On average, rural supermarkets are 4% more expensive than suburban supermarkets. You might expect that our massive transportation system would allow for decentralization of our nation's food production; prices would increase as you move away from the farm. Instead, our system is marked by massive centralization. Big farms, big processing plants, and big supermarkets. Food travels great distances from farm to supermarket, with a number of bottlenecks in the system as they pass through centralized processing plants. Two plants in the United States process 75% of all precut salads; one of them processes 26 million servings of salad each week. Michael Pollan highlights several of the problems caused by food centralization. Much more below.
Bill McKibben, who's run the Step It Up! efforts to draw attention to the climate crisis has urged people to support carbon emission reductions of 80% by 2050. That people are paying attention, that Congress is starting to pay attention and take early steps, is encouraging. Before an Inconvenient Truth came out and a great many committed activist organizations laid the groundwork for awareness, not even that much would be possible.
But it isn't enough. For one thing, it's not quite enough to get the job done. For another, I'm concerned that it won't even sustain people's interest long enough to mobilize for better legislation and industrial solutions once they see that 'something' has been passed.
2050 is a long ways away. In terms of my own timescale, I'll be 75 then. I'll be shaking my cane at the young whippersnappers who won't get off my lawn. (Not that I'd have a lawn. Very ecologically unsound. Can I suggest a nice, friendly, native plant landscaping, instead?) The teens and 20 year olds involved in these campaigns will be around retirement age, and when you're their age, 40 years old seems incomprehensibly distant. The people who are passing these laws today will be long dead by 2050. (Unless we have incredible leaps in cryonic storage, which is exactly the sort of wild and crazy thing that comes to mind as being possible over long time periods.)
Considering the amount of technological change that's happened just in my lifetime, I think encouraging people to deal with it on a scale like that creates a favorable climate for those who say we should do nothing, because surely we'll figure it out by then.
So, if you didn't know, I sold my car before moving to DC. The last time I drove was to the U-Haul place to drop off the truck. Parking is a nightmare here and it's expensive, too. I figured, hey, my new place is three blocks from a Metro station and most of the places I need to go are right on the Metro, it'll be great. That's mostly the case. Mostly.
Here's where it falls down: groceries. The full implications of that part sort of slipped my mind, it's been years and years since I needed groceries and had no car. And I was way less picky about what I ate then; lots of fast food, lots of Top Ramen. It must be granted that there is a sizable grocery store only two blocks from here, and it was a selling point, so it isn't like I didn't take this into consideration at all. But it isn't a co-op, or a Whole Foods, and their selection of organic foods on top of all my allergies leaves me with slim pickings. For fruit, sometimes there are non-skeezy grapes or maybe strawberries, never very good.
Not that I'm complaining, no, really, just musing. Sometimes I do that here. It's either that, or they'd have to search me for pens before letting me use the bathroom at the local sushi bar. And I don't approve of vandalism at all, at all.
There have been efforts in the past to teach "life skills" to students in the public schools, and of course among those skills is the lesson of financial responsibility.
I can imagine that these classes, especially for a student forced to take them first thing in the morning, can be like a daily session of discussing Hawley/Smoot in Ben Stein's high school economics class. So, so dull that they make you nod your head in....zzzzzzz...
For some school districts, however, a more direct method of financial education has been employed-a method that will be our outrage of the week.
Note to would-be Farm Bill reformers everywhere: There are no U.S. Congresscritters whose constituencies include West African cotton farmers. There are no U.S. Congresscritters whose constituencies include clothing manufacturers (actually, you could almost put a period right there, they've mostly gone to China by now), garment distributors, or clothing retailers who've got even a passing desire for the price of cotton to go up. There are no U.S. Congresscritters whose constituencies could be characterized as having a broad, favorable public consensus towards furthering the goals of the World Trade Organization. This doesn't mean you can't argue against subsidies, it just means that the foregoing are always going to be weak arguments when your audience is the U.S. Congress.
Take the debate about international food aid and the Farm Bill, for example.
