i want to talk a bit about agriculture. i'm no expert on this... but i know a few things.
just don't ask me to grown anything, because i have managed to kill everything from cactus to tomato plants. i can honestly say that i've never gotten a seed to sprout. i even screwed up composting. i've since learned that there are very few rules when it comes to composting, but you have to have carbon content. i apparently added to much nitrogen, and the result is a pile of refuse that has sat in the back corner of my yard, doing very little in the last year. it's a good thing i decided to try to make money by cooking food, and not by growing it.
chefs have gotten a lot of attention recently. we're like rock stars to some people. and there's no doubt, we work hard, we are an artistic lot, and we deserve praise. but you know who the unsung hero is in my book? the guy who has to wake up every morning at the butt-crack of dawn and go out into the cold, lonely fields to tend to his animals and crops. farmers are all romantics at heart. they know they probably won't make a lot of money. they know they are going to be facing an unforgiving set of variables that could plummet them into the abyss of debt. but they do it anyways. they don't have a choice. it's their calling. somewhere imprinted in their genetic code is the word farmer. they are in love with the land. and i am in love with them.
i'm of course a little bit partial to the local, sustainable farmer. but i also understand the need to throw a little pragmatism in to balance all of this romanticism. i understand that in theory it made sense that if we produced more crops, if we were more efficient, we would be better off financially. and it's in our nature to stockpile. when our government entered into the business of buying up grains from farmers in the 50's, it began a precedent that has haunted this country ever since. enter the glut of corn. see, the farm subsidy idea backfired. it started as an idea to stockpile in case of famine. pair this with good old fashioned american ingenuity, which led to higher crop yields; achieved mainly by raping nonrenewable resources such as the oil used to make synthetic fertilizers, modern day pesticides which have created a dead-zone in the gulf of mexico, and by the invention of many motorized farm machines that enable farmers to work more efficiently, but usually the high price of these machines thrust most farms deep into debt. what we seem to have ended up with is a welfare system instead of an agricultural system. farmers can no longer meet their bottom line by growing commodity crops. the government has to pay them to grow, and sometimes, they have to pay them not to grow. it's a lose-lose situation. the farmer loses because they are kept in a marginal income bracket, and the consumers lose because we have to pay for the food atleast twice. we pay at the market and we pay with our tax dollars.
atleast we won't starve in a famine, right? i guess. but i always find the image of our countries grain silos a little unsettling. it's not the silo itself. it's what's usually right next to it that bothers me. these days, next to grain silos in the midwest you usually see a mountain of homeless corn. there's nowhere to store it, we don't even need it, and if we did it's not edible in it's current condition anyways. it's the variety of corn that they developed to feed the cows. that was the first ingenious idea they developed when the surplus first began. and why not feed it to the cows? they ate it after all. and they didn't tell us they didn't like it. nevermind that we could tell it was obviously making them sick. which by the way has in turn made us sick. so that surplus was used up. but then our farmers got even more efficient and grew even more corn. well, now what do we do? mmm...corn syrup. i'm not going to get into all the reasons why i think corn syrup sucks. the fact of the matter is that the occurrence of type 2 diabetes in adults has skyrocketed since that shit ended up in our sodas. but, hey... atleast we were using up all the corn. so can you guess what happens next? yeah, we got even more efficient. and now there is ethanol. studies have proven that the amount of calories expended to produce a gallon of ethanol exceeds the amount of calories gained from producing a gallon of ethanol. the stupidity of the plan lies in the complexity of the plan. first, you have to derive nitrogen from petroleum to create the synthetic fertilizer necessary to grow the corn. god only knows how many miles the oil travels in order to make that happen. then you have to ship the fertilizer, the seeds, and the pesticides to the farmer. the farmer tends the field. he uses his tractors and pesticide distributors and mechanized planters and tillers and harvesters. then he carries his harvested corn to the silo. from there it travels to a factory where it is mixed with chemicals to become ethanol. then the ethanol is shipped to another factory to be blended with gasoline. from here it travels to your gas station. i'm probably forgetting a few stops along the way here. but it's obviously making somebody money so i guess they think it's a good idea.
