How to feed the world - Louise Fresco talks

Louise Fresco: How to feed the whole world (the case for white bread)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/louise_fresco_on_feeding_the_whole_world.html
In a world of food shortages and escalating food prices, as well as Western consumers’ preoccupation with eating only organic, wholesome food, it unusual to hear anyone advocating the use of mechanized farming techniques as a way out of the present impasse.

Louise Fresco, a powerful thinker and globe-trotting advisor on sustainability argues that a smart approach to large-scale, industrial farming and food production will feed our planet's incoming population of nine billion. Only foods like (the scorned) supermarket white bread, she says, will nourish on a global scale. She advises us to think of food as a topic of social and economic importance on a par with oil, and fresh water.

The world, she says, with its burgeoning population, cannot be fed by small scale farming, enchanting as that thought might appear to us. The fact is that our notions of ‘good agriculture’ stem from our romantic ideas of pre-industrial societies when most of the people worked on the land.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the food that has nourished us has been grown and produced by fewer and fewer people until now, in 2009, less than 5% of the world’s population grow all the food we eat.

Asked to choose between a whole-wheat loaf and a factory produced white loaf of bread, Fresco’s audience chose the former, predictably. However, she admonished those who did that, by stating that it is the white loaf that will feed the world, rather than the twee items we pay more for in ‘organic produce’ shops; the lifestyle we enjoy is made possible, not by small scale farming, but by large acreages given over to single crops. Furthermore, she adds, the poor of the world will be further impoverished if we divert our resources to these ostensibly more desirable methods of food production.

Since we are in the global economy, whether we like it or not, consumers behaving in one way in one country will have dire consequences for those living in poorer ones.

Thinking about what we eat is not just a concern for our own health, but the health of billions.
Robert l. Fielding