Food: It’s Magic.

A Magic Trick

When we enter a grocery store, sit in line at a drive-through, or go into a restaurant, food just seems to magically appear. Always. It’s just there. It’s as if a mustachioed man with a devilish glint in his eye shows up each morning and wills food into existence through the darkest of magic. A beautiful, yet frightening sight, I assume.

Of course, we know there’s no magician, but the question of where all that food comes from persists. Along with the origins of our food, why has grocery shopping become so much more complex? Why do food labels look like science experiments, and why does something simple, like buying a chicken, now include deciphering between organic, free-range, air-chilled, and “natural” chickens? Are people eating “unnatural” chickens? Does it give them powers?

Let’s peak behind the curtain of the U.S. industrial food system, and find out what’s going on…

Farms Changed

If you’re confused about our current food landscape, the root cause may be as simple as this: our farms changed. They got larger, more efficient, and more specialized, which is to say that the number of farms reduced, and those remaining got really good at growing a smaller variety of commodity crops (like corn). To give some perspective, from 1910 to 2000, there was a reduction in the number of US farms from over 6 million, to 2 million. During this same time, the number of farm workers decreased from almost 14 million, to less than 4 million (chart link).

The reduction in the number of farms is only part of understanding what changed. To begin to fully grasp and appreciate the transformation, you need to understand just how large some of the remaining farms became, and the sales represented by them. According to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, 75% of all sales came from just 5% of farms and ranches (census link). With such a staggering marketshare, across so few producers, one can’t help but imagine the type of deep specialization that must be required… one that must be similar to a factory churning out widgets.

Enter Monoculture

Traditional polyculture systems started to give way to monoculture systems over the past century. Instead of growing a variety of crops in the same place and time (polyculture), many farmers moved over to a single crop (monoculture). Why? Technology allowed them to do so, and government incentivized them to do so through subsidies and legislation (The Farm Bill). In short, producing commodity crops like corn and soy is where the money is for farmers.

Okay, so there’s this huge shift from polyculture to monoculture, and as a result, we get loads of commodity crops like corn. Corporations then spin that corn into thousands of other products. Our food labels start to get really complex, and terms like High-Fructose Corn Syrup become mainstream.

There is another crucial piece to understand about polyculture though, which is that it includes a number of inherent benefits that a monoculture has to try and make up for. Simply put, polycultures reap the benefits of diversity, which help to control pests, weeds, disease, and maintain soil health. Sounds good, right? Monocultures, on the other hand, lack these sorts of inherent benefits and make up the difference with synthetic fertilizer (restoring nitrogen) and pesticides (controlling pests/weeds).

In a way, monoculture aims to sidestep a diverse and harmonious ecosystem through chemistry and toxins. It requires the Monsanto’s of the world (now owned by Bayer) to develop genetically modified crops that can handle being doused in pesticides like Roundup - a product that many would assume is safe. It’s not.

In 2014, a research paper was released from BioMed Research International (link), which detailed the effects of major pesticides on human tissue. According to the publications abstract, “Despite its relatively benign reputation, Roundup was among the most toxic herbicides and insecticides tested. Most importantly, 8 formulations out of 9 were up to one thousand times more toxic than their active principles.”

That last bit about formulations verses active principles is important. Regulators determine the acceptable daily intake (that which is deemed to be safe) based upon the active principle alone. Unfortunately for humans, what’s in products like Roundup and other pesticides is more than just the active principle… it’s a formulation that contains other adjuvants, which can make the product both more effective in it’s intended purpose, but potentially a thousand times more toxic for you.

If you’re wondering if that means it’s cancer causing, you should know that, as of 2020, Bayer AG (who bought the producer of Roundup in 2018) has an estimated 125,000 U.S. based cancer lawsuits in process (link). They set aside 10 billion dollars to handle the lawsuits.

A Move to Factory Farming

The transition from polyculture to monoculture isn’t just about crops though, it’s also about livestock. As farms became more specialized, cows, chickens, and hogs started to find themselves displaced from the idyllic farm that many of us envision in our heads. Instead, they find themselves in tight quarters on factory farms where they are simply grown as fast and as cheaply as possible.

The technical terms and qualifications for what is colloquially referred to as “factory farming” are defined by the EPA, and are broken into Animal Feeding Operations (AFO) and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO). Per the USDA, “AFOs congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland. ”

Sounds gross, huh? How about those special concentrated versions? An AFO becomes a CAFO if they confine 1000 + animal units for 45 + days, and/or discharge waste into streams or waterways.

So that’s where our meat comes from. And if you’re wondering how much comes from these conditions, and if that meat entered your mouth…

The 2017 Census of Agriculture (Table 12) revealed that .10 % of farms represented 19% of all cattle and calves inventory. Yes, that’s right, a tenth-of-a-percent of farms account for 19% of inventory. Add some of the other larger farms to this mix and you’ll find that 9.6% of farms represented 69% of all cattle and calves inventory. Sentience Institute conducted an analysis of the same census and concluded that around 99% of farmed animals live on factory farms.

Let’s not forget about the massive crop production from monoculture,  it contributes to the fast and cheap growth as feed. According to the USDA, “About a third of America’s corn crop is used for feeding cattle, hogs, and poultry in the U.S.”

If you like a good corn-fed steak, you’re in luck. But if you’re a cow, it’s not so great. Not only are they confined into small spaces, standing in manure and urine, potentially with a few dead-cows nearby, but they’re also being fed something (corn) that their bodies can’t digest. Common sense would tell anyone that these conditions make the animals sick, which it does. And so, much like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are used on our crops, livestock disease and sickness is combated with antibiotics and a race to grow them for slaughter before they die.

Again, this is where our meat comes from. The juxtaposition of a crimson well-marbled steak in the grocery store, and the conditions from which that piece of meat originates, is hard to square. But that’s kind of the point of all of this: we are so disconnected from our food.

A Magic Trick Revealed

We need food… there’s no getting around that. But while food has a habit of just magically appearing for us, it does so with some hidden costs: from nutrient depleted and eroding soil, to genetically modified crops, to pesticides that get in our food, air and water, to farmers that tirelessly work day and night to produce, but need government subsidies just to make a living, to the animals that are sick, grown in place, and pumped full of antibiotics, to “food” that is processed and chalked full of salt, sugar, and fat, to the destruction of our health, nature, and planet… the list goes on.

When you start to unpack the industrial food system, you begin to dispel the magic. If you like magic, but never get a little curious about how a trick works, then continue bearing witness to the masterful and destructive illusion of our food system. Continue to accept that the ingredient list in our packaged foods looks like a science experiment. Continue to assume that the meat you eat comes from animals that happily grazed and were treated with one ounce of compassion. Continue to accept that we’re surrounded by food choices that have given rise to sickness and health epidemics like obesity, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. And at the end of all of this, accept that the corporations delivering this food to you continue to become more rich, more powerful, and more controlling of our government. Accept that you, along with all life on earth, are collateral damage in an effort by the rich to have more, while the rest of us get less...less money, less health, less good days enjoying the one life we get.

If you accept all of this, that is one hell of a magic trick.