Food , Glorious Food

Over the last century about 75% of the world's crop varieties have been lost, data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization suggests.


UN researchers say that we now rely on just three crops: wheat, rice and maize. The fact that poorer nations are almost twice as dependent on these cereals as richer nations has led to the question: are we now too reliant on too few crops?



"First of all, I think the environment is going to be more unpredictable," Sayed Azam-Ali, professor of tropical agronomy at the University of Nottingham, UK, tells the Television Trust for the Environment's Earth Report programme. "So we need crops that are going to be safe," he said. "We can't rely on importing and moving crops around the world indefinitely. I think we have to be more reliant on locally sourced food."



The demand for relatively few crops has left experts worried that traditional knowledge of how to harvest millet will die out; something they have called "cultural erosion". Researchers believe the high nutritional value and its resilience means millet offers a more secure future for farmers, rather than growing cash crops and buying cheap rice to eat.



Mixing minor crops, such as millet, into the major farming system could be the future for food, locally and globally.

Food , not so glorious Food

From the radical news service Democracy Now , Michael Pollan , professor of science and environmental journalism at UC Berkeley, argues that what most Americans are consuming today is not food but “edible food-like substances.”

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it’s a literary scientific experience now going shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten more complex. It’s—for the food industry—see, to understand the economics of the food industry, you can’t really make money selling things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for seventy-nine cents. There’s no money in that, because it doesn’t have any brand identification. It’s a commodity, and the prices of commodity are constantly falling over time.

So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you take those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can charge four bucks for that seventy-nine cents—and actually even less than that, a few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios become a commodity. You know, everyone’s ripping off your little circles. And so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like cereal bars. And now there’s cereal straws, you know, that your kids are supposed to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. It’s made out of the cereal material. It’s extruded.

So, you see, every level of further complication gives you some intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as you make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to make it last, to make it taste good, to make—and because, you know, food really isn’t designed to last a year on the shelf in a supermarket. And so, it takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen...