(except for this one, this one has two faces!)
In the early 1800s, Thomas Malthus proved that the planet’s resources would be unable to supply a growing population with sustainable food. He used the diminishing marginal returns to explain that as the product of our labour grew less effective, the growing population would be left with starvation. Though it’s easy to look back at him with disbelief, one of his assumptions remains quite true: our labour would have been unable to sustain population growth, had we not made technological advances since then. Better fertilizers and harvesting techniques but also the disease resistant strands of seeds chemically developed, and the pesticides that make growing in humid climates possible. Fast forward 200 hundred years and there’s a growing trend: a return to the past in our food market. “Out with the processed munch-ables!” scream the people, and to them I say: You guys make no f**** sense!
……
Now I could spend hours describing the plethora of things wrong with these “food-conscious” arguments, but I’m just going to focus on one of the issues: the information they spread, and the general mentality of this generation to remain uncritical of what we hear and consume. There’s two different sides to every coin!
There are so many movements within the food industry that people need to think twice about. The first, I’ve mentioned, is the idea that we should sacrifice the lower prices of processed food in order to eat organic. That’s all fine and dandy, except that charging lower prices wasn’t the original intent of our food experiments – feeding a growing population was. Lower prices are just a happy accident; they exist as proof of the advancements we’ve made. The real sacrifice isn’t the prices, but the ability to produce food on a global scale, in environments that would normally grow callous over time. The real trade off, than, is eating an apple you’re pretending tastes better, so that other people can’t eat the ones that you deem unnatural. What does it matter, if one apple’s better than another, if everyone gets one?
I’m no expert, just a regular chap that holds an issue with the ethical movement behind organic eating. It’s not that I don’t see benefits environmentally to not producing with as many chemicals, but I just don’t see it as a realistic solution to our current environmental predicament. For that matter, I don’t really see the benefit of producing an organic apple in New Zealand, because their climate is appropriate, and shipping it across the world to be enjoyed – at least from an environmental standpoint.
Anyways, as I said, there’s two sides to every coin. If you can’t see the other side, look harder: It has a habit of showing itself eventually…
