Thanks for including organic food and localism in with one-child policies and eugenics. Really appreciated that.

Why you felt that had to be included in a comment about "humanity adapting" as though "localism" and "organic farming" would hold us back from producing enough food to live is ridiculous, not to mention it totally avoids the deeper issues of the health hazards of processed foods, GMO's, and the like.

Your choice to distill the issue into your badly informed opinion is a major disservice to anyone even mildly interested in agriculture and liberty.

I would recommend you take a closer look at how our food system really works. When you get right down to it, things are pretty screwed up. In particular, corn subsidies play a major role in why certain grocery items are cheaper than others. Genetically modified crops are destroying biodiversity throughout the world. There's so much more to say but others smarter than me have written about it. If you're in the mood for some reading, I'd recommend "Real Food" by Nina Planck, "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan, "The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved" by Sandor Katz, and anything by Weston A. Price.

At the very least I highly suggest you watch the documentary "Food, Inc" which, surprisingly, comes to a very free-market conclusion: You vote with your dollar. Food Inc shows much of the true cost of our  "cheap food." It's a well done film. Other documentaries I'd recommend are "The World According to Monsanto," and "Fresh: The Movie"(more of a profile on several individulas working to change our food system, voluntarily).

I do not write this to be inflammatory or petty, but I couldn't NOT comment. This is an issue important to me and one I've read about extensively. The true cost of "cheap" food is pretty disgusting.

GMOs have saved the lives of literally billions of people in places like Africa.  It's very easy to self-righteous laments the "dangers" of GMOs when you go to bed every night with a stomach full of food.  Because of GMOs, scientists can go into countries where people are starving and create grains specifically for their climate and terrain that will flourish within a year or two and feed those people.  They can't wait for God knows how long while you go the "organic" route and try to manually reproduce what GMO can do with the snap of a finger. 

Technology is not innately evil.  Look at DEET.  Absolutely NO evidence that it has ever killed even ONE person, yet liberal morons got their panties in a wad because OMG IT'S A CHEMICAL IT MUST BE EVIL and got it banned, and what was the result?  Malaria related deaths skyrocketed.  MILLIONS of people died because of a handful of idiots were terrified of something they didn't understand in the first place. 

But hey, as long as they keep pumping out shock documenteries, privileged yuppies will keep swallowing.  In the meant time, it's the poor and starving in third world countries that pay the price.

My corn-fed, farm-raised salmon provides me little or no nutrition. I get a full stomach, and that's about it. That's about it, my brain ceases to be creative. I veg out on the couch.  Life is soooooo.......zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Thanks, "scientists". I'm so fat and boring.

Of course, any food is better than no food. Carefully read my comment. It seems to be absent of the statements you attributed to me.

You are right- things take longer the organic, natural way. It takes quite a short time to raise and slaughter a chicken using genetic engineering. The hidden costs of cheap chicken are something you seem to have neglected to look at. Chickens from, say, Tyson, which you could pick any of the 3 companies that own/sell chickens, can't walk more than 3 feet before falling over because their breasts have been engineered to be much bigger than normal. As a result, death and disease is quite rampant in industrial chicken coops.  Animals were not meant to be this way...you'll notice whenever there's news of rampant mad cow disease or the like, it always comes from these types of farms.

I could sit here spouting off facts all day but you're clearly a mind reader. I'll go sip my caramel macchiato whilst driving my hybrid...oh wait, no, I think I'll go to work at Home Depot now because I'm a poor college student driving my Geo Prizm. The fallacy perpetrated by stores like Whole Foods is that it's super expensive to eat that way- fact is, it's not. Things like co-ops, farmers markets, and CSA's have made eating healthy cheaper than ever. Trader Joes competition in organic foods has made things even cheaper. Honestly I rarely go to Whole Foods because of how expensive they are. Even mainstream grocery stores like Woodman's or Hy-Vee are adopting sections for organic, healthy foods.

Something interesting to note about the recent Whole Foods boycott- there was a larger counter-boycott that supported John Mackey's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about healthcare.  There have been similar protests in the past, for things like no unionization for Whole Foods employees. Yet they continue to be a successful business. Why is that? Simple- their main customer base is no longer, as you put it, "priveleged yuppies." They're still a big part of it, to be sure, but not as much as they once were.

To be honest, GMO's and pesticide laden crops are like  a drug. It takes more and more every year and people wonder why health and obesity in this country are so bad. The root is bad choices people make in the grocery store.

GMO crops can be grown on a larger scale, but like most you neglect the real cost in health, and loss of biodiversity. When NAFTA came about, cheap corn came to Mexico, the home of hundreds of species of corn. Contamination from GMO corn has destroyed much of their species and made it impossible for them to compete with cheap, government subsidized American corn, which is why Mexican farmers started coming up here. Now you wonder why is biodiversity and crop rotation important? It replenishes the nutrients in the soil. The more we monocrop, the more we risk a real famine.

Nobody said technology was innately evil. It's the thoughtless rush towards the future which I do not like. Nor do I like the Department of Agriculture being a revolving door for former and current Monsanto employees. Nor do I like the corrupt FDA. Look at how your glorious GMO's got ran through the FDA with little scientific study and put out in the market during the mid-90's. I'm all for the free market but if there's no thought to the consequences of what we're doing, that's not right. Nor is it right that John Aschcroft made it illegal to label GMO foods as GMO, or for someone wishing to emphasize their product not being GMO as such. As usual, government is mostly the problem, though I would very much say Monsanto shares the blame for its shameless lobbying efforts.

Also for the record I'm very aware there's nothing wrong with DDT. There was no real science to back that up. I'm fine with DDT, though as with all things, too much is never a good idea. Life is balance. I'm also well aware of malaria skyrocketing. I never defended any of those things, thanks for ascribing statements I did not make to me! Lovely!

Shock documentaries? You're damn right it should be shocking what's going on. The American food supply is not some trivial matter. It should shock you how our food system has changed over the past 100 years.

But eh, what do I know. I'm just a privileged yuppie who clearly doesn't know anything. Keep on stereotyping, it's going great!

Nobody is advocating forcing everyone to eat healthy- I didn't get to be a front page blogger because of my lack of free market beliefs ;-)

However, truth is very important to me and I won't sit idly by while it gets disparaged by lies.

I wasn't mocking or discouraging food localism and eating organically. What I was commenting on was how people unrealistically think that a world of 6 billion people could eat using methods completely free of fertilizer, antibiotics, and other chemical products. Sure, it has an unhealthy effect on our immune system. However, this is also countered by the recent advances in medicine. If you can afford to eat organic and local, that's great. But the cold hard truth is that it is not feasible for everyone to be able to do so. It's too expensive and takes up way too much space. Plus, what about the problem of urban dwellers? Are they going to eat food grown off of rooftops?

A loss of biodiversity would also happen much more if solely organic methods were used. Read this article on Norman Borlaug here that dispels these organic myths. My favorite quote is here,

"That's ridiculous. This shouldn't even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have -- the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues -- and get them back on the soil, you couldn't feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There's a lot of nonsense going on here."

http://reason.com/archives/2000/04/01/billions-served-norman-borlaug