It is quite graphic at times, but it is hugely important to gain awareness of where our food comes from…

One of the biggest impressions I was left with was the massive centralisation of power and control in the food industry and the ineffectiveness of the bodies charged with regulating it. It seems that this process is systematic in many of the industries (banking comes to mind!) in the US in particular but also elsewhere in the world.

A wake up for those still in denial:

The vast majority of the world around us runs on or is derived from Oil.

Think it’s time for something new?

I was thinking about the post I put up growth, and the effects of Peak Oil and overpopulation on food production and distribution, and came across this:

How far does an average piece of food travel before it goes in your mouth?

Apparently between 1,500 and 2,500 miles (2,500 and 4,000 kilometers) from farm to table. A new study by the Worldwatch Institute details the lengthy journeys that much of the nation’s food supply now takes, finding a growing separation between the sources and destinations of American food.

The distance that food travels has grown by as much as 25 percent, according to the report by the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental and social policy research institute based in Washington DC. The nation’s reliance on a complex network of food shipments leaves the United States vulnerable to supply disruptions, the group argues.

“The farther we ship food, the more vulnerable our food system becomes,” said Worldwatch research associate Brian Halweil, author of “Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market.”

“Many major cities in the U.S. have a limited supply of food on hand,” Halweil added. “That makes those cities highly vulnerable to anything that suddenly restricts transportation, such as oil shortages
or acts of terrorism.”

This vulnerability is not limited to the United States. The tonnage of food shipped between countries has grown fourfold over the last four decades, while the world’s population has doubled. In the United
Kingdom, for example, food travels 50 percent farther than it did two decades ago.

This reliance on long distance food damages rural economies, as farmers and small food businesses become the most marginal link in the sprawling food chain, says the Worldwatch report. Long distance
travel also creates numerous opportunities along the way for food contamination, and requires the use of artificial additives and preservatives to keep food from spoiling.

Food transportation also contributes to global warming, because of the huge quantities of fuel used for transportation. A typical meal bought from a conventional supermarket chain – including some
meat, grains, fruit and vegetables – consumes four to 17 times more petroleum for transport than the same meal using local ingredients.

“We are spending far more energy to get food to the table than the energy we get from eating the food. A head of lettuce grown in the Salinas Valley of California and shipped nearly 3,000 miles to
Washington, D.C., requires about 36 times as much fossil fuel energy in transport as it provides in food energy when it arrives,” Halweil said.

While most economists believe that long distance food trade is efficient because communities and nations can buy their food from the lowest cost provider, studies from North America, Asia, and Africa
show that farm communities reap little benefit from their crops, and often suffer as a result of freer trade in agricultural goods.

“The economic benefits of food trade are a myth,” said Halweil. “The big winners are agribusiness monopolies that ship, trade, and process food. Agricultural policies, including the new [Bush administration backed] farm bill, tend to favor factory farms, giant supermarkets, and long distance trade, and cheap, subsidized fossil fuels encourage long distance shipping. The big losers are the world’s poor.”

The media hologram shows countries in recession or achieving positive growth, depending on how the data has been massaged. Consumer confidence is often closely related to the particular position of any given state. As a result all governments claim their economies will return to positive growth in the “near” future. None would dare state that in fact the economies of the world have over extended themselves and the debt fueled growth of past decades will never been seen again, despite the likelihood of this as a stark reality of our future due to debt, Peak Oil and over population.”

This September/October is setting up to be a very interesting period for the worlds economy.

Meanwhile, we should take faith from the fact that in the real world growth of some kind or other can always exist, even in the most improbable places…

Economic growth can either be positive or negative. Negative growth can also be referred to by saying that the economy is shrinking. Negative growth is associated with economic recession and economic depression.

Five major critical arguments raised against economic growth include:

1. Growth has negative effects on the quality of life such as crime, prisons, or pollution.
2. Many aspects of economic growth that affect the quality of life, such as the environment are not traded or accounted in the market.
3. Growth encourages the creation of artificial needs: Industry cause consumers to develop new tastes, and preferences for growth to occur. Consequently, “wants are created, and consumers have become the servants, instead of the masters, of the economy.”
4. Resources: The 2007 United Nations GEO-4 report warns that we are living far beyond our means. The human population is now larger and that the amount of resources it consumes takes up a lot of those resources available. Humanity’s environmental demand is purported to be 21.9 hectares per person while the Earth’s biological capacity is purported to be 15.7 ha/person.
5. Distribution of income: The gap between the poorest and richest countries in the world has been growing. Although mean and median wealth has increased globally, it adds to the inequality of wealth.

Some critics argue that a narrow view of economic growth, combined with globalization, is creating a scenario where we could see a systemic collapse of our planet’s natural resources^. Other critics draw on archaeology to cite examples of cultures they claim have disappeared because they grew beyond the ability of their ecosystems to support them. Concerns about possible negative effects of growth on the environment and society led some to advocate lower levels of growth, from which comes the ideas of uneconomic growth and de-growth, and Green parties which argue that economies are part of a global society and a global ecology and cannot outstrip their natural growth without damaging them.

Growth refers to an increase in some quantity over time. The quantity can be physical (e.g., growth in height, growth in an amount of money) or abstract (e.g., a system becoming more complex, an organism becoming more mature). It can also refer to the mode of growth, i.e. numeric models for describing how much a particular quantity grows over time.

Economic growth is an increase in activity in an economy. It is often measured as the rate of change of gross domestic product (GDP). Economic growth refers only to the quantity of goods and services produced; it says nothing about the way in which they are produced. Economic development, a related term, refers to change in the way goods and services are produced; positive economic development involves the introduction of more efficient or “productive” technologies or forms of social organisation.

Since starting this blog I have consciously tried to avoid posting anything to do with the political/economic quagmire that the world seems to be in. There are enough people with far bigger brains than mine who are writing about these issues, and there is enough freely available information out there that I felt I would muddy, and not add to, the message.

However, after listening to some people recently, it’s clear that many, many people are simply not aware (or do not care) that many aspects of this world are just unsustainable, or what a pitiful world we are leaving to our kids. Perhaps we really do need to start trying every day to make everyone around us more aware.

For example, it is painfully clear that Civilization cannot go on gobbling up all the worlds natural resources without any ramifications.

It also seems obvious that the world (U.S in particular) cannot continue to maintain such ridiculous debt levels without repercussions.

Meanwhile, the gap between the Elite (supported by an illegitimate president) and the rest of the world grows bigger daily.

Are we ready for forced vaccination (of a vaccine that has not been sufficiently tested) against a disease that was deliberately spread?

What would you do if all banks closed down for an emergency bank holiday, and the supermarkets shelves ran dry? Is this what it will take before people actually sit up and take notice? Perhaps we should prepare for this possibility?

Things are coming to a head, of that I have no doubt, despite Big Medias continued efforts to brainwash us. Before the end of this year there will be rapid economic and health related developments, and they wont be pretty.

What should we all do about it? Many solutions have and will be presented. Most are as useful as digging a big hole in the ground and sticking your head in it…

My angry question is why is man so destructive? But the more relevant question right now is how bad will things be allowed to become before a new “solution” is rammed down our throats by the NWO advocates?

Images: www.deesillustration.com