Living Beyond our Means

1. I was listening to the radio this morning when I heard the thought provoking question: is it possible that we all share some of the blame for the current financial turmoil, given the fact that we've gotten used to living on credit, rather than within our budgets? I got to thinking about food, as usual. In some sense the industrial food system has us all living beyond our means in the sense that prevailing production practices use up natural capital quicker than we can replace it, depleting the health of the soil and relying on nonrenewable resources like petrochemicals to create artificially high yields.

While the solution to a credit card economy is for folks to spend less, the solution to the industrial food system is for us to spend more on higher quality products, before we run into the food security equivalent of the current financial crisis: an unsustainable system no longer able to sustain itself.

There's no easy way to convince people to spend more on food while they're adjusting to spending less on everything else. But I think the message is gradually getting out there, as farmers' markets continue to thrive and people find themselves cooking more and eating out less. It helps that so much of this food is just so tasty.