Savvy Vegetarian Blog

news and opinion on vegetarian diet and nutrition, vegetarian lifestyle, green living, and environment

Send comments to SV Blog

Tue, 19 Dec 2006

Secure? We Are What We Eat

By Sally Kohn, director of the Movement Vision Project, advancing shared values of family, community and humanity across the United States.

A few days ago, I read an uncommonly sensible food article in Common Dreams. It's about the connections between the industrialization and globalization of our food supply, and how that affects food safety. "With the speed of clicking a button, an E. coli outbreak in California or China can threaten our entire food supply and risk a widespread pandemic ... Long-distance food of corporate agribusiness threatens our environment, our economy and our health. If we're feeling insecure, it’s no wonder. We are what we eat."

Sally Kohn supports her assertions with plain-as-day details from daily life. She speaks of the appalling loss of family farming operations in this country and the concerted, well organized attack by big agribusiness on small local farming operations globally. She also lays out the bad economics of agribusiness control of our food supply, and gives the obvious solution - change your buying habits, boycott the supermarkets, shop local. It's the only way to feel secure about what we eat, and the only way to keep at least some of what we spend on food in our communities.

"Gone are the days of family farms, which would produce sustainable, healthy food that also fed the local economy. Today, a staggering 330 farmers abandon farming each week. In the 1930s, there were over seven million family farms in our country. Today, roughly two million remain." Let's help reverse that trend, and take back our food supply from Monsanto, Cargill, Con-Agra, etc.

Read Secure? We Are What We Eat