The argument for agribusiness is that larger operations can produce food more efficiently, but what if part of the goodness of our food comes from the goodness of the people who grow it? What if bringing the efficiencies of modern corporate methods has poisoned the land and made the crops not worth eating?
The singer Dave Matthews spoke at Farm Aid 2008 last month, and gave a beautifully warm yet penetratingly logical description – in 3 minutes – of how the corporate approach to farming has been destroying the nutritive quality of our food as well as our ecological habitat. And he explained why this happens.
Take a listen:
Farm Aid 2008 – Dave Matthews Speaks Out
I love the way he delineates in 3 minutes the values that will have to prevail in the economics of sustainability. He talks about money, and how money works regardless of how we are – how, in fact, money cannot care, is philosophically opposed to caring about us.
This quality of money serves useful purposes in bringing a leveling logic to the play of free markets – but it has proved disastrous, in fact fatal, when applied to the food we eat.
This model has failed, says Matthews, because the informing dynamic is, how can we make as much “food” as we can, as cheaply as we can, regardless of what it tastes like, regardless of what it does to our children, regardless of if it destroys the land in the process.
The difference between this mentality and the mentality of the small farmers who feed their children and their neighbors the food they grow, and who work to preserve the land, is part of the answer to the ecosystem’s distress. The factory farms destroy the planet, because that’s what they do, says Matthews, and the small farmers can save it, because that’s what they do, naturally.
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