The High Price of Cheap Food

[jayocal]

I stumbled upon this very interesting and important article today:

http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...7458-1,00.html

I was a vegetarian for a little over 1.5 years but my willpower faded and I started eating meat again (thanks a lot Pho Rang Dong lol) ...after reading this, it has re-awakened my awareness to this issue.

[4X4]

Originally Posted by posted article

At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills.

Does it get worse beyond this statement? I quit reading.

[mikey_the_redneck]

We hardly ever use fertilizers......we load up a tandem truck with cow manure from the feedlots, and spread 'er all over our land. If you cultivate it in soon after, the smell is minimal and it does wonders for the fertility of the soil....

.......oh and global warming is a bunch of bull. We have been in a cooling period since 1998. It's all about the cycle of the sun.

[mikey_the_redneck]

"So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It's clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down — a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones. Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million."

This is an interesting comment in the article. The biggest challenge of creating a sustainable food supply is reversing what large corporations have done.............good luck with that.

Also, it says that global meat consumption is set to increase 25% by 2015 because poor countries are going to start eating more meat......I highly doubt it. That would be a pretty remarkable economic turn-around for poor nations in such a short period of time.