Nurses know much better than anybody that the American food industry has actually added to an epidemic of obesity and hypertension unprecedented in recent history through unconfined advertising, food ingredients and mono-crops. If we fail to resolve the destructive impacts of 'Big Food' then this could likewise end up being a nation whose population is also facing a health crisis.
According to The New York Times, a huge portion of the cash invested on health care in this country deals with persistent diseases connected to diet. But it's not simply the health of people at threat, the health of the planet is also suffering. Even President Obama acknowledged that "our agriculture sector really is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector."
Small family farms across America have actually mainly been replaced by mega-agricultural corporations operating big livestock feeding lots and a focusing of our food production in massive facilities and on huge farms.
Much at stake
The farming industrial complex is a $1.5 trillion-dollar market in America - that's trillion with a T - with big corporations from farms, to feeding lots, to supermarket controlling almost the entire process from seed to table.
In an innovative choice that supported genetically-modified foods, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of seed patents - fertile soil for mega-agribusiness Monsanto, which was currently developing lots of genetically-modified (GM) seeds. There is growing concern that introducing foreign genes into food plants may have an unexpected and negative influence on human health. The British Journal Lancet examined the effects of GM potatoes on the digestive tract in rats and found "considerable differences." Considerable study continues on the vital concern of the damage of GM foods.
This whole system has extremely little oversight. And we have actually seen the repercussions - under-regulated fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide saturated mono-crops of soy and corn changing little scale multi-crop farms, increases in greenhouse gases produced by big animals operations, and even current outbreaks of food-born illness originating from large cleaning and packaging plants.
President Obama did try to eliminate back and apply some much-needed control over the food industry - enough so that a group backed by pesticide and fertilizer producers called the Obamas, "organic limo liberals" and called on Michelle Obama to utilize pesticides in the White House garden.
President-elect Trump now inherits a beautiful garden complete of healthy organic foods. How will his garden grow?
It is certain that corporate agriculture will try to apply influence over the brand-new administration at the expense of the household farmer and at the expense of the health of our nation.
There is an alternative design for feeding our country using less chemicals, causing less harm to the environment and promoting healthier eating practices. That option comes from a nation that could not be more various from ours - Cuba.
What Cuba can teach us
Because of the USA-led embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tiny island nation was left in a precarious food scenario, not able to import fertilizers, pesticides, or foodstuff to feed its people. It likewise indicated that what food Cubans might grow, they primarily ate themselves rather of cycling through animals.
At the exact same time, the Caribbean island needed to fix the issue of farming in the age of extreme weather occasions.
These aspects added to Cuba being even more ready for situations now facing many countries across the planet. Cubans mastered what is now called "agro-ecology" in contrast to our country's mainly commercial agriculture. Small scale farmers in Cuba are leading the nation's farming motion and promoting sustainable practices like planting flowers to draw in valuable pests and nitrogen producing beans to fertilize the soil. Cubans needed to find imaginative ways to till the soil and plant crops without fossil fuel-fed equipment.
Out of requirement
Cuba now produces almost all of its own produce and much of its own meat. These agricultural developments were not constructed out of ideology. Rather, Cubans acted out of requirement, to meet the needs of a hungry individuals.
Cuban agriculture can in some ways be seen as an example for the United States of an agricultural system that is sustainable for the health of our individuals and the health of our planet.
Already, researchers fear that our planet is on the edge of no return from worldwide warming. If we don't downsize our farming use of nonrenewable fuel sources we might tip the thermometer completely for our warming planet, causing the exact same kind of food insecurity across the world that Cubans dealt with.
