The future of food

My Sunday Star today has on view a wholly unappetising story by Lisa Kramer titled Consumer demand will lead to lab-made ‘clean meat’.

Yummy!

Kramer bobs and weaves through a thicket of issues ranging from food safety to animal welfare, but ultimately seems to have only one over-riding concern; safe returns for investors. Of course that’s how virtually all policy is decided these days. Nothing is a good idea until “luminaries” like Richard Branson and Bill Gates put money into it.

We have to call bullshit on that. The last hundred years of the corporatization of the human food supply chain has given us cheap food. It’s also given us an obesity crisis and a diabetes epidemic. Big Ag is a nightmare for our ecosystem. Industrial agriculture, no matter how much it enriches investors, impoverishes everyone.

We don’t need more corporate control of our food supply.

We need to break free of that corporate control!

Buy beef that was grass-fed in pastures instead of fattened in feedlots.

Source your eggs from small farmers who allow the chickens to run free.

Patronize your local farmers’ market (but beware the “farmers” who source their produce at the Oshawa Food Terminal – they’re everywhere).

There’s a growing enthusiasm for “real food” alternatives today that didn’t exist a generation ago. Community supported small-scale farming is on the rise everywhere. A lot of millennials are saying “goodbye Wonderbread, hello artisanal sourdough!”

Here’s a great example of what’s happening. Riverside Bakery is a community supported bakery in Stirling, Scotland. I use them as an example because I’ve met some of the folks involved, but similar ventures, be they bakeries or butcher shops or what have you, are popping up everywhere.

And while they may hold little appeal to Richard Branson and Bill Gates and other investors, they, and not lab-grown food products, are the real future of sustainable agriculture.