I watched a really good movie called “Fresh” tonight. It’s a documentary about fresh food, as opposed to processed food. It talks about the tomatoes instead of the Fritos.

I was a bit worried that it was going to be one of those “True Believer” documentaries, you know, like a Michael Moore movie, except without the gentle sophistication. Ahem, gentle humor over. But it was an entry-level exploration of what’s involved in feeding America. It showed both sides: the factory versus farmer grown food. In fact, it was so gentle it didn’t even mention transportation costs as a factor in the eat local movement.

It mentioned American food containing today 40% less nutrition than it did in the 1950s, and how we can begin to change that. It wasn’t loud or pushy and didn’t have as many “scientific experts” as it did people who actually produce food. I was really impressed with the farmers showing and telling how they manage to produce healthy food by doing what comes naturally instead of what comes chemically.

I was especially impressed by the farmer who said his family had never, in 50 years, used seeds, commercial feed, chemicals or antibiotics, and they’d always made a comfortable living. They did have a really nice house. And it really struck me when he said that they didn’t have to build a $500,000 poultry building that they’d get paid off in 20 years, when they sold their 10,000,000th chicken.

It struck me because of how worried (and trapped) the couple seemed who had made those kind of investments in infrastructure to raise chickens the “conventional” way.

I recommend the movie, particularly if you’ve been wondering if America’s food supply, from American producers, is sustainable. I imagine you already know that America’s food supply from foreign producers isn’t sustainable.

China recently purchased 6,000,000 acres in Africa to use for food production. That’s in addition to the land for farming, outside China, they’ve already bought, and the farming land they’ll buy in the future. China is far from alone in the current rush to buy farmland outside it’s own national borders. And, yeah, it’s a big rush, like a stampede.

The scary truth is that what we now consider “conventional” food production actually produces much less food than organic farming by small growers. Corporations always get “scientific” talking heads to say how they’re just slaving their butts off trying to solve the “problem” of how to feed the world. They’ve been saying that since before I started losing my baby teeth. I remember. Do a bit of research and you come to the conclusion that it’s all that “better living through chemistry” that has created the “problem” of how to feed the world.

Here’s another scary thought: 70% of the food produced in America doesn’t go to feed people. It goes to feed animals. As one of the farmers in the movies pointed out, we need to feed grass to animals that can eat grass. It sounds sensible to let animals eat what they were designed to eat, and humans eat what humans were designed to eat. That way everything and everyone gets enough to eat. And the meat lovers can still have their steaks, without cows taking 70% of the humans’ food. Seems sort of fair and equal, doesn’t it? Well, if you ignore the part about cows getting eaten.

If you also do some research on who’s currently buying land to farm, and where they’re buying it, it all starts to seem much less fair and equal. Particularly when you consider that, in 50-60 years that land will be farmed out too.

Considering that farmed-out land wouldn’t happen if it were not for corporations doing all the food growing and soil depleting, which is the least efficient and most profit friendly way to produce food, it seems like maybe corporate profits just might have more impact on our planet’s ability to feed its population than we’ve ever realized. It’s been done that way all our lives, so we “assume” that it’s the most efficient, most cost-effective method of food production, to feed the most people.

You see, sometimes it’s our basic assumption that’s wrong instead of the rest of the world. Your basic assumption, my basic assumption, has been that there are so many people on the planet that corporate farming is the only way to feed them.

From what I’ve been reading and hearing in the last couple of years, corporate farming, which produces less food but more profits, may be as big (or God forbid, bigger) a cause of human hunger than the actual number of mouths needing to be fed.

What I’m wondering about, here in the wee small hours of the morning, is where are these corporate farmers going to be growing OUR food when they’ve stripped all the land? I guess the same place we’re gonna get the oxygen to breathe and water to drink after corporations have finished raping our ecosystems and polluting our water, for their profits.

Maybe corporations aren’t the best overseers of what’s good for all the humans on this planet. Maybe we all need to do a little bit of research, and stop leaving all the research to corporate employees.

Maybe having the necessities of life for humans isn’t the same thing as providing profits for corporations. In fact, now that I’ve said it in so few words, I feel kinda dumb and irresponsible for ever thinking they could be the same.