“Our industrial food system is rotten to the core. Heirloom arugula won’t save us. Here’s what will.” – Paul Roberts

Some excerpts I’ve saved from the excellent article, Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008. After all, why give Delicious.com all the juice?

• For all the benefits of a local diet, eating locally doesn’t always translate into more sustainability.
• Going meat – and dairyless – one day a week is more environmentally beneficial than eating locally every single day.
• A truly sustainable food system is inherently resilient – more capable of self-correction and self-revitalization than its industrial rival.
• A reintegrated model can require almost twice the labor hours of a conventional agribusiness one.
• If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use – assuming dietary habits remain constant – the extra land we’d need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland. Such an expansion would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming.
• If sustainability means food security for everyone, and not just for affluent nations, trading food over long distances is here to stay (think Africa).

• Proponents of ‘vertical farming‘ claim that a single city block could feed 50,000 people.
• A single Wal-Mart supercenter sits under more than four acres of rooftop – enough, according to Agoada, to produce 5.7 tons of wheat a year.
• Today, the fraction of the federal research budget spent on anything remotely resembling alternative agriculture is less than 1 percent—and most of that is sucked up by the organic sector.
• One reason farmers prefer labor-saving monoculture is that it frees them to take an off-farm job, which for many is the only way to get health insurance.
• Federal agencies and food programs are among the biggest purchasers of food in the world. If they didn’t buy solely from the lowest-cost bidder, as they’re now required to, but could instead source from local or organic producers, or farmers practicing polyculture, this massive new customer would remake American agriculture in a heartbeat.
• Most Americans could afford to spend more for their food – or could afford to eat less of the resource-intensive foods. It’s no coincidence that Americans, who spend less than a dime of every dollar on food – the least in the world – also consume about 200 pounds of meat per capita each year – the most in the world.
• What we’re still waiting to find out is whether sustainability is something we’ll all benefit from, or whether it, too, will go to the highest bidder.

- from MotherJones.