March 13, 2024

With a constant stream of Hollywood end-of-the-world calamity blockbuster movies, Americans are generally distracted from the real-life disaster scenario that threatens us.  Growing dependency on processed foods, often shipped long distances via crammed distribution systems, has created a vulnerability to food supply disruption unparalleled in human history.

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Unprecedented Dependency

The Southern sharecropper of a century ago generally possessed a healthier and more secure food supply than the vast majority of today’s urban denizens.  The sharecropper was essentially an indentured servant to the landowner, but he could produce a substantial amount of his own sustenance.  Most modern Westerners (especially Americans) may own land freely, but they are indentured servants to industrial food manufacturers and the phalanx of captured regulatory agencies that oversee food and agriculture.

We tend to suppress or dismiss alarms that the American food supply — for decades the global leader in technological and genetic advances in plants and livestock — could in fact be vulnerable to a seismic disruption.  Americans have come to take their food for granted, perhaps understandably: the average household food budget has long hovered at a mere 9% of income, and food choice diversity in products (including ethnic choices) has never been greater.

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Yet there are fractures within this amazingly productive system: not everything produced is healthful for humans or ecosystems.  Economic and other trade-offs involved in the creation of this “Green Revolution” in agriculture and food distribution may be a devil’s bargain.  It is not the intention here to forecast doom, but to critically assess some profound and growing threats against which preventive measures might be employed.

Trapped in Suburbia?

The migration of rural Americans into cities for better pay and amenities over the last century or so has accompanied standards of comfort and plenty unimagined in the past.  City workers overflowed into suburbs, where more and more land was irrevocably withdrawn from local agricultural uses in favor of cheaper foods shipped from larger, more efficient, or more productive areas.  Indeed, much of Americans’ domestic produce is now grown in California and Arizona and then trucked or flown to points east and south — a very different demographic picture from 1924.

The trade-off for cheap food was consolidation and mechanization, which dramatically shifted the nation’s food production and distribution from the local and diverse to the massive and homogeneous.  Much like Walmart and Applebee’s displaced Mom-and-Pop general stores and family restaurants, the consolidation of farming and food processing (including especially meats, an industry now tightly consolidated under the control of a handful of gargantuan corporate conglomerates) lowered prices but also choice.  This rapid transition was made possible by technology fed a reliable diet of cheap fossil fuels to replace the historic labor of mule, horse, and human.

The resultant benefits of this conversion in agricultural infrastructure are obvious, though so too are numerous health problems.  But what is not readily apparent to most consumers is how vulnerable this seemingly miraculous system is to disruption or destruction.  Consider the weak links and the potential modern threats.

Food System Vulnerabilities