Our Food
I think people are finally starting to understand the tremendous changes that have happened to our food over the past half century, but still we often choose not to change our past eating habits. It is difficult to do. But our food habits are also tied to to why our health care costs are as high as they are. Everything is connected, and what has happened to food and our health is an easy connect the dots.
My revelation of how much food has changed since I began cooking in the 1960s came working on my dissertation in the 1990s. I did not plan to do a food related study, but, let's make this easy....I was not allowed to write about the borderwalk, and this was the next subject that interested me. So in 1996 I (with the help of my mentor, John Fraser Hart) found the subject that would become an important part of my geographic (and otherwise) study. I have not veered away since.
It all started when a glint on the horizon told Dr. Hart much more than I understood at the time. Dr. Hart is a lifelong student of the evolving agricultural landscape. When he heard that I was heading out to an area he had not visited in a while, he packed his suit and lace ups (which he always wears near as I can tell) and flew out to meet me in my reconnaissance of the Panhandle of Oklahoma. The next day I picked him up at his hotel and we began to drive. Along a lonely stretch of High Plains road all of a sudden, like a beacon, he sat up straight in his seat and ordered me to drive toward that glint, the whole time murmuring "They've changed the geography! They've changed the geography! They've changed the pig geography of America!"
Hog production has changed dramatically since the 1980s. While Iowa continues to be a large hog producing state, North Carolina and the panhandle of Oklahoma (among a few other places) have become large hog producing states using CAFO methods.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but he knows his agricultural geography and he was right. We had stumbled upon the first hog barns, CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), in the Panhandle of Oklahoma. Texas County in the Panhandle would go from having 4,000 hogs in 1992 to a million in 1996, all feeding the new Seaboard Hog processing plant in Guymon. Over the next two years I would end up living in the Panhandle and in my fashion, study CAFO production from every angle possible. I talked to everyone connected to the practice, owners, corporations, politicians, consumers, outraged inhabitants nearby, and then capped it all by working in a pig barn. I wanted to know as much as possible. 
From there I expanded to all food. It was easy after studying CAFOs so intensely. I call it the hourglass theory: know something so well that the world (in a grain of sand) opens up after that focused and tight middle of the hourglass.
The zeitgeist (spirit of the times) of America has been based on a fast-paced and monetarily efficient lifestyle.
(Photo) Grain fed meal is what is fed to cattle then they enter the feedlots that stretch across the High Plains. Grain makes the cattle fatten quicker. Grass is what cows are genetically predisposed to eat. But grass takes more room to grow (hence adding to the cost), creates a leaner and more toned cow, and is healthier in providing
Omega-3 fatty acids.
It includes the food we eat and how it comes to us. The average food travels about 1500 miles to reach our table - how sustainable is that? Haw tasty is that? When we gas our fruits to maintain shelf life, feed grain to animals that have digestive systems made for grass, take nutrients out of grains only to add them back artificially, add sugar and salt to almost everything in order to re-find that taste that was lost..... How can we not question the mounting health costs in America due to heart disease, diabetes, and joint pain?
Can we begin to think about our bodies as something other than another commodity eating more commodities? Is there more than economic efficiency to the way we grow our food, when a hypoxia zone the size of New Jersey grows each year in the Gulf of Mexico--fed by the fossil fuel based and oxygen killing inputs to grow our food? Can we only measure success by how big and profitable something is? Does the environmental and equity costs mean anything?
You know where I stand.