Reading Journal

Our Decrepit Food Factories

by Michael Polan

"To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown." Michael Polan
This paragraph was a very good segue into the authors article.  He is writing about what he thinks is causing the breakdown of sustainability in our food system.

 He points out that the use of antibiotics make strains of bacteria stronger causing a new strain to evolve.  He also points out that we are eating meat that is being fed these antibiotics, the same antibiotics that we need when we get sick.  It isn't a stretch to see he is leading you down the path of eating this meat is doing you harm in some way or an other. 

He goes on to write about a collapse in the bee population, and how the bees aren't being allowed to keep to their natural cycle.  Bees are being shipped from all over the world to work for three weeks in the almond orchard of California.

At first I felt like the article was going all over the place, but he brought it all together.  It felt choppy to me, first he was talking about sustainability, then about antibiotics and the meat we eat, then he went on about the bees.  However, with the next paragraph it all came together.


"We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”" Another great eye opening paragraph from his article.  He makes it very clear that we are over using our resources, and heading for a breakdown in our system.