Thursday, July 1, 2010

Post-materialistic fantasy?

"The prestigious National Research Council threw its considerable heft behind the sustainable food movement Tuesday with a 570-page report that endorses the new food and farm practices that began in the Bay Area and have taken the nation by storm.

There are now twice as many farmers - 30,000 to 40,000 - selling local meat and produce in farmers' markets than there are growing cotton, a major industrial crop, said August Schumacher, an author of the report and a former undersecretary of agriculture in the George H.W. Bush administration

....


Produced by a dozen academic and industry leaders and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the report squares off against a growing backlash by proponents of industrial agriculture to what they see as a utopian and romanticized vision of pastoral life that would take food production back to the 19th century and starve the world.

"A post-materialist fantasy," is what Robert Paarlberg, a member of the Board of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the National Research Council and a leading food policy academic, has called the new food movement." (Thanks Annie)


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/29/MNUQ1E6MIP.DTL#ixzz0sQVXVCD2

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