Can healthy, local, organic food become accessible to everyone? Here's a good overview article about what some call the foundation of social justice: healthy food.
Quick summary:
Making delicious, nutritious, safe food available to all people inspires much of the passion of those laboring to reshape America's food system. We've met them in every region of the country. They are young people setting up diversified farms; chefs dedicated to local sourcing; ordinary citizens establishing farmers markets; mothers and fathers remaking public school lunch programs, and on and on. They come from all walks of life, all incomes and every ethnicity.
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Yet the [elitist] criticism resonates to an extent because sustainably produced foods are often more expensive.
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Commodity foods — from large-scale, industrialized agricultural production — seem cheap by comparison because they're produced without bearing their true costs, which are passed on in the form of pollution, virulent infectious diseases and animal suffering.
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But what about the criticism that sustainable farming can't feed the world?
The good news is that sustainable farming can feed the world. Productivity comparisons of organic crops versus conventional crops have been hotly contested for decades. But recent years have seen mounting studies showing that organic crop yields are catching up and even surpassing chemical-based agriculture.
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Nonetheless, there is no denying that foods from sustainable farms carry a higher price tag for the U.S. consumer. Most of us can actually afford it. Americans spend about 9% of their incomes on food, according to the Agriculture Department, one of the smallest percentages in the world.
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The real challenge now is making good food available to people at every income level.
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