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N.b., the author is British not American. Argindustry isn’t a uniquely American thing, it’s global and pervasive, specially for protein and animal feedstock. A
by fnordpiglet 3y ago
N.b., the author is British not American. Argindustry isn’t a uniquely American thing, it’s global and pervasive, specially for protein and animal feedstock. A lot of vegetable in a global context is grown locally and purchased at local markets (outside the US and urban settings globally, which are end to end industrialized), but most people don’t raise artisanal pigs for slaughter. Most people buy their meat from a store or merchant who buys from a middle man who buys from a dense industrialized setup. Even in developing countries dense animal farms are the norm for most meat, even if individuals raise some amount of animal for extra money or protein in their diet. The economics are just too strong. Likewise feedstock tends to be larger plot farming by either large land owners or corporations.
I do not believe you though that people in Madrid and Barcelona and other urban areas of Spain raise their own food in their studio apartments, herding their sheep in their half bath. They buy from supermarkets, or often restaurants, who buy from distributors, who buy from wholesalers, which buy from whoever sells them the food for the cheapest.
What the article gets profoundly wrong is that somehow tourism is driving industrialization of food production. What’s driving industrialization of food production is profit motive and a growing population with enriched tastes and growing wealth that’s outstripping the ability of small farm operations to meet at scale and relatively flat pricing as demand soars. That requires ever increasing supply, which requires ever increasing land productivity with a shrinking farm workforce and shrinking available arable land. The “it’s all the offensive bourgeois food tourists fault” is absurd and talks more to the author seemingly unreasonable social dislike of certain types of people than a level headed economic assessment.
- 3seashells 3y agoDense? It's pigs under old oak trees?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jcampbell1 3y agoI didn’t take away the same message. To me it was a decent attempt to explain that offensive liberal bourgeois foodies have been sold a bill of truthy sounding bullshit because that is how free markets work. If you want to help someone tell them the truth, if you want to help yourself then tell them what they want to believe. There is a whole market of selling expensive things and claiming it will save the planet or the poor or stop colonialism or some other lie which is designed to enrich the seller. In terms of peak bullshit, I personally think the absurd stupidity of vertical farming is what caused most people to realize the ideas coming out of one camp are mostly bullshit.
- bsder 3y ago> The economics are just too strong. This is really the crux of the issue. Farming sucks. Farming at small scales really sucks. There is a massive incentive to consolidate. Even when left alone, farmers tend to form co-ops in order to mitigate risk. I had a long talk with a local producer of "Hormone free, antibiotic free, grass fed, grass finished" beef (need it because of family member with corn allergy). The economics are brutal. Corn finishing a steer nets you 3x (or more) the weight. Grass is highly dependent upon rain. etc. Basically, the best thing I could do was commit to buying a whole steer every 6 months and let them sell what I can't deal with. Effectively, I gamble that they can sell the extra meat or I eat the loss. It generally works, but how many people can float a $5K-$10K loan every 6 months? And, even if they can get enough customers to float the loan, it will quickly saturate the number of customers who can buy the "extra". It's really a tough problem. Everybody talks like farmers don't know what they are doing. Go talk to one and prepare to be surprised--you'll find out really quickly that most farmers know their business extremely intimately and can tell you how every single dollar is put to work.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoOh yeah, farmers are engineers of the land and nature for sure. They know their processes, their dependencies, and procedures in extreme depth and they are complex and unforgiving. Farming isn’t gardening, and every farm is a business end to end - and a risky one with low payouts and huge downsides that are often entirely out of your control. Modern farming techniques aren’t that way out of some sort of malevolent spite, they actually work and make farms profitable reliably. That they blast the earth and poison the populace is sad and most farmers don’t relish destroying their land.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> even if individuals raise some amount of animal for extra money or protein in their diet. It happens more often than I expected, but of course it's still not common. A friend of mine living in an apartment in Shanghai once complained to me that her neighbors were keeping a chicken in their apartment and she was irritated by the daily crowing. But she took the philosophy "soon enough they'll eat it and the problem will go away". Hard to imagine something similar happening in the US.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoTbh that’s a fairly uniquely Chinese thing I’ll wager