Food for Thought

Even though coffee is an important additive for many students, you will usually consume more than coffee in the cafeteria. In fact, you’ll have lots of choices because Americans believe in the ideology of choice. But you won’t generally have a choice about American agriculture, which is both incredibly productive and an ecological calamity.

The Economist, a conservative English magazine that advocates market-based solutions to most problems, contends that “If modern agriculture were invented today, it probably wouldn’t be allowed. It pollutes the environment with pesticides, fertilizers and nutrients from feed and animal waste. Farming damages wild habitats and domesticated animals are stocked at high densities and pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics, with the result that they are often unhealthily fatty compared with their wild relatives.” And it sucks up energy like it was going out of style—which, of course, it is. Americans use about ten times more fossil-fuel energy producing food (including farming, food processing, packaging, transportation, storage, etc.) than the energy content of the food itself. So Americans enjoy what New York Times writer Michael Pollan calls the “transcontinental strawberry” 5 calories of food energy that requires 435 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get to the cafeteria. This means, of course, that we consume oil with every bite we eat. The college food service, like the American food system, depends on fossil fuels to bring food from fields to our tables.