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I'm there with you. I belong to a food coop and purchase from small local farms all the time, but that's as an affluent tech professional where I'm under no il

by zzzeek 5y ago

I'm there with you. I belong to a food coop and purchase from small local farms all the time, but that's as an affluent tech professional where I'm under no illusions that the current state of this food community would be able to sustain the entire US population at its current rate of consumption. Things like producing millions of acres of corn to produce corn syrup and animal feed for fast food burgers are things that the "artisinal" food community sort of looks down upon, things like that would likely have to change if the farming system were de-industrialized and replaced with small independent farms. It's an extraordinary claim that small family farms could feasibly replace industrial scale farming as a whole without changing things like that, so you'd need some extraordinary proof. While I can see how maybe you can show that a small farm is more productive per acre compared to an industrial farm, OK, now try to scale up that small farm, by either expanding it or adding many more such small farms, to produce the same amount of food as the industrial farms do. Then what happens?

p_j_w 5y ago
>Things like producing millions of acres of corn to produce corn syrup and animal feed for fast food burgers are things that the "artisinal" food community sort of looks down upon I know you were just providing one example, but this doesn't seem like an outrageous position to me. That's a lot of resource use for some food that causes myriad health problems in our society. Seems like we'd all be better off just eating the corn and then would be able to use a lot less food. I don"t disagree with your wider point about industrial vs. family farming, though.
- zzzeek 5y ago
  oh, I 100% agree that the practice is awful, corn syrup shouldn't exist and animals are mostly supposed to eat grass, not corn. I was just pointing out that these are things that are enabled by industrialized farms, so if they went away (which would be great) then the overuse of corn would have to go away too. that is my larger point is, if small farms can feed the US, it's likely that US food culture / economics would need to change pretty radically for that to happen.

by zzzeek 5y ago

p_j_w 5y ago

>Things like producing millions of acres of corn to produce corn syrup and animal feed for fast food burgers are things that the "artisinal" food community sort of looks down upon I know you were just providing one example, but this doesn't seem like an outrageous position to me. That's a lot of resource use for some food that causes myriad health problems in our society. Seems like we'd all be better off just eating the corn and then would be able to use a lot less food. I don"t disagree with your wider point about industrial vs. family farming, though.

zzzeek 5y ago
oh, I 100% agree that the practice is awful, corn syrup shouldn't exist and animals are mostly supposed to eat grass, not corn. I was just pointing out that these are things that are enabled by industrialized farms, so if they went away (which would be great) then the overuse of corn would have to go away too. that is my larger point is, if small farms can feed the US, it's likely that US food culture / economics would need to change pretty radically for that to happen.