Since the 1870s, as the industrial food system became ever more “efficient” it lowered the price of basic agricultural commodities. Consequently most country folk rejected their self-sufficient-farm birth right for a better-paying job in town, abandoned their technologically primitive free-and-clear homestead in favour of a city apartment (with electric power and running water) and soon became wage-enslaved. The ones who remained on the farm borrowed to invest in capital-intensive production methods and so became debt slaves.
Industrial agriculture has devastated self-sufficient, independent lifestyles. Take the U.S. as an example. In 1870, something like 90% of all Americans lived on free-and-clear farms or in tiny villages and as a consequence, enjoyed enormously greater personal liberty than today. The current decline in personal rights in America, Canada and in Australia is NOT the result of there being more people dividing up a fixed and limited amount of total possible liberty into smaller and smaller slices. It is a consequence of financial insecurity, financial dependency and wage slavery. Persons lacking financial independence rarely possess the strength to forthrightly demand social liberties.
This is actually what has happened: The global industrial system’s imperative is balance-sheet efficiency in all areas, including farming, but the apparent cheapness of economically-rational agriculture does not reflect a true accounting of costs. Despite the statistical increase in average lifespan, our average health and feelings of wellness have been declining. Consider as an example the large proportion of your neighbours whose mental awareness seems wrapped in fat. Americans especially are disdained worldwide for being hugely obese and Australians and Canadians are going the same way, spending ever-larger portions of their productivity on the treatment and cure of disease. This whole activity of “health” care is not a productive use of human attention, but in reality constitutes enormous waste, pain, and suffering, suffering whose main source, poor nutrition, is almost entirely unappreciated.
Here’s an example of the result of foundation- and industry-influenced “science.” Despite all the apparent advances in broad acre industrial agriculture, the nutritional qualities of our basic foodstuffs have been declining over the last 100 years. That’s largely because most agronomists focus on bulk yield and profitability of the crop, whilst knowing next to nothing about animal/human nutrition. However, there’s a little-appreciated “law” about this area: nutritional value usually drops in direct relationship to the increase in bulk production. Or, in agriculture at any rate, “quality” seems the opposite of “quantity.”
There is a noted doctor, Dr. Isabelle Moser, who spent 25 years conducting a clinical practice using holistic approaches and suggested in private conversations that the “constitution” of her older patients was typically much stronger than the constitution of her younger ones. Each generation got a poorer start than the one before it as each generation built the foundation of their health from foods produced on ever-more degraded soils grown ever-more “scientifically,” and more and more consisting of processed, denatured fodder.
With the internet, people can now access books and articles and videos of people who are now questioning this decline and are becoming far more aware that grandma’s ways were better for all of us and that maybe we have all been hoodwinked for decades by ‘big Pharma’ and the desire to make money for their shareholders. It is time to restore the integrity of the food industry by putting nutritional quality first and taking control back in the kitchen by cooking from scratch.
