On Food.

The following is taken from a much longer essay about the root of all evil, money. It will be released in book form on December 16 2013.

On Food: You might think that our food problem is directly related to our poverty problem, but it is only in that the impoverished need food too. Food does however present problems unique to our discussions about poverty. Food is: finite, expensive, suffering from degrading quality, wasted, genetically modified, difficult to transport... Odds are most of our food problems will harken back to our money problems, (remember, we've separated money problems from poverty.)

Food, be it plant or animal, requires the same things to exist that we do, air, water, soil, minerals (for nutrients) and sunlight. Foods, like humans, are the products of chemical processes. To interfere with any aspect of any particular process presents a danger. These dangers do not always present themselves readily and it might take generations for, as an example, a particular group of people to realize that the industrialization of beef reduces the nutrients that can be gleaned from eating it, or that a diet might actually be turning a nation diabetic, or that genetically modified food genetically modifies its consumers as well. These things are of no concern to food producers as food is produced, not directly to feed people, but rather to make money by feeding people. Income concerns in the realm of food production are the reason that food production suffers and therefore why we suffer, eating it. This is again returning us to our original conclusion that money is the cause of all suffering. When those who look at food production systems are not concerned with the food or the consumption of it, but rather how they can improve the income margin of the food produced, the world stops making sense.

I happen to live in a very fertile part of the world, various food plants and food animals are mass produced (and grow wild.) Yet most of the food I buy in grocery stores comes from elsewhere and by "elsewhere" it would seem we could say "as far away as possible." This is because of trade regulations, food legislation and especially corporatism, which all suffer from systemic cronyism, (like most organizations,) that don't look at supply, unless it's directly quantified against demand and of course, profit. Such is it that I can't buy a locally grown apple, because it's a better business decision for our apples to go south and southern apples to come north. I understand it, I get it: You need to pay orchardists, pickers, packers, shippers, traders, taxes, tariffs, duties, warehousers, grocers, etc. If you don't create something for these people to do, unemployment will rise. In modernity, if you don't "grow the business" you are not even doing business. The problem here is that I have perfectly good apples in my town. I can have them at a fraction of the cost of the apples you're importing, just so that you can keep the wheels spinning. The wheels only spin because you have set them in motion without any concern about the end result. You only care about the income that can be generated. In the mean time, I can't afford apples. Why is it you can't be satisfied with less?

Well, you know the answer why. It's going to keep coming up over and over again: Money. The solution to food problem is fairly straightforward, produce foods naturally and locally. You'll still be able to get bananas, you'll just have to pay more for them because they had to travel from Central America, but not everything need be so expensive. I don't need apples from New Zealand.