Our food system is broken. Or so says Oran B. Hesterman, PhD, founder and head of the Ann Arbor-based nonprofit
Fair Food Network, in his book
Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All. But unlike many we're-doing-it-all-wrong books, Hesterman offers up recommendations for and examples of solutions. The
New York Times review finds lots of food for thought.
Excerpt:"Agricultural mass production, of course, led to enormous increases in efficiency and productivity. It helped to create an abundant food supply at low cost to consumers. But the same forces that envisioned the farm as a "big factory floor" have also produced unintended but dangerous consequences. These include problems with food quality and safety, animal welfare, soil erosion and depletion, higher energy consumption and greenhouse gas production, and diet-related illnesses like diabetes and obesity, Mr. Hesterman writes.
The book’s use of statistics to document these problems is spotty. But those it offers can pack a wallop. For example, citing a University of Michigan fact sheet, it says, “our food system consumes 10.3 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1.4 calories of food energy.” The author says this is a sign of a broken system, “not because the policies that created it were necessarily bad policies for the time in which they were created, but because the context has changed."
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