4 ms·

Perhaps it's true that you can't feed the whole world without industrialized food, but you could feed the vast majority of people who live in cooperative climat

by wprl 13y ago

Perhaps it's true that you can't feed the whole world without industrialized food, but you could feed the vast majority of people who live in cooperative climates. It's debatable whether the rest couldn't be fed as well. Also, it wouldn't take "most people" to support small-farm agriculture. Many would gladly raise organic produce and livestock, and sell locally if the food economy were not stacked against them. It also provides more financial independence than minimum wage jobs, and many full-time jobs. Not to mention it would create many jobs.

philwelch 13y ago
Creating jobs that people don't want and won't show up for, more like. With unemployment where it is now, you'd think Americans would sign up to pick fruit. But they don't, and we're dependent on migrant labor. More labor also means more expensive food. In the whole spectrum of human existence, farming sucks. It sucked so much that people remained hunter-gatherers as long as they could to avoid it, and it sucks so much that people leapt at the chance to become industrial wage slaves to avoid it. Turning more people into farmers out of some crazy left wing ideology sounds like a bad idea to me. I think Cambodia tried it once.
- wprl 13y ago
  Unfortunately, your opinion just isn't based in fact.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    My opinion is based on the current US farm labor situation and the general history of mankind that saw hunter-gatherers forcibly displace agricultural civilizations throughout the Middle Ages followed by massive migration to cities since th Industrial Revolution. Your opinion is based on what facts exactly?
    - wprl 13y ago
      The displacement caused by industrialization and imperialism, and the economies they foster, is not a situation in which enfranchised working class people are making informed decisions about their future, freely choose their lot, and draw from the public resources managed by their benevolent representative governments. It wasn't the case then, and it isn't the case now. The fact is that industrialized agriculture represents a massive centralization of the production of a basic necessity of life. It is made to be perceived to be less inexpensive through subsidies on low-nutrition crops such as corn, sugar, and wheat, subsidies for import and export, state-funded research into literal Frankenstein's monsters built of corn, fish, and insect genes. Patents for the basic building blocks of life are issued and violations enforced, even cases of accidental spread of these genes by wind. Pollutants and hormones abound. And what do we get? Lower nutrition when picked, lower nutrition because of shipping and storage, insecticides, hormones, anti-biotics, factory meat and egg production that makes a mockery of animal life, runoff that poisons our water supply and wildlife. What is good about subsidizing junk crops? What is good about subsidizing the fuel used to ship food across the world when it can be grown literally in one's backyard? What if we funded robotics and technology for small agriculture instead of drones that kill Pakistani civilians and children? What is good about the conflation of money and value, to the point where money is lauded over health and freedom? Your premise seems to be that people have decided they want industrialized agriculture because farming "sucks." To you this seems to imply that therefore industrialized agriculture is good and that there are not alternatives. We will and should become more and more materialistic, inert, disconnected from family and nature, because what people want must be good. We are not being manipulated by world government systems that have their own benefit at heart. I reject this premise wholeheartedly.
      - philwelch 13y ago
        I think you're drawing a false dichotomy. It's certainly possible, and probably preferable, to have large scale agriculture that limits ecological impact, produces nutritious food, and avoids antibiotic use without requiring large numbers of people to work as farmers.
        wprl 13y ago

by wprl 13y ago

philwelch 13y ago

Creating jobs that people don't want and won't show up for, more like. With unemployment where it is now, you'd think Americans would sign up to pick fruit. But they don't, and we're dependent on migrant labor. More labor also means more expensive food. In the whole spectrum of human existence, farming sucks. It sucked so much that people remained hunter-gatherers as long as they could to avoid it, and it sucks so much that people leapt at the chance to become industrial wage slaves to avoid it. Turning more people into farmers out of some crazy left wing ideology sounds like a bad idea to me. I think Cambodia tried it once.

wprl 13y ago
Unfortunately, your opinion just isn't based in fact.
- philwelch 13y ago
  My opinion is based on the current US farm labor situation and the general history of mankind that saw hunter-gatherers forcibly displace agricultural civilizations throughout the Middle Ages followed by massive migration to cities since th Industrial Revolution. Your opinion is based on what facts exactly?
  - wprl 13y ago
    The displacement caused by industrialization and imperialism, and the economies they foster, is not a situation in which enfranchised working class people are making informed decisions about their future, freely choose their lot, and draw from the public resources managed by their benevolent representative governments. It wasn't the case then, and it isn't the case now. The fact is that industrialized agriculture represents a massive centralization of the production of a basic necessity of life. It is made to be perceived to be less inexpensive through subsidies on low-nutrition crops such as corn, sugar, and wheat, subsidies for import and export, state-funded research into literal Frankenstein's monsters built of corn, fish, and insect genes. Patents for the basic building blocks of life are issued and violations enforced, even cases of accidental spread of these genes by wind. Pollutants and hormones abound. And what do we get? Lower nutrition when picked, lower nutrition because of shipping and storage, insecticides, hormones, anti-biotics, factory meat and egg production that makes a mockery of animal life, runoff that poisons our water supply and wildlife. What is good about subsidizing junk crops? What is good about subsidizing the fuel used to ship food across the world when it can be grown literally in one's backyard? What if we funded robotics and technology for small agriculture instead of drones that kill Pakistani civilians and children? What is good about the conflation of money and value, to the point where money is lauded over health and freedom? Your premise seems to be that people have decided they want industrialized agriculture because farming "sucks." To you this seems to imply that therefore industrialized agriculture is good and that there are not alternatives. We will and should become more and more materialistic, inert, disconnected from family and nature, because what people want must be good. We are not being manipulated by world government systems that have their own benefit at heart. I reject this premise wholeheartedly.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      I think you're drawing a false dichotomy. It's certainly possible, and probably preferable, to have large scale agriculture that limits ecological impact, produces nutritious food, and avoids antibiotic use without requiring large numbers of people to work as farmers.
      - wprl 13y ago