In a little over a month, we will mark the 52nd anniversary of an event that forever changed our nation's health systems. On June 12, 1957, Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney declared it the official position of the US Public Health Service that "evidence pointed to a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer."
His statement constituted the first official government warning of the health consequences of smoking. It was followed seven years later by another landmark report by Surgeon General Luther L. Terry entitled, "Smoking and Health" which linked smoking to emphysema, coronary heart disease, chronic bronchitis as well as lung cancer.
"Smoking and Health" was released on a Saturday morning (January 11, 1964) to minimize its effect on the stock and to maximize coverage in the Sunday papers. With its release, the campaign to end smoking became a war that lasted over 30 years. During its duration, tobacco killed more people than all of America's wars combined (over 10 million by conservative estimates). Indeed, the war against tobacco related illness and death isn't over; it continues today.
I write about the fight against the health impacts of smoking because we are entering a similar struggle today - a war that dwarfs the anti-smoking battles of the past.
The evidence is mounting that conclusively demonstrates that conventional, petroleum based, water intensive, monoculture agriculture is at the heart of a massive public health crisis that threatens to bankrupt our nation, undermine our economic competitiveness, impoverish our rural communities, while continuing to shorten the lives of millions of Americans and reducing the quality of life for millions more.
This conventional, petroleum based, water intensive agriculture - often called "production agriculture" by its proponents - is more dangerous than smoking to our collective future.
For purposes of this essay, I will call it "industrial food production" to reflect the industrial production thinking that characterizes its growing and processing and marketing practices.
The impact of industrial food production on obesity, diabetes, and coronary disease has already been established.
Industrial food production's connections to asthma, arthritis, allergies, autism are emerging rapidly as science begins to look more deeply at what is in and on our food. And what isn't.
Beyond human health lies ecological health on which true human health is based.
Here industrial food production has stripped away 1/3 of our nation's top soil, destroyed (and continues to destroy) tens of millions of acres of healthy living soil and its critical biological diversity, introduced synthetic chemicals into the environment which individually and collectively reduce both ecological and human health, pursues monoculture practices with GMO technologies without any idea of its long term impact on ecological and human health, made our food supply dependent on foreign energy, and relies on antibiotics (70% of all antibiotic use) to allow for the industrial production of genetically similar (or identical) animals.
To do this, industrial food production demands (according to US House of Representatives Agriculture Committee Chair, Rep. Collin Peterson) continued public subsidies of tens of billions of dollars. Basically, Representative Peterson has repeated the cry of the big bankers in the current economic crisis - "Subsidize us or suffer the consequences". (A sort of "do as I say or starve" position)
And all these agricultural subsidy numbers ignore the contribution industrial food makes to the $1.5 trillion the US spends on chronic disease annually, and the secondary costs agricultural runoff and pollution impose on society as a whole (global warming included).
I propose we think about industrial food production like we think about smoking.
We should begin a campaign to end its practice and use for all the reasons listed above and more.
Like many of the current and past anti-smoking efforts, this campaign, in my opinion, should include...
- a multi-dimensional public education campaign about both the dangers of industrial food and the benefits of local food grown using practices that maximize soil health, conserve water, sequester the most carbon, and respect nature's processes and diversity,
- education, transition payments, and technical support for farmers currently addicted to industrial food growing practices, (this was done for tobacco farmers in many places).)
- linking healthcare expense savings realized through better nutrition to funds dedicated to ensure that all citizens have access to healthy, humane, homegrown food. In other words, we should treat food grown in healthy living soil as a kind of preventive medicine that should be paid for in health care budgets.
The first step in all this is to reconceptualize industrial food as a danger equivalent to smoking. The right to eat Twinkies is not included in the Bill of Rights.
We must begin to discredit the monopoly corporate agribusiness and giant farm interests that now control current farm and food policies that threaten us so fundamentally.
The local food revolution in cities and towns and in the countryside offers us diverse, sustainable models for the positive way forward. This is the "Blessed Unrest" Paul Hawkins writes about.
But we are running out of time. We need to take public policy action as well to both promote the local food revolution AND to educate the public about the dangers of industrial food.
I have a 50 page report about this, funded by the Wallace Global Fund, on these public policy actions entitled, Public Policy for Feeding the Roots available in PDF format that I will send to anyone who requests it by email.
The struggle before us will be difficult. It will involve speaking truth to immense political and economic power - something that few non-profit institutions find comfortable. But we have little choice.
As Fred Kirschenmann reminds us, "The industrial food system demands on three elements to operate. Cheap petroleum. Surplus water. Stable climate. All three are becoming increasingly unreliable and scarce."
We need to begin this fight now.
Let me know if you want a copy of the report.
