More Is Never Enough sold comes from a small proportion of farms that specialize in one or two
enterprises such as raising hogs or growing wheat.
So how do fire, language, and memory figure into our modern food
system? We use mastery of fire in everything from the production of
fertilizers and pesticides, to internal-combustion engines in tractors and
harvesters, to trucks and refrigerated trailers destined for retail outlets.
Language facilitates the development of new technologies and higher
yields. But collective memory, accumulated over generations to remind
us that survival and the environment are inextricably bound, has become
antiquated.
Taking the place of memory was money. For a nation of non-farmers,
the rows of vegetables, orchards of fruit, and fields of wheat, once
understood as beholden to environmental pressures, were replaced
by supermarket aisles of harvested and processed food. Food avail-
ability was no longer linked to weather and climate, the absence of pests,
or the presence of other species. If one wanted more food, the solution
was bringing more money. Our new connection to food could not have
been more straightforward—nor further removed from the realities
of nature.
While equating money with access to food is most evident in the
United States, similar outlooks have taken root in other countries.
Working overseas, I often wondered how and why countries priori-
tized agriculture and food differently, especially neighboring countries
where climate, resources, and cultures were similar. Take, for example,
Venezuela and Colombia.
The last time I was in Venezuela, agriculture accounted for around
percent of total goods and services produced each year, nearly four
times less at the time than Colombia. Its cultivable land supported one-
third the number of people. Its population was 0 percent smaller.
Along with my two daughters, I traveled from the country’s petro-
leum capital, Maracaibo, to the mountainous city of San Cristóbal.
Along the route, evidence of oil was everywhere. Pipelines ran adjacent
to roads, then darted off in different directions like enormous strands of
spaghetti. Signs of unintended seepage along the ground were common.
Gasoline was half the price of bottled water. Oil was so cheap that rather