copyfire.com Blog

The 1/6/09 Examiner features a short blog post by Ronald Holden, the famed food writer and blogger, and founder of Cornichon.org. Holden begins the article by writing about the recent Wall Street Journal article on the best and worst jobs in the United States, and wonders why food critic isn’t one of them. I have to agree with him there. If I wasn’t a quasi-vegetarian, and therefore willing to eat a much wider range of foods, that would definitely be a the top of my list of dream jobs (as an aside, though, if anyone out there IS willing to hire a veggie food writer, please shoot me an email — I am all over it).

Towards the end of his blog, Holden mentions an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times by Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, and I thought it important to give that op-ed as much publicity as possible. Berry writes about the need for something he’s calling a 50-year farm bill, explaining essentially that with all the rush to “green” this and “eco” that, somehow it’s become lost in the mix that our greatest natural resource, soil, is in great danger of going the way of the dinosaur, due to the great amount of abuse it’s subject to on a regular basis. He goes on to remind us that soil is non-renewable, and there is no amount of money in the form of government subsudies to agri-business giants or otherwise that will allow more food to be grown or raised, because once the soil is dead, it’s dead. His suggestion to make sure that doesn’t happen is a farming practice called perennialization, a form of crop rotation, and a 50-year farm bill “that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.”

In other words, ya’ll, if we want to keep eating, we better start paying more attention to where our food comes from, who’s making it, and exactly how it’s made or grown. It could be as simple as eating more certified organic produce, or buying more locally, but regardless, we’re all going to have to do our part. I’d hate to have to live on those weird freeze-dried astronaut meals when I’m in my golden years, and I think you would, too.