incoln Journal Star: Local View: Food security a looming concern
Howdy,
NeFU Member Tim Rinne has penned an excellent op ed in today’s Lincoln Journal Star pasted below. It connects the dots between our food production system, national security, and climate change. Well done Tim!
As far as George Will goes, his “Let’s stay Restless, America” column given his take on our nation’s food needs, his column more accurately should have been titled: “Let’s stay clueless and helpless, America.”
Tim’s column is particularly true given that the USA, the world’s largest food producing nation no longer has COOL-Country of Origin Labelling in place, so our food consumers no longer have the right to know which country the food they consume even came from. Thanks to the WTO’s dysfunctional dispute resolution by design system, the power of the meat cartel, and Congress, our food producers can no longer identify and differentiate their own food products in their own domestic market, and our food consumers can no longer have the information they need to make an informed decision.
All the best,
John K. Hansen, President
Nebraska Farmers Union
1305 Plum Street, Lincoln, NE 68502
402-476-8815 Office 402-476-8859 Fax
402-476-8608 Home 402-580-8815 Cell
john
Lincoln Journal Star
Monday, July 3, 2017
Local View: Food security a looming concern
- TIM RINNE
From his desk inside the Beltway, Washington Post columnist George Will thinks it’s just great that Amazon and Walmart are now going to be our preeminent food suppliers (“Let’s stay restless, America," June 22).
Retracing the history of America’s food distribution system — from the first supermarket to A&P’s bankruptcy and Kroger’s plunging stock value — Will reports that “Consumers are buying more of their groceries outside of the traditional supermarkets. Online merchants, discounters and meal-kit delivery services are all grabbing market share.”
Free market and limited government proponent that he is, Will celebrates this new consumer buying trend, noting that “the biggest and best-run organizations” (read: Amazon and Walmart) are uniquely poised to take advantage of this new capitalist opportunity “to the detriment of upstarts and second-fiddle players.”
In Will’s world, the days of independent producers and grocers are past. More than ever before, we will eat from the corporate hand of Big Food, and we will like it.
Not once, though, in this blueprint for our eating habits does Will mention the words "food security" — generally defined as the safety, nutrition and reliability of our food supply.
Where all this food Amazon and Walmart are supposed to be dishing out and delivering right to our door will be coming from is not explained. And I’m guessing that’s because he doesn’t know.
None of us, in fact, have the first clue where the food we take off the shelf, pick up from the drive-thru, dispense out the vending machine or order from the menu comes from.
And, with the average bite of food we put in our mouths traveling more than 2,000 miles to get there (one out of five bites imported from outside the U.S.), how could we possibly know? We have no idea who grew what we’re eating, how it was grown or even how healthy it is. Like Will, we just throw it down and blindly trust that it will keep coming.
But food security is not a minor consideration. We have to eat. And the farther away we are from our food supply, the more food insecure we are.
As city residents, we’re pretty concerned about the response time of our police and fire services. We justifiably want to know that, in the event of an emergency, these public safety departments are just minutes away. But how often do we actually call on them? Hardly ever.
And yet in the case of our food supply — when we’re eating and drinking from the moment we get up to when we turn off the light at night — we don’t give a moment’s thought to how removed in space and time we are from our food and how tenuous that long supply line is.
Over his long journalistic career, George Will has made no secret of the fact that he’s a climate skeptic. He’s written extensively of his scorn for the consensus climate science that we need to drastically reduce carbon emissions.
But just as I trust my medical doctor to treat my asthma, my computer geek, the technician who services my Prius, the CPA who does my taxes and our firefighters and police officers because they’re the experts, I trust the climate scientists because they too — unlike George Will — are experts.
Climate science says that global warming is going to have a devastating impact on the world’s food supply. Hotter temperatures, sea-level rise, more extreme droughts, wildfires, floods and disease will all make it harder to grow food and to get it to our plates.
Nor are the climate scientists alone. The Department of Defense and Republican political and business leaders like George Shultz (Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State) and Henry Paulson (George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary) all agree with them — as does the world’s largest food company, Nestle: They’re all warning of coming food shortages within the next 10 years.
If we expect to continue eat with regularity, we would be wise to start thinking about shortening our food supply chain and ramping up local food production — and less about concentrating our food security in the hands of Amazon and Walmart.
We may exist in a global food system, but eating is a local act.
Tim Rinne is the state coordinator of Nebraskans for Peace. He is a co-founder of the Hawley Hamlet, a neighborhood garden in the block bounded by 25th, 26th, T and U streets in Lincoln.