Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have.
To a very great extent, it's the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture - that drove the system to one variety of chicken grown very quickly in confinement, to the feedlot system for beef, to giant monocultures to grow potatoes. All of those thing flow from the desire of fast-food companies for a perfectly consistent product.
The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its treatment of animals. It never asks the question: 'Should a pig be allowed to express its pig-ness?'
Ninety-five percent of the eggs produced in America come from factory-farmed birds. Even if free-range farms were hugely more humane, the sheer number of animals raised to satisfy people's desire for eggs, meat, and milk makes it impossible for us to raise them all on small, free-range farms.
It is obvious that the greatest and most important service that is required of our agriculture under existing conditions is an enlarged production of the staple food crops.
There's a big difference between industrializing production of tractors and industrializing production of food. We like technology, but we really like technology that allows us to do better what nature does itself.
Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
Agriculture was the first manufacturing industry in America and represents the best of all of us.
When you cook, you get to shop. You get to vote if you want the pastured raised pork or the organic grain. You can get to help produce your agricultural system, and you give that up when you outsource your cooking. You become dependent on what's offered - and that's a shame.
Now listen, the one thing about agriculture is we've lost our manufacturing, we've lost a great deal of jobs overseas, lots of our industry. The last thing in the world we need to do is lose the ability to produce our food.