One more thing to check out today: this op-ed piece in the New York Times by Wes Jackson and Wendall Berry.  The piece focuses on the problem of soil degradation, enhanced by our unsustainable systems of large-scale agriculture.  Here’s a section that stood out to me:

1. For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.
   

The authors talk about a few solutions, like rotating land use, including periods of pasture and grazing, and more radical solutions like perennialization of grain crops.  But they don’t focus on a significant reduction of grain crops, which strikes me as something that could serendipitously have a major impact on both soil quality and diet.

We’re extremely reliant on grain, especially wheat, corn and soy.  We feed it to our livestock, we use it as fillers in poor-quality prepared foods, we create processed oils and sweeteners out of it.  Our consumption of these products is reducing the nutrients in our food and the quality of our food by acting as a substitute for wholesome, more nutritive foods like grass-fed meats and dairy, unprocessed foods, or wholesome fats.  Our consumption is also increasing our intake of detrimental things like high levels of omega-6 fatty acids and antinutrients.

It’s true, there are a lot of people to feed in this country and beyond, and grains are a fast and cheap way to create food.  Properly prepared (soaked, sprouted, fermented), they can even be part of a healthy diet, in combination with foods like fish, fats, eggs, and organ meats.  I’m not advocating the elimination of grains. 

But given the significant amount of grain produced for oil, for animal feed, for biofuels, for sweeteners, and for other purposes which don’t contribute to optimal health or land use, I would guess that a lot of land used for grain production could be repurposed for pasture or vegetable production.  This could mean enhanced soil, better and more diverse foods, and increased sustainability.  I wouldn’t miss the high fructose corn syrup and soybean oil, personally.

Of course, politics and money make this kind of a radical change less likely, as does the cultural assumption that grains should constitute the lion’s share of diet.  We produce food in a way that maximizes profit and convenience rather than nutrition or sustainability.  It’s a costly mistake.