To Lead or Be Led? 4 strawberries, raisins, sweet peppers, tomatoes, and winter squashes.
To lead is to recognize how foods like apple juice, avocados, bananas,
beans, broccoli, cabbages, cantaloupes, carrots, cauliflower, celery, corn,
eggplants, grapefruits, lentils, lettuce, onions, oranges, orange juice,
peas, prunes, summer squashes, sweet potatoes, tomato sauces, and
zucchini are being produced with far fewer residues—and sometimes
none at all.
For more than two million years, the human race was driven to conquer
and replace food scarcity with ready food availability. Perhaps more so
than any other country, America first showed how it was possible. By
880 , scarcity of food was behind us: a new society of consumers had
supplanted a nation of farmers. Sadly, since then, Americans have also
shown our inability to live with abundance. From having turned scarcity
into abundance, we converted abundance into glut, glut into waste and
now waste into gutting the forces that made abundance possible. The
path we are on is coming full circle, one individual decision at a time.
We have had our way with food long enough to build up resis-
tance to any messages suggesting that individual actions still lead to
collective outcomes. It has become summarily easy to fault the modern
food system for all that is happening. It is not so much what the mod-
ern food system is doing to our health, natural resources, nature, and
the environment, but what we are doing with the modern food system.
More than anything else, this is the message I have wanted to convey
with the examples of my own foibles and experiences, as well as those
of others.
From experience comes reflection and occasional nuggets of insight.
The most important for me is how food has been our greatest teacher.
Through food we learned how well-being and finite resources were
intertwined. How more nutrition advanced intellectual capacity and
our ability to tame physical scarcity. How our survival relies on millions
of other species we never see, not just the few we put into our mouths.
Through food we could learn how harmony with the environment is far
more important than our attempts to control it.
Because of food we learned how to cooperate with each other and
live in communities. We learned social norms and basic expectations