Our food system is broken. This finally became clear through the COVID-19, which triggered a collapse of the food supply chain in many places of the country where supermarket fresh produce sections became empty. Yet, at the same time, farmers had to throw away thousands of tons of vegetables that could not leave farms.
Industrialized agriculture has become the world’s most destructive commercial activity, with Earth losing a third of its cultivable land because of erosion or pollution in the past 40 years. Although food production has increased by 30 percent over the last decade, the farming industry is no longer profitable in the US, and thousands of farms disappear every year. Large corporations replaced them with lower-quality produce. The top 10 percent of farms in terms of size account for over 70 percent of cropland in the United States.
Our Food travels miles…..
The average vegetable in the USA is transported over 1500 miles from harvest to table, arriving devoid of most nutrients and loaded with lectins from being ripened artificially. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a model that favors quantity over quality and shelf-life over flavor. And this model is so flawed that its inability to maintain the safety and quality of products results in over 30 e-coli outbreaks per year.
And much of the food ends up in the trash. Americans discard nearly 40 million tons of food every year, yet 37 million people across America — including 11 million children — suffer from food insecurity.
An urgent change is needed. We need an evolution of humanity that sees a design priority to move towards a functional ecology economy. We need to move into Earth repair mode.
We need to move into Earth Repair Mode.
The Rose Tent Urban Farms
