut it into small portions...

[whatelseisnew]

3. The Slow Food Movement

http://www.slowfoodusa.org/

Recognizing that the enjoyment of
wholesome food is essential to the
pursuit of happiness, Slow Food
U.S.A. is an educational organization
dedicated to promoting stewardship
of the land and ecologically sound
food production; reviving the kitchen
and the table as the centers of
pleasure, culture, and community;
invigorating and proliferating regional,
seasonal culinary traditions; creating
a collaborative, ecologically-oriented,
and virtuous globalization; and living
a slower and more harmonious
rhythm of life.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/Organic/slowfood081301.cfm

Founded in 1986, in direct response to the opening of a McDonald's restaurant
in Rome's famous Piazza di Spagna, the Slow Food Manifesto declares that: A
firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal
folly of Fast Life.

In its first years Slow Food, which has adopted the snail as its official symbol,
was heavily concentrated on food and wine, and produced what is considered
to be Italy's best guides to wine, restaurants and food stores. But in the mid-
1990s Slow Food developed a new political dimension, called eco-
gastronomy. "We want to extend the kind of attention that environmentalism
has dedicated to the panda and the tiger to domesticated plants and animals,"
says Carlo Petrini, the movement's founder, a tall, handsome bearded man of
54. "A hundred years ago, people ate between one hundred and a hundred
and twenty different species of food. Now our diet is made up of at most ten
or twelve species."