Do we have to rely on corporations?

Local is good. (4.00 / 1)

To play devil's advocate for a minute, though, small farmers in a co-op might not always able to engage in responsible and sustainable land-use practices, for example. The amount of labor per bushel is often much higher than on large, heavily-automated farms, and if we shifted to a small-farm system en masse, we would need a lot higher proportion of the population taking to farming. The example I'm particularly thinking of is Zimbabwe (because picking an extreme example makes it easier to highlight negative outcomes, not because it would necessarily make a good model for what would happen in the US). Regardless of the racial, political, and historical causes of the shift, it represented large centrally-managed farms being broken up into small, locally-managed farms, with catastrophic reductions in yields. I'll happily take fresh-picked local corn on the cob over something that's spent two days being compressed and dried out in a shipping crate any day - but not to the extent it leads to cornflakes being $25 a box.

Also, to head off the otherwise-inevitable digression, BOTH Katrina Swett and Annie Kuster agree that BP should not be allowed to spill nuclear waste over American farms REGARDLESS of whether the farmers are able to marry, and it is utterly shameless of Charlie Bass to support this position (which we have to assume he does because he refuses to return the money from the fundraiser BP-apologizer Barton raised for him).

Only the left protects anyone's rights.

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by: RealNRH @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 08:08:54 AM CDT

These are good points. (4.00 / 1)

But a concurrent change in the way we eat and the amounts we eat might be part of a self re-enforcing cycle. Having to give up gazillions of calories of high fructose corn syrup might have some silver linings and reduced demand can moderate prices in turn.

The way we farm and eat is an ecological and medical disaster, which themselves have significant costs, which simply are paid outside of the grocery store, but are paid nonetheless.

I dont know where we strike the balance, but it does seem that a new balance is needed.  

"But, in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope." Si se puede. Yes we can.  

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by: Paul Twomey @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 08:17:21 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Also, for the record... (0.00 / 0)

I don't actually think supporting local farmers would lead to a $25 box of cornflakes or massive agricultural collapse. I DO think that Kelly Ayotte actively wants to personally stuff small farmers into Terminator-driven combine harvesters powered by broken dreams and sheer hypocrisy. ;-)

Only the left protects anyone's rights.

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by: RealNRH @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 08:29:34 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

see my Carlin post on open thread... (0.00 / 0)

you are owned my friends and the owners don't want you to think for yourselves...they want to steal your social security put it on Wall st. and let you eat crap so you can pay outrageous medical bills.
HFCS= highly fucked corn syrup

for transparency sake ~I represent Union print shops

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by: JonnyBBad @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 08:30:30 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

While I appreciate the devil's advocate role (0.00 / 0)

what too often happens is what happened here, that we accept the current model as being accurate:  we say that food is cheaper because it is grown in quantity, like an assembly line, but it is also highly subsidized by our government, and creates very high externalities, which we all pay for elsewhere, as Paul notes, especially in medical costs and the costs of destroying our arable land and our water supplies by ghastly pollution (want to be sick? read about big pig or chicken factories or stockyards).  
We were also creating antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria by feeding livestock the quantities of the drugs sufficient to keep them alive, eating stuff they didn't evolve to eat, mostly corn, so they can get fat (literally) enough and full of Omega 6's instead of Omega 3's which again make us sick.  I believe that it is no longer acceptable, as of just recently, to feed antibiotics to well animals to keep them healthy enough to survive the brief life they need to have to get ready for market.
Agribusiness is like the fossil fuel industry, it is only profitable as long as they make the rest of us pay for all the damage they do.  If we could change the regulations that let them get away with this, or even just start by removing all the subsidies these sort of industries get, the actual operation of a market would move us toward the new model, I believe.  This is happening from the other end by the surge everywhere in the country of local foods, which is well supported and encouraged by Michelle Obama, thank you, Michelle!  

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by: Lucy Edwards @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 08:57:26 AM CDT

fresh from downtown (0.00 / 0)

Lynch was filming commercials at Farmer's Market in Concord today...I wish this happened year round but given the growing seasons...not gonna happen soon..

heard UNG Economist Ross Gittell and NH Ag Secy Lorraine Merrill with Laura Knoy on the Exchange this week...did you know ...???NH has highest per capita direct to consumer farm sales of any state...meaning to individuals, restaurants and stores...they studied food as a system(minus industrial and academic kitchens, cafeterias)
Keeping up first in the nation status...

for transparency sake ~I represent Union print shops

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by: JonnyBBad @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 11:18:04 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

There are markets in the winter around here now (0.00 / 0)

There is still local meat, condiments, jams and jellies, baked goods and root vegetables, plus all the things that can be grown in greenhouses.  Concord had a very popular market at Cole Gardens.  They are often not every week, but next year who knows.  

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by: Lucy Edwards @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 17:31:23 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

great thanks ! n/t (0.00 / 0)

for transparency sake ~I represent Union print shops

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by: JonnyBBad @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 19:33:23 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Our house guest tells about Halifax, Nova Scotia (0.00 / 0)

being reliant on green-houses in his youth (he's 91) to supplement the fish they took from the sea.

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by: hannah @ Mon Aug 02, 2010 at 03:40:03 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

One note (0.00 / 0)

I know what you're saying but it seems important to mention that the antibiotics don't just keep the animal alive.  There are many diseases that can pass from animals to humans and control or prevention of disease outbreaks in livestock is a really important public health measure.

For example, one of the reasons why tuberculosis was stamped out in this country was that they started giving antibiotics to cows.  I would not want to catch tuberculosis from drinking a glass of milk.

Everything else you're saying is spot on, though.

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by: Vis Unita Fortior @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 11:39:05 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Tuberculosis is back (0.00 / 0)

MDR strains

for transparency sake ~I represent Union print shops

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by: JonnyBBad @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 12:23:19 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Prevention of disease, yes, (0.00 / 0)

but this is simply the use of the drugs to allow them to leave the animals standing in crowded stockyards in ankle deep manure, being fed corn, which makes them fat, but sick.  Cattle evolved to eat grass, that is what they can digest well.  In the stockyards, e coli has mutated into virulent forms that can kill people because of the use of antibiotics.  We can, I am sure, find other ways to control diseases in animals that can be passed to humans, but raising animals whose meat gives us heart attacks, because the fat in corn-fed beef sticks very well to artery walls, while grass-fed beef is actually much higher in Omega-3's, which we are encouraged by our doctors to eat, is wrong and stupid.  
We can find other ways.  That is what I am trying to get at.  But the Rs are "betting against the American people" as President Obama said today, saying that we have to keep doing the same things the same way, because we have reached the pinnacle of human endeavor or something.  BS, which is appropriate in a comment about cow manure.

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by: Lucy Edwards @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 17:39:10 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

generalize (4.00 / 1)

You guys are all giving specific examples of how this or that instance of corporate food production yields good results in specific circumstances, in response to a diary that seems to me to be largely about corporatization, not about food.

Certainly free enterprise is the best system to come along so far. It beats the hell out of feudalism, which in turn was a big jump up from slavery (and I know history didn't progress that way). That doesn't mean it's the last best word in economic and social systems.

The cost of free enterprise is in some ways oddly similar to the cost of democracy as practiced in this country.  Both are improvements over our previous systems, but both have grown so big they resist further control and moral input.

I find the local movement one appealing attempt to downsize to a more controllable, morally sustainable economic model, and it is not necessarily limited to food. I wonder if an analagous movement could happen in politics.

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by: kite @ Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 21:46:51 PM CDT

Maybe the "grassroots" (0.00 / 0)

of a Carol Shea Porter campaign is a start?  
Thanks for bringing this around to what I wanted to suggest, that corporations do not = capitalism.  Corporations are  legal constructs, NOT natural persons, no matter what the Supreme Court says.  We can change this, but like all change, we first have to talk about it long enough to make it an allowable subject of conversation.  It's like the pledge in NH politics, if you don't talk about, it will never go away.

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by: Lucy Edwards @ Sun Aug 01, 2010 at 06:07:37 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

And capitalism does not = democracy. (0.00 / 0)

At least not corporate capitalism.  I truly believe we're seeing the limits to many of our systems.  Economic, government (national and global), and environmental.  

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." A. Einstein

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by: StraffordDem @ Sun Aug 01, 2010 at 18:06:52 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Apples and oranges (0.00 / 0)

Apples and oranges
I would like things to cost what they actually cost. All the blarney about sales saving you money, zero percent interest, cash back - what a load of crap. I don't know about $25 corn flakes but if that is the cost, it is a Democratic fundamental that you pay for what you get and hopefully when you get it.

It is very clear (See Food Incorporated) that the real costs of industrial food production are offset by kicking down the road the can of pesticides, fertilizers, environmental destruction and waste products - like with the southern hog farms. Then there are the government subsidies for stuff that have created a group of business leaches that have put the small farmer out of pasture, so to speak.

Did anyone else see the UL article about the demise of SERVE? Sad to see a volunteer effort go under particularly in this time of great need. I know nothing about them but if they followed the usual curve, it came down to one person dragging the few remaining volunteers and then the king pin got sick and there goes the program. Sustainability is very very hard. Everyone should be trying to arrange not only successors for themselves but the horizontal contacts that make sure that if there is disruption at any level the effort can be maintained. So often here, the campaign is over, whether political or social, the hired guns leave and even those few who would like to make sure the effort continues don't have contacts that last with others interested and the governmental folks that can make the difference between continuing and slowly choking to death.  

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by: xteeth @ Sun Aug 01, 2010 at 06:33:52 AM CDT

Point of order: (0.00 / 0)

ALL our political jurisdictions are public corporations -- i.e. fictive bodies organized for a public purpose.
The problem with private corporations is that we have allowed them to act as if they were natural persons, whose "mistakes" are correctable after the fact because the mischief a single person can do is relatively minimal.  Clearly, corporations shouldn't be given such lee-way and public ones aren't.  What public corporations can and must do is clearly set out in their organizing documents (constitutions and municipal charters).

The organizers of private corporations would just as soon we overlook their similarities to public corporations, with which they are actually in competition for power and control of the nation's assets.  Our corporations are outlaws-in-law.  By which I mean that they engage in anti-social behavior under cover of law.  By restricting our standards of behavior for them to the accumulation of monetary profit, we've made thievery legal.  The easiest way to accumulate money is to steal it without giving anything in return.  Private corporations are given carte blanche as long as they give back a little -- an ounce of nutrition in a 16 oz box of chemicalized cereal.

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by: hannah @ Mon Aug 02, 2010 at 03:55:40 AM CDT