If there is one thing this book has sort of reinforced is the reason why we industrialized food in the first place instead of sticking to less mechanical means. Because it's cheap, and organic living cannot be managed on a mass scale.
I hate to say this, but when I read that Whole Foods has virtually fallen into the same trap as the rest of the industrialized food industry, I was rather amused. Why? That's certainly not a good thing, but it goes to show that no matter how righteous one feels about saving the animals and providing organic fruits, you're still not much better than the industrial machine. They tried to fight it and they pretty much failed.
Because you cannot ship organic foods straight from the farm, across country, to a grocery store! Everything, thus, has to be local if you want straight organic foods and that simply is not possible, at all, for every city. Where is New York going to get their organic foods if there can't be any preservatives? Are there enough farms around there to feed 8 million people (I don't even know how many people live in New York. That's just a ballpark figure and it's probably very wrong) and the rest of the surrounding area? I'm pretty sure farm lands are in short supply up there. Not that they don't exist but that they cannot possibly produce enough to feed that many people. And even if they do, what about the surrounding areas? They'd just starve?
To be quite frank, though, I seriously doubt anyone is going to be able to get rid of the food industry completely. It may produce extremely unhealthy foods and have animal abuse (I love animals too and I think the FDA should look this more closely!), but it does make food on a mass enough scale to feed the 300,000,000+ in our population.
I guess you could rightly call this my primary criticism of this book. It's saying a lot about how good Joel Salatin's farm is, how much it produces, and how it produces but it is not saying anything about how we can transport this. Other than the fact that Joel Salatin refuses to go beyond local.
This is probably what I find annoying about quite a few environmentalist writings that we've read. They totally ignore practical reasons as to why Salatin's way farming hasn't spread like wildfire to other farmers. He seems to be making a decent living. And part of that is because it simply is not practical! Organic food can't be shipped! Or isn't supposed to be shipped because they prohibit the use of preservatives.
Durning did the same thing, because I criticized his article which was so bent on proving the American people are ill with consumerism, that he totally ignored the fact that happiness is quite largely based on job satisfaction. He was so certain materialism is the sole cause of happiness that he completely ignored how job satisfaction is pretty much at an all time low. Big business has CEOs that keep awarding themselves huge bonuses and severance checks(even for doing a crappy job), and meanwhile their poor employee on the lowest rung of the ladder is constantly ignored and withheld bonuses despite working 40+ hours a week. Yes, NOTHING wrong or even pessimistic about that picture at all. (See? I'm not a capitalist through and through. Unregulated capitalism is horrible! Ergo, our current financial crisis right now.)
We don't have to get rid of the industrial food machine, but we can make individual dents in its undeniably rusted, unpleasant armor. I do a little gardening myself and I'd like to do more. If we all could do a little potted plant gardening in the windowsills we use for our monstrous A/C units or trivial knickknacks, we would all be a little healthier. I do agree that Organic is not sustainable because it cannot travel long distances (I worked at an organic grocery store and our food waste was regrettably off-the-charts) and yet food shouldn't have to travel far. If allotted spaces were used to better use and land-owners zoned a little more for gardening than they did more McDonalds/Subway, et al, we could have healthier/more expedient food. On campus, for instance, Student Sierra Club attempted a rooftop garden project on that awful eye-sore of a parking garage uptown. But the city stepped in. "No dice, hippies," seems to be the consensus. Omnivore's Dilemma does in fact show how Satalin ships his food, his brother takes it on a truck to local restaurants where it is quickly refrigerated and dolled out to customers. Just imagine if everyone sold their homegrown goodies to others, creating an inevitable web of freshness that would no doubt sustain, at least much more than a web of big macs and microwave dinners that leave me feeling hollow inside.
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