Are Our Ideas About Sustainable Food Out of Date?

This article originally appeared on PSFK.com.

The ways our food is produced, packaged and shipped stand at the center of an ongoing debate about the health of our planet and ourselves, but the key to creating a sustainable system may rely on our collective ability to accept a realistic solution as a opposed to a perfect one. And this involves a concerted effort on the part of not only producers and consumers, but policy makers as well.

If we examine the farming methods in our country, we find a polarizing set of standards -- industrial monoculture machines that favor high yields and high profits and smaller outfits that focus on growing numerous crops using a methodology that is less invasive and more closely mimics nature. Within this landscape the prevailing attitude seems to be "all or nothing" and there's very little room for alternative approaches in between. In his Mother Jones piece, "Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008," Paul Roberts wonders whether this narrow viewpoint has now seeped into all of our discussions about food, prompting him to ask, how do we fix the current system without the fits and starts along the way? The short answer is, we probably don't.

Working off of a popular definition for sustainable food put forth by the W.K Kellogg Foundation -- ecologically benign, nutritious, produced without injustice and affordable -- Roberts discovers only about 2% of the food purchased in the U.S. qualifies under these rigorous guidelines. As bleak as this statistic might be, he merely mentions them as a point of reference, showing us the distance we have left to travel unless of course, we change the direction of where exactly it is we want to go.

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