Farmer in Chief: Reflection

This is an article about the present condition of the food system in America and, in my opinion, and analysis of others in different countries. The article is exceptionally written and the evidence used actually made me realize the flaws in a system I had before known nothing about. A key point in the article that struck me was the fact that we use 10 calories of fossil fuels to every 1 calorie of produce. That statistic is staggering simply because it seems to utterly wasteful. You'd think that those that run any operation related to this would realize how unnecessary it is to use that much fuel. But, I suppose that since most machines that deal with farming run on diesel, the farmers or whomever have no choice simply because there are presently little to no alternatives.

Which brings me to another interesting point in the article where it is stated that, "More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten." It just blows my mind that that is the route that made the most sense. Why ship fish from and area they were caught at to another country and then ship it back to that general area? It would seem that it would make more sense to localize it so you don't have to create a middle man.