One day, the father of a very wealthy family sent his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live. The son spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family. Upon the son’s return, the father asked, “How was the trip?” “It was great, Dad.” “Did you see how poor people live?” the father asked. “Oh yeah,” said the son. “So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?” asked the father. The son answered the following:
I saw that we have one dog and they
had four … We have a pool that reaches
to the middle of our garden and they
have a creek that has no end … We have
imported lanterns in our garden and
they have the stars at night … Our patio
reaches to the front yard and they have
the whole horizon … We have a small
piece of land to live on and they have
fields that go beyond our sight … We
have servants who serve us, but they
serve others … We buy our food, but
they grow theirs … We have walls
around our property to protect us, they
have friends to protect them.
The boy’s father was speechless: Then his son added,
“Thanks Dad, for showing me how poor we are.”
The farms of old are experiencing a revival – yuppies swapping the suits of city life for the overalls of country life, municipal bylaw officials debating the merits of backyard chicken coops and the explosion of farmer’s markets, trendy restaurants and roadside stands, all promoting fresh area produce. The sage advice touted is – get to know your local farmers because buying from them will make you much healthier, support the local economy and help save the planet. So whether it’s the 10, 50 or 100 mile diet, only purchase food grown within that circle. It all sounds good to me. Where do I sign up?
But enter two Canadian agriculture academics and their book, The Ten Thousand Mile Diet. They argue that these local food movements will not make us all healthier, but instead will result in food prices rising, more people going hungry and an increase in gastronomical poisonings. The two professors state that over the past fifty years, much of the gains the world has made in a safe, secure and inexpensive food supply have come through changing our agricultural system – from the small family farm to the giant conglomerate kind, with an emphasis on specialized growing. And they present facts like the following:
“Over the last century, food illnesses have decreased by a hundredfold … Today, it takes less than 1/10th of an acre to feed a single person for a year … The world’s population is 7 billion, yet hunger has decreased from 40% to 15% … The cost of food has dropped more than half from 23% of a family’s income in the 1920s to 11% in the 2020s … If we raised cattle now as in the 1950s, we’d need 165 million more acres.”
To these authors, big corporations that control huge swaths of the North American food supply chain (like Walmart and McDonald’s) are not farming villains, but agricultural heroes. And that food activists would turn back the clock on modern farm developments, closing the door to trade, and returning to a world where families toiled on the land, pesticide-and- fertilizer free, squeaking by on what they could earn at the local farmer’s market.
The bottom line? Whether you follow the 10-mile diet or the 10,000-mile diet, it may all be moot anyway. For currently, one acre of farmland per minute is being lost to urban development. And if this keeps up, soon there won’t be enough good soil left for anyone to fight over.
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