Everything we hope to achieve, have and enjoy would be shaken from our grasp, without the miracle of seeds unfolding into food, far from where we live. Are you on the road to success? Take food with you.
Whether we eat from silver plates or tin cups, three times daily or three times weekly, we will eat or die.
Fortunately, enough food is brought to Los Angeles to fill City Hall every night. While we sleep nearly one thousand trucks deliver 40 millino pounds to
dozens of wholesale and supermarket warehouses. Fruits and vegetables reach us from California's Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys, from south coat counties, Florida,
Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Mexico and Central and South America. Milk and eggs from San Bernardino County refrigerate here with slaughtered western steer. Fish
from the coasts of California and South America flop ashore at San Pedro.
The system never rests, delivering the greatest variety of eats for the least paycheck, any place on earth. From high above, our machines and trucks and toilers would look like blood cells racing through an athlete. We are fed so well we can live preoccupied with careers, romance, God, homes, sex, families and thrills.
As the cartoon shows, metals and fuels forge tools which raise food. The food we buy has survived bugs, birds, weeds, diseases, erosion, drought, flood, poison, harvest, storage, trimming, crushing, mixing, cooking, packaging, spoilage, more storage, and transport to wholesalers and then markets, to be swallowed by us.
But there are problems in heaven. Los Angeles has become an army camped far from its sources of supply, using distant natural resources faster than these renew. Although Los Angeles was once the greatest garden in the world, producing more food between 1910 and 190 than any county in the United States, we now import most food from hundreds and thousands of miles away. Gigantic local orchards, farmlands and grasslands were paved for the region's latest crop: people.
Every day two hundred additional Angelenos arrive, each wanting as much food as you, yet each day eight square miles of agricultural land is destroyed for suburbs, shopping centers and stripmines. Costlier fertilizers and deadlier pesticides are needed to pump more food from overworked dirt. Twenty-six square miles of topsoil fly or float away daily. At the same time, America sells grains abroad, trying to feed nations which have preceded us toward agricultal ruin. More hunger is served by less land every day.
Relax, though, don't eat faster. We are not riding a spoon to the mouth of doom. You're doing your part to help the world by one or more of these changes: You're eating less meat, so that grains are fed to humans, and animals do not suffer. You're shopping for California labels, rather than eating food hauled cross-country. You're growingsome of your own food. You recycle kitchen scraps into your garden. you're buying bulk when you can, looking for food value rather than packaging. You ask your grocer to stock organic fruits and vegetables. You support small farms by spending at farmer's markets. You plant fruit trees rather than ornamentals. You control retail sales by joining or starting a buying club or co-op. You're having a good time without wasting metals, plastic, oil, paper and electricity. You have one or fewer children, and adopt the rest.
Even large factory farms are beginning to learn the benefits of non-toxic pest control, drip irrigation, green manure, mulching, intercropping, rotation and genetic diversity.
Cities are starting to plant edible parks, to link buidling codes and development options to urban agriculture, to fund food preservation centers, turn clean sludge into fertilizer, establish agricultural zones, and give tax breaks to greenhouses.
There are many organizations working to grow healthy food systems. Among those in Los Angeles, Eco-Home Network provides information and encouragement for all who want to heal the earth.