Leverage on a bun

What the financial collapse can teach us about the food system 18

In a recent New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten published a lucid, entertaining essay on the financial collapse. Titled “The Death of Kings,” it focuses on the hedge-fund managers, stock gurus, and private-equity wizards who reaped billions from the credit bubble.food systemIs Big Ag running the food system into the ground the same way Wall Street wrecked the economy?iStock Photo

What were those people thinking? Turns out, Paumgarten relates that during the flush times, many in the world of finance had a “moment of clarity, an inkling of doom” about what was coming. “The sky was full of signs,” Paumgarten writes.

For many, the awakening came while driving through some overbuilt exurb in California or Florida, or watching a commercial for a subprime lender (“Mortgage consultants are standing by!”), or studying a chart depicting total debt to the gross domestic product.

Paumgarten’s tale is essentially about high-level fecklessness: people with degrees from the nation’s finest universities, rewarded with nine-figure annual salaries, knowingly driving the global economy right over a cliff. Paumgarten doesn’t go there, but the same analysis applies to financial policymakers and regulators; they, too, could gawk at obviously overbuilt exurbs, or wince at debt-to-GDP charts.

The whole sorry spectacle got me thinking of the global food system, the juggernaut that feeds billions every day. It’s not hard to make analogies with the financial sector whose rubble now lays scattered about, ready to be cleaned up on the public’s dime.

Like the financial sector, the food system has dramatically globalized over the past generation, even as it has become increasingly concentrated (PDF). Just as traders in New York, Tokyo, and London—often employed by the same mega-banks—can make, say, the Argentine peso plunge or soar with a few keystrokes, global food commodity markets have become tightly intertwined.

Just last year, the U.S. policy of diverting massive amounts of corn to biofuel—in concert with similar European Union policy on soybeans—sparked steep increases in food prices worldwide, pushing hundreds of millions of people into hunger. In essence, decisions made in Washington and Brussels reduced Haiti’s urban poor to eating mud cakes.

The analogy between food and finance also extends to the concept of leverage. During the boom, a typical Wall Street firm held a dollar in liquid assets for every 25 it used to make speculative bets in stuff like derivatives and credit default swaps. Execs were so confident that real-estate prices go only one way—up!—that 25-to-one leverage seemed like a sound business model. Paumgarten shows that many of them had doubts; but that only makes the situation more stunning.

Whereas Wall Street’s leverage was financial, the food industry’s is mostly ecological and social. (Financial leverage does play a role, as in the case of teetering, debt-gorged Pilgrim’s Pride, the globe’s largest chicken producer.) Companies like Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Tyson have built globe-spanning empires by taking vast amounts of cheap, monocropped corn and soy and turning it into everything from sweetener to meat to car fuel. Mega-processors like Kraft and fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s suck in these inputs and churn out cheap, ready-made meals.

These giant entities behave as if soil is an easily renewable resource, that the climate can absorb endless amounts of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (a synthetic fertilizer byproduct), and that communities and the biosphere can endlessly bear the toxic footprint of industrial meat production.

And just as in the financial world circa 2006, signs of imminent trouble abound, discernible by anyone who dares look. Consider just a few of the most obvious ones:

• Industrial corn and soy are the lifeblood of the industrial food system, providing livestock feed, cooking oil, sweeteners, and a dizzying array of processed additives. They’re also the feedstock of choice for the biofuel industry, of which food giants like ADM and Cargill form a major part. And, they’re massive contributors to climate change. Industrial corn needs heavy lashings of synthetic nitrogen to reach maximum yield—and recent studies (PDF) suggest nitrogen fertilizers emit four to five times more nitrous oxide into the atmosphere than previously had been assumed. Meanwhile, the expansion of soy into Brazil’s agricultural frontier, egged on by ADM and Cargill, has led to massive deforestation in the Amazon, perhaps the globe’s most important carbon sink. Under the industrial-food regime, we’re literally warming the planet bite by bite.

• Large doses antibiotics are fundamental to the industrial livestock model. Animals crammed together in close quarters over their own waste become immune-comprimised, requiring steady doses just to stay alive. Meat producers also favor antibiotics because they promote fast growth. “An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics produced in this country—nearly 13 million pounds per year—are used in animal agriculture for these nontherapeutic purposes,” claims the Union of Concerned Scientists. A growing body of evidence links intensive hog production with MRSA, an antibiotic resistant staph infection that kills 20,000 Americans per year—more than AIDS. The situation with flu viruses may be even more dire. The current swine flu strain sweeping the globe has been traced to a hog raised by a large-scale operation in North Carolina from 1998; and even conventional veterinary scientists have been warning for years that hog CAFOs create ideal environments for fast-evolving, species-jumping flu strains.

• Industrial-scale vegetable and fruit production relies heavily on domesticated honey bees for pollination—and commercial beekeepers have been haunted since 2006 by large die-offs. Scientists have yet to settle on a single explanation for “colony collapse disorder”—but widespread insecticide use almost certainly plays a role.

One can easily imagine a rollicking New Yorker piece about the aftermath of a food-system meltdown: quotes from wistful agribiz execs about how they saw, and ignored hints of a coming calamity.

But there’s no need to wait fearfully for that day. Just as signs industrial food’s fragility abound, there’s also evidence of robust alternatives nationwide. For 20 years, farmers markets and CSAs have grown dramatically, providing links between consumers and farmer unmediated by transnational food corporations.

In places as diverse as Woodbury County, Iowa, and Hardwick, Vermont, citizens are organizing to use municipal policy as a tool to revitalize and support local food networks. Across the nation, municipalities are launching “food policy councils”—based on the theory that just as cities develop strategies for securing sufficient water and regulating growth, they also need to think about nurturing their foodshed.

And in inner-city Chicago and Milwaukee, Growing Power and the Institute for Community Resource Development are putting the lie to the idea that low-income people tend to eat industrial food because they like it better. These groups—along with Brooklyn’s East New York Farms and Added Value, Oakland’s People’s Grocery, and others—are thriving as they bring fresh food to neighborhoods that too often only have access to ill-stocked corner stores.

All of this activity, vibrant and promising as it is, produces a small fraction of the food consumed in the United States—likely less than 3 percent. Unlike the industrial food system, it’s disaggregated, decentralized, and unsubsidized by the federal government. Yet these shadow food systems represent the best hope we have as Big Food lumbers toward disaster.

Here is where the analogy to the financial system offers some hope. Commenting on how difficult it was for most people not to get swept up in the bubble economy, Paumgarten writes: “The sad fact is that betting against the global financial system requires more than pluck; you need to be a participant. Most of the mechanisms in place for the implementation of pessimism are known only to the members of the guild.”

In other words, nearly anyone could have seen that the U.S. economy had entered a precarious bubble phase. But you pretty much had to have been running a hedge fund to, say, make money by betting against the value of collatoralized-debt obligations.

Food is different. There are multiple ways for individuals and communities to get involved with alternative-food efforts. And unlike shorting securities like a Wall Street “bear,” betting on alternative food expresses optimism, not pessimism.

Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Follow my Twitter feed; contact me at tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org.

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  1. MotherNatureDaily Posted 9:48 pm
    25 May 2009

    An intelligent, thoughtful and poignant post underscoring the problems endemic in modern industrial agriculture. We can't continue along its path indefinitely -- as the author has outlined, the signs that we're reaching the breaking point are only growing more pronounced.

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  2. enviroperk Posted 11:24 pm
    25 May 2009

    I agree with most of what you have said in your article. Though I question who the demon is here. Business people are well trained in finding out what the consumer wants and efficiently giving it to them. In this process a profit is made.My local grocer and I chat a lot. Mainly because he is a block away and my 2.5 year old lives for the trips to "see people" at the grocery, and I think we were in Cub Scouts together. He tells me he buys locally, because it is fresher, better and cheaper produce, when IN SEASON.However, when the customers want watermelon in January and summer squash in February, he has to purchase from Mexico or California. ( By the way, what is the growing season for locally-produced produce in Vermont anyway?)Who is at fault here? In my mind, the consumer. Corporate farms would die a quick death when no one wants to buy produce out of local season. If people demanded free range local meat, they would have it. Business is good at delivering what we want.To make a swine analogy, if people really demanded only non-factory pork, how long would the factory farms last?My grocer could force me to make better food choices, but is that his mission? Should he risk customers going elsewhere because he is making their moral choices for them? Maybe. But that behaviour lies far outside of what businesses see as their mission -- to meet the needs of the consumer.To quote again Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us" . I guess I think that blaming "industry" and "factory" and the financial community is avoiding the painful truth that will set us free. We need to change.   

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  3. Bud Dingler's avatar

    Bud Dingler Posted 11:40 am
    26 May 2009

    good article but as a proffesional beekeeper I disagree on the pollination part. The same stories are being recycled about bee losses but the realty is much improved and is demonstrated by the fact there was an over abundance of bees available everywhere this spring including almonds and poillination prices are down dramatically. there is no crisis in the bee world, and while insecticides do play a role in the losses they are not the sole or leading cause. the sole cause for losses is beekeeper applied chemicals to treat for mites. other important factors are a loss of habitat and then corresponding decrease in nutritional diversity. if european honeybees dwindle the more aggressive and robust africanized honeybee will take over which it is doing already in the deep south and southern CA 

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  4. CowsEatGrass's avatar

    CowsEatGrass Posted 11:40 am
    26 May 2009

    I think this implies that the consumer is asking for feedlot beef.  I think the percentage of people that actually seek out meat from feedlots because it is from feedlots is very small.  Most folks just want cheap, tasty food.  They buy the stuff from feedlots because it is cheap and it is cheap because it is heavily subsidized.  I agree that consumers are to blame, but the top-down issues are equally responsible for the perils of our current food system.

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    1. enviroperk Posted 10:13 pm
      26 May 2009

      If you are referring to thoughts i presented, I do not think consumers ask for feedlot beef. However, at my local grocery I see many consumers paying with yellow credit cards. Here, that indicates they are buying with electronic food stamps (there are no yellow credit cards I am aware of)  on a budget of $50 per week for a family of four. They buy things like chicken breast quarters (on sale) for $.99 per pound, ground beef on sale for $1.99 per pound. I am not sure they have the luxury of free-range meat, which is not available unless one drives 55 miles north and is willing to pay two to four times that price. Fortunately for me, I can, but even my modest income puts me in the top 5% of those in my area.Those of us with high speed Internet and abundant free time to make our Internet proclamations of outlawing factory farms need to provide the comparable-cost alternatives to the factory farms, or at least give the less fortunate majority the right to buy the meat they can afford.Though I guess a massive educational campaign showing these people how they can affordably feed their family year-round on locally produced vegetables would be a green alternative. Yet, even living in a fertile area at 30.4N degrees latitude and myself being a moderately successful gardener, this is appears to be problematic. I can only imagine the challenges of this in Detroit or Chicago or even Vermont. Maybe this is a great volunteer education opportunity for those more knowledgeable than myself in these matters.  

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      1. splashy's avatar

        splashy Posted 5:20 pm
        30 May 2009

        My big problem with buying locally is they just don't have the same hours I do. You have to get up early in the morning to go to the farmer's market, or you just don't get anything worth buying. Or, you have to really work at it to make arrangements, going to the farm and picking your food, or whatever. Either way, they don't run on the same schedule as this night owl does.It just doesn't fit into the lives of people like buying in the grocery store does, especially if you include those that are open 24 hours a day like the Wal Mart supercenters.I did it at one time, but it just became too difficult. I loved the local food, mostly organic, but between having to fit their schedule and having to come up with the total price for the entire year, then preserving it myself, I just don't have the time or energy any more.

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  5. EarthWiseLifeWise's avatar

    EarthWiseLifeWise Posted 7:16 pm
    26 May 2009

    We must boycott the products of transnational corporations, reclaim economic power, and build community gardens. We need a revolution in buying and eating food, one that brings us back to a respectful relationship with the earth and sea that sustain us. Buying locally, as well as organic, and supporting local production and building local farmers markets is also key.

    The seeds have been planted for a sustainable food system. It's up to us to nurture them to maturity. Take responsibility, plant a veggie garden and start being aware of what you buy at the supermarket. Consumers need to realise we can not trust corporations to do the right thing, it's all about their bottom line, we have to demand it before its to late.

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  6. Delay And Deny's avatar

    Delay And Deny Posted 9:26 pm
    26 May 2009

    My own take on it is this.In the 1970s we were fighting for our lives with Russia.
    And they were winning.Our energy intensive agricultural system was a way to grow our population rapidly to keep up with what seemed like a Soviet system that could produce more soldiers, more warheads and maybe more goods than us.So we punted and signed the SALT treaty while we massed our forces.We fed the kids high energy high sugar stuff to make us bigger, stronger and able to pound Ivan under the table.The fallout was lots of fat people and diabetes.Even today, only something like 3 percent of the population is fit enough to join the Army.   But those that do are virtual terminators.Do we still need to do this to ourselves?
    Do we have to grow super soldiers to beat Al Qaeda? Maybe not so much any more.  

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  7. walt k Posted 9:39 pm
    26 May 2009

    @ Enviroperk- Business people are well trained to manufacture desire just as our government manufactures consent for all sorts of horrible things like torture and war. They've also used their influence in DC to totally restructure US agriculture over the past 100 years, to the detriment of small farmers and the benefit of large processors. The whole "cheap food" policy was their idea, for their profit. The "Food as a Weapon" thing was their idea too. (In reality, the emphasis on exporting our agricultural production simply proves that we aren't paying our workers and farmers enough to consume their own production.) The giant corporations wind up with most of the subsidies they've engineered, even if they pass through a farmer's hands first. You want watermelon in January? Start paying the full cost of the oil burned to get it here, including the lives of American servicemen and women sent to die for oil. As for the local season in Vermont, that's why we have canning, and other methods of preservation. If we get off the dime on solar and wind generated electricity, you'll even be able to have a freezer to help you enjoy summer treats all year long. The same useless folks who ran our financial system into the ground (MBAs) are running our food system too. You should be very, very worried.

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    1. enviroperk Posted 10:36 pm
      26 May 2009

      I am sorry, I missed your solution to the problem? Frankly, I dont think MBA's ran our financial system into the ground, I think our excessive consumption and borrowing did it.Extrapolating from your comments I would think that we have no free choice,  between  the corporations manipulating our desires and our ELECTED government manufacturing our consent and all --are we really that helpless? Have we been brainwashed and water-boarded into eating at McDonald's and buying packaged Pringles? I think maybe not. Possibly, just possibly, we choose to do that. How many people do you know that actually want to can produce? How many do you know that even know how?My point is -- we can make other choices without happily killing ourselves with Big Macs while blaming the corporations and government for allowing us to buy it,  but most choose not to make other choices.Come on, every American knows what advertising truely is, and that our government is corrupt, we just want to wait for someone else to fix it.

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      1. enviroperk Posted 11:03 pm
        26 May 2009

        PSDont make me tell you how much money, water, gasoline, time and fertilizer I spent canning 100 ears of corn three years ago. Suffice to say it was many times what it cost at the grocery. Harvesting and canning for two days in July in 98F heat was not really a fun experience. Though it may be cooler in Vermont.

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      2. walt k Posted 9:56 pm
        29 May 2009

        I'm not worried about a solution, for as Wendell Berry said, "Nature bats last." But that solution involves things like mass extinctions and die-offs, and I suspect what you mean is I didn't offer a happy ending for the overfed Americans. Given that we have a triple crisis, environmental, financial, and political, happy endings are unlikely. Maybe if we had listened to the president in the sweater instead of turning to denial and the Great Prevaricator 30 years ago. I do know that spouting "the power of the market" inanities will not put us on the road to living happily ever after. If we are to avoid collapse now, I believe it will require single-minded, concerted action of type that is probably impossible with this Congress. Make me czar and we'd start on the new electric grid and electric rail lines (light-rail, hi-speed, and regional freight) tomorrow morning. Immediately slap a tax on petroleum products and natural gas that ensures only absolutely essential things are made with them (like drip-irrigation tubing). Not another dime for internal combustion automobiles. Put the auto industry to work turning out plug-ins even if they're only good for second-cars at first. We can recycle the lead acid batteries if we ever come up with better ones. Boeing can start making something besides fighter jets or airliners or get taken over. Start cranking out solar thermal plants and wind generators as fast as we can build them, and if that means taking over the industries to get it done, so be it. Top tax-rate to 90% tomorrow too for income over !,000,000. Everybody does 2 years of paid, national service at 16 or 18, which can be directed into rebuilding local economies and local agriculture, especially in the cities. Giant WPA project for everyone else without a job. I think you get the idea, and of course I realize the American people would scream bloody murder and change of this magnitude is impossible. But the snail's pace we're on- maybe we'll get a public option for health care this year and meanwhile the stimulus in my area is being used to put up road signs we've managed to survive without for years- won't cut it. I'm reminded of the doctor who speaks with the wife of a seriously ill man. "You need to pamper your husband if he's to survive. Nothing but home cooked meals, no stress, comfort him in every way possible or else he's going to die." When the wife comes out of the doctors office, her husband asks, "What did the doctor say?" "That you're going to die." MBAs not only ran our financial system into the ground, they destroyed agriculture and manufacturing in this country as well. They had help, but they also personify the junk economics of Milton Friedman with everything subordinated to short term profit. Prior to WWII, our manufacturing executives had typically worked their way up. Since then we've gone to MBAs, who are taught that they can manage any business because its all about numbers. I watched them screw up two perfectly good high tech companies that would probably be in business today if they actually could manage anything. Management is not about numbers, but about people. I heard this very thought seconded on the BBC program "The Interview" a few months bank. An old British banker decrying the screwups of the MBAs who led British banks into disaster because they had no banking experience. Free will? Sort of like the mythical free market, it would require perfect information. Maybe it's because I live in a red-neck rural area (not Vermont) but most of the folks I see have no idea how predetermined their desires are, despite them being exactly the same as the guy in the next trailer. I hate to break this to you, but we don't live in a democracy because the founders wisely figured the masses would screw things up. They gave us a republic, which we haven't been able to keep. That supposed "greatest generation" came back from following orders in WWII, took the plaudits, the GI Bill, moved to the suburbs and let Truman and Eisenhower dump our republic for the current National Security State (as Gore Vidal has been pointing out for decades). Instead of the disinterested noble leaders, and the eternal vigilance our system requires, we hnow have bread and circuses. Mostly circuses. And as for your 100 ears of corn. Not a crop I'd start with. Potatoes are good, provide more protein than corn and can be stored quite well in a root cellar. What your experience proves is that it takes a little practice to become self-sufficient, not that it can't be done. Both Berry and Gary Nabhan have pointed out that despite this being called the "Information Age," we've actually lost more information than is on all of Google's servers. Nabhan points to the information contained in genetic diversity, and Berry to the intimate knowledge of farming a particular place.

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    2. enviroperk Posted 10:43 pm
      29 May 2009

      WaltK,  I am not disagreeing with you. Though mass-die-offs is not a very popular remedy to our problems, it is a tool of nature to deal with them. That process is one, argurably, that man interferes with most heavily in nature.My darkest plan D is moving to the homesteads of my family of the 1800s, which thankfully is property still in the hands of my family, and making an existence as they did. Thankfully the memories of the specific housing, farming, canning and water supply folklore still exists. The fact that the vessels of that knowledge lived to be over 100 years old attests the the viability of that past lifestyle.It is so fascinating to learn of the comfort of a "dog trot" house built to use seasonal tree shade, hills and prevailing winds. To learn that a simple cellar in the earth can keep many root vegetables edible all through the off-season months, and that natural limb fall from trees can provide heating, personal cleaning and cooking energy year round. Brine (salt) can preserve meat etc.My only concern is that most of the population does not have that advantage and sometimes efficient methods of business help with making this available to the masses. I confess that one of my educational degrees is a business degree which I feel adds a practical tool to many of my ideas. Frankly, I still challenge a single gardener to produce many food stocks (corn) more energy efficently than a factory farm. If you have done this with any foodstock, I would be most appreciative of the details. To save you time, yes, I have used compost, chicken manure and rainwater.
      Sadly,  most of the population of the earh does not have that advantage of arible real estate. What say we to them? 

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      1. walt k Posted 3:24 pm
        01 Jun 2009

        The ratio I see most often of petrochemical energy in calories to food calories produced is 10:1. Are you sure you didn't beat that? Pivot irrigated corn has to pump the water from ever greater depths, and then it travels 2,000 miles on average, both costs you eliminated. Gene Logsden ("The Contrary Farmer") grows open pollinated corn on 25 acres in Ohio. It's advantage for him is that a small farmer can realistically harvest it without machinery, as opposed to small grains, which require equipment that is no longer made because the big boys use combines. But he uses it for animal feed. A family could harvest enough wheat, rye and barley for bread and beer with a scythe.
        Most ag in the world is still small scale, although efforts to industrialize ag are ongoing. NPR had a story this morning on rolling back te green revolution and going organic in India.
        Access to arable land in this country will be a problem. We've built suburbs on some of our best land. They won't be hard to tear out, but there will be a gap of time before we can get production going. Cuba managed it when the Soviet Union collapsed and their access to oil disappeared, but now that Chavez is sending them oil, they're going back to mechanization. All I can say is the more local ag and urban ag we get going before everything hits the fan, the better our chances as a functioning society. We don't have a shortage of humans to work on the problem. Paying unemployed people to start farming vacant land might be the best public works projects we could do. If we are starting soon enough to avoid collapse, I think our goal should be to have 15 to 20 percent of the people producing food for all of us. I believe that is doable, even without oil, and not coincidently would alleviate our unemployment problem.

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  8. bailsout Posted 10:49 pm
    26 May 2009

    Is it urban myth or is it true that there are too many people to be sustained solely by organically cultivated foods? Once again the problem is not food production as much as it is overpopulation. But that is too sacred a cow to confront-- even it is from a feedlot.

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    1. walt k Posted 7:23 pm
      30 May 2009

      It's urban myth. American industrial agriculture is efficient in only one regard, labor, where we have a surplus. In terms of energy, water, and land, it is horribly inefficient. Urban homesteaders in the southern states can easily grow food at the rate of 30 tons per acre of mixed crops  organically.Industrial corn production at 300 bushels per acre (national average is much less, probably under 150 with global warming predicted to decrease) is only 8 tons per acre of  a what is a pretty low value foodstuff in terms of nutrition.There's also the declining nutritional value of industrial food. The land grants and industry lied for years saying there was no benefit to organic. There's a huge nutritional benefit that is getting bigger over time. Alan Weisman's book, "The World Without Us," has a chapter talking about sealed seeds and foodstufs prodced in the mid-1800s in England. These samples had far more nutrition than current production. "The End of Food" by Thomas Pawlick is a whole book dedicated to that topic, comparing USDA nutrition studies over time. Then there's the issue of sustainability. Green Revolution type farming takes water, capital, fertilizer, pesticides that Third World farmers can't afford. Throwing them off the land to become squatters in the city so agribusiness can take over farming is no solution, its genocide.

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  9. Tatil Posted 4:14 pm
    29 May 2009

    I have very good information on the site now the new members here . Tatil

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  10. Clifford Wells's avatar

    Clifford Wells Posted 4:14 pm
    30 May 2009

    I have to confess that in a way, a "food bubble" could pop just like the mortgage market bubble, the financials bubble, and the Big Auro bubble - hey, remember the "Dot-Com" bubble before that?  Yes, if is highly likely, although possibly nudged by disasters, disease, and so forth.  There is a definite tie-in with Climate Change by the way.What tends to dampen the food bubbles are immense subsidies and crop insurance for Big Ag.  If it was a truly free market with no supports, many of these conglomerates would have to scale back, go bankrupt, or walk away from the fields and food factories.  For example, I have no idea why the US supports sugarcane growers, since we produce it for more than we can import it - well without the heavy import tarriff on sugar, that is.Such a huge, inefficient system can lead to massive failures, or crops so bountiful that grain rots in the silos, and has to be trucked to the dump.  Big Ag doesn't care - it has commodities margins, subsidies, insurance, and all kinds of fancy derivitive-like tools to stave off large losses. For good or indifferent, I do see some people starting to demand local-grown food when in season.  I don't know if that is a passing fad, but even the USDA and state agencies fund some farmer's markets and gets the growers to provide healthy foods - with an accent on promoting organic when possible.  It's a refreshing thing, especially if it lasts and grows bigger.  I would even allow some subsidies for the meat and dairy products sector, within reason.  Now there's a subsidy I can support!Back 100 years ago where I grew up (hah, I'm not THAT old), people had fresh stuff in the summer and canned, dried, smoked, stocked root sellars, or did whatever to make it last through the winter.  By the end of winter, people were usually down to whatever potatoes, dried beans, turnips, or whatever starch hadn't rotted yet.  They ate a lot of deer, fish, and birds by hunting, and slaughtered some farm animals they would rather sell to the market.  If you didn't do it this way, you got sick and died.  Today, we're so incredibly spoiled ... but are we better off?That's a good question.  One can't make the argument that we're "better" nutrionally, evidenced by the high rates of obesity, diabetes, occassional E. coli outbreaks, and other diseases associated with a poor diet.  One could almost make a point that is a few giant food companies went bust because of a "food bubble," we'd respond by planting real food all over the place as a matter of necessity.  Gee, I never looked at it that way ...

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