Food Security

I heard a piece on the radio the other day about the farm bill and specifically food security. NPR was running something on the how the USDA can provide better oversight and control of food borne illnesses. While listening it occurred to me that current food safety rhetoric has two major flaws: it doesn’t consider diversity or quality.

Food is not all equal, this we call nutrition but fail to truly grasp the meaning. Having all the right ‘elements’ in a box of cereal doesn’t make it good for you. Likewise a tomato doesn’t come with an ingredient list or a calorie count. If we want to talk about security we need to consider WHAT foods we should secure. The answer, in my opinion, is grains first, then fresh produce, followed by meat and processed foods last. We need grains like we’ve always needed them as a staple to our survival and produce is crucial to our health. Domestic meat and processed foods are secondary because they provide little nutrition and are basically ‘luxury’ foods.

Now to really increase security we need to ensure diversity of our resources. A bad year for one vegetable should be ok if the others are producing well. So massive monocultures of corn and soy should be discouraged while smaller more diverse farming should be incentivized heavily. In addition, smaller farm collectives increase economic diversity and alleviate lobbying pressure from agri-business to tell us what we should eat. True diversity would result in a larger crop variety AND more small growers.

These issues are complicated and I certainly don’t know all the answers. But I think the above is where the discussion really needs to go instead of increased budgets and power for a failing notion of security.