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What the financial collapse can teach us about the food system
May 29, 2009
Tom Philpott explores the relationship and implications between food and finance. 

      "Whereas Wall Street’s leverage was financial, the food industry’s is mostly ecological and social. (Financial leverage does play a role, as in the case of teetering, debt-gorged Pilgrim’s Pride, the globe’s largest chicken producer.) Companies like Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Tyson have built globe-spanning empires by taking vast amounts of cheap, monocropped corn and soy and turning it into everything from sweetener to meat to car fuel. Mega-processors like Kraft and fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s suck in these inputs and churn out cheap, ready-made meals.

     These giant entities behave as if soil is an easily renewable resource, that the climate can absorb endless amounts of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (a synthetic fertilizer byproduct), and that communities and the biosphere can endlessly bear the toxic footprint of industrial meat production."


 
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