"The more people became accustomed to the attractively cut, carefully wrapped, cunningly displayed packages that Swift had introduced to the trade, the more easily they could fail to remember that their purchase had once pulsed and breathed with life much like their own. As time went on, fewer of those who ate meat could say that they had ever seen the living creature whose flesh they were chewing; fewer still could say they had actually killed the animal themselves. In the packer's world, it was easy not to remember that eating was a moral act inextricably bound to killing. Such was the second nature that a corporate order had imposed upon the American landscape. Forgetfulness was among the least noticed and most important of its by-products. (emphasis added) (Nature's Metropolis, William Cronon, WW Norton, New York, 1991, p.256)

Forgetfulness was the most important by-product of industrialized agriculture. What has been forgotten? How about human dignity, the integrity of creation, democratic participation in our economy, the appreciation of the local, the common good, the poor, the purpose of the goods of the earth, our solidarity with people in other lands?

William Cronon's book, Nature's Metropolis, describes the process of the industrialization of agriculture. Among his major themes is the theme of forgetfulness, the loss of awareness among eaters, food consumers, of where their food comes from, how it is produced, and the moral implications of such forgetfulness. The phrase, eating is a moral act, is an attempt to bring to awareness, to generate thought and action rather than forgetfulness about the food system. It attempts to help eaters be responsible and to exercise their power in the market place through their choices.
My contribution, I believe, affirming that eating is a moral act, is a result of the long 80-year history of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. Our publications: The Rural Manifesto of 1939, Rural Routes to Security in 1940, and A Handbook for Rural Pastors in 1944 were all clear statements about moral concerns in the food system. Our focus has been on the good of the order, the system as a whole. In 1937 Father John Rawe, SJ, NCRLC's policy co-ordinator stated the following: "We (referring to NCRLC) were convinced from the beginning as we are today that you cannot modernize agriculture by taking the ownership to the profit-seeking hands of absentee landlords or the greedy hands of distant managers and irresponsible stockholders. We know that such land tenure would finally give us in the domain of agriculture the same big, exploiting, usurping, private monopolies that claim our industrial world, and our rural families would under such land tenure be broken up and exhausted, economically, morally, spiritually, as so many industrial families are." And further he said, "Our plans for the family farm in the economic order embrace the retention and perfecting of food production and processing for consumption as near as possible at the point of production, land use for much diversified production, land use with a view to conservation of soil and water." "Our agricultural economics will concern unfair profit taking, destructive collectivization, and wasteful centralized food processing, involving cross-country hauls and rehauls of canned goods of inferior quality." (John Rawe, SJ, Catholic Rural Social Planning, 1937, republished in Rural Landscapes, Volume 5, Number 2, NCRLC)

My perspective is from within the Roman Catholic tradition which speaks of seven principles for orienting action, also known as Catholic Social Teaching: l. dignity of the human person 2.integrity of creation 3.solidarity 4. Common good, 5.option for the poor 6.subsidiarity 7. Universal destination of goods. A lot could be said about each principle. I am handing out a short and direct statement for each of you to have that states and describes each principle. A primary reference point today will be: "For I Was Hungry & You Gave Me Food: Catholic Reflections on Food, Farmers, and Farmworkers." (USCCB Publishing, Washington, DC, January 2004)

In the statement are the following quotations:
"We focus on the ethics of how food and fiber are produced, how land is protected, and how agriculture is structured, compensated, and regulated to serve the "common good." " (p.1 "For I Was Hungry")

"Fewer people are making important decisions that affect far more people than in the past. These choices have serious moral implications and human consequences. These forces of increasing concentration and growing globalization are pushing some ahead and leaving others behind. They are also pushing us toward a world where the powerful can take advantage of the weak, where large institutions and corporations can overwhelm smaller structures, and where the production and distribution of food and the protection of the land lie in fewer hands." (p.4)

"Agriculture is a way of life. Agricultural policies should help ensure basic income security and provide opportunities for economic initiative for farmers in the United States and throughout the world, with special attention to small producers." (p.12)

"Public policies must address the needs of agricultural workers. A key measure of agricultural, immigration and labor policies is whether the reflect fundamental respect for the dignity, rights, and safety of agricultural workers and whether they help agricultural workers to provide a decent life for themselves and their families." (p.12)

"Public policies should encourage a wide variety of economic development strategies in rural areas. They should continue to promote and support farming, especially family farms, as a strategy for rural development. … A key measure of agricultural and development policies is whether they encourage widespread diversity in farm ownership and advance rural development in this country and abroad, promoting and maintaining the culture and values of rural communities. "(p. 13)

"Agricultural and food policies should reward practices that protect human life, encourage soil conservation, improve water quality, protect wildlife, and maintain the diversity of the ecosystem. An essential measure of agricultural and food policies is whether they protect the environment and its diversity and promote sustainable agricultural practices in the United States and abroad." (p. 13)

"Catholic teaching about the stewardship of creation leads us to question certain farming practices, such as the operation of massive, confined, animal feeding operations. We believe that these operations should be carefully regulated and monitored so that environmental risks are minimized and animals are treated as creatures of God" (p. 31)

Throughout the statement are factual data about the structure of agriculture. There is a critique of the industrialization of agriculture and the trends in concentration of agriculture in the hands of a few agro-industrial giants. There is a strong and recurrent critique of power in the hands of a few agro-corporations. Farming is viewed in that statement as a way of life, a culture, and yet most of the power today is in the hands of a culture of agriculture I call corporate or investment agriculture. The 80-year tradition of NCRLC and its values based preferences for the agriculture, food, land, and community life articulated in the two-fold criteria of care for creation and care for community remains a vital source of reflection for action.

The Cultures of Agriculture

The sustainability of agricultural production as related to protection of the land, the economic and social viability of a community is a matter of culture. A culture can be described as "the meaning and value of a way of life". (Lonergan, Bernard F. J., Method in Theology, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1990, p. 5. ) Anthropologist Sonja Salamon has identified two cultures of agriculture in her study differentiating Germanic yeoman agriculture and Yankee entrepreneurial agriculture. (Sonya Salamon, Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming and Community in the Midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) I differentiate four types, place them on a historical time line and differentiate them as value sets, with central pivot interests or values as their focal value. In my typology there are four cultures of agriculture: subsistence agriculture, entrepreneurial agriculture, investment agriculture, and sustainable agriculture.

Subsistence Agriculture
Subsistence agriculture is focused on the family and local community. Peasant agriculture comprises the segment of agriculture which is based on family labor, and in which the family is the essential nucleus of both production and consumption. In this culture, cooperation prevails over competition. The family members each cooperate with each other. Parents and children each have their respective roles and domains of labor and recreation, with a lot of inter-relatedness. If one neighbor needs help, the others are there to assist. Whether one speaks of harvesting or home building, share enlivens the community.
The framework which holds the family and community together is a tradition that is passed from one generation to the next. For this culture, religion is an integrating force in life; it is the bond that holds everything else together. Intergenerational transfers of the farming operation is important in this type of agriculture. Products are produced for personal consumption and for cash. A focal pivot value is the family and its relationship to land. The land is to be held in trust for future generations. so it is treated with reverence. Yeoman agriculture has goals, which transcend economic goals. Institutional carriers of these values include native Americans, the Amish, and many smaller-scale independent family farms, market gardeners and the like.

Entrepreneurial Agriculture
Entrepreneurial agriculture is related to the influence of the small-town business methods onto the rural life-style. Entrepreneurial agriculture arises in situation in which family boundaries are extended in networks of association such as business societies, fraternal orders or women's associations. The cultural hope is expressed in "climbing the agricultural ladder". This meant that if one did not inherit a farm one might aspire to own one by moving up the ladder from sharecropper to tenant farmer and from tenant farmer to owner-operator. The culture of the farm shifts from family as a primary focus to incorporate refinements in values and attitudes. The temporal horizon shifts from life long, multigenerational perspective to the annual budget. The focus becomes more on individual success which is measured in profits. There is a high value on being one's own boss. There is less of a commitment to farm ownership continuity by keeping the farm in the family. The pivot of this culture is a fair price for the product.

Rather than family and local community, the culture fosters strong self-reliance and individualism. Religion is separated from one's livelihood. The social constrains of local community and values achieved in hard work give dignity and civilized shape to this culture of agriculture. Overt greed is unseemly in social dynamics of small town.

Investment Agriculture
This form of agriculture seeks to systematically incorporate all individual and discretely distinct economic and productive activity into a larger whole for a globalized market. Profit is the goal. The temporal horizon has shrunk from generations, to annual accounts, to now a focus on quarterly or monthly stock reports. It is a culture driven by globalization of capital. No longer are we focused on local, regional or national levels. Investment agriculture relies heavily on the use of advertising technologies.

This type of agriculture brings with it a concentration of land ownership, economic control, and consolidation of power. The pivot is the profit. It seeks to control production through intellectual property laws, control over biotechnological research, by developing designer "genes". It has been a powerful force for the deregulation of the countryside and has brought downward pressure to bear on governments at every level,

Sustainable Agriculture
Sustainable agriculture attempts to restore a lost connectedness , deriving from forgetfulness, between the earth and the human community. Proponents foster the encouragement of intentional communities and smaller human-scale operations in agriculture. The pivot is the ecology, the profit, and the community all as an integrated whole. The farmers explore microenterprise development and value-added activities like local processing, local marketing, local distribution networks. Sustainable agriculturalists encourage the adoption of alternative agriculture and appropriate technology over and against the investment agriculture's focus on large machinery-giant technological inventions, center pivot irrigation systems, concentrated livestock production in poultry and hog, are significant examples.

Among the efforts for this alternative view are consumers who look for nutritious food, less dependence on chemicals like pesticides and herbicides. They place a priority on people and the earth rather than on profit exclusively. In this culture, we see greater efforts at cooperation among members seeking new system. There are as well correlative efforts at the formation of credit systems, mediating structures of counseling, information sharing, and crisis intervention.

Cultural Trends in Agriculture
What kind of futures can we envisage with the cultures of agriculture? The first cultural trend we see is the growth of investment agriculture, the subject of a statement by the late American agricultural economist Harold Breimyer:

___	"The founding of our country was basically an escape from the feudal system in Europe in which the Lords owned all of the land and the serfs worked it for them. Now we're moving into an industrial situation where the farmers become wage employees, and the masters are a few large corporations."

A second cultural trend for the future might be described as the declining mixed middle ground. This will be made up of traditional yeoman and entrepreneurial family farms trying to compete or to hold their own in an increasing investment culture. A common characteristic of these farmers might be uncertainty about their future in agriculture. The question many of these farmers will face is: do I take the leap? do I become bigger? or, do I get out now? The older farmers may be hoping to ride out the remaining years of their farming by holding out until retirement. One current effort by the Center for Rural Affairs and The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture is entitled "Farming in the Middle" which is an effort to support middle scale farms by teaming up with major food service providers like Cisco foods, the thought is that farmers of a mid range size can be assisted to provide foods for these food service companies, without which the variety and diversity of food products the consumers want from these companies will be lost.

A third direction will found by sustainable agriculture. It has a historical grounding in the yeoman culture and structure of farming in the United States -- with its agrarian, Jeffersonian ethos. The culture promoted by civic republicanism was most at home on the farm in local community. Not Locke, Hobbes or Adam Smith, but the Greek Polis and Humanism were the philosophical roots of this agrarianism. There is an effort located at Cornell University entitled "civic agriculture" led by Dr. Thomas Lyson which embodies this tendency.

What will lead the voice of agriculture? Will the forces leading to industrialization pose a treat to our ability to protect a dispersed land ownership system, broad participation in farming, active, local democratic processes, stewardship of the land and of local communities - a sense of responsibility to future generations? What legal policies will promote sustainability?

We are focused in this talk on moral evaluation. Eating is a moral act. Our focus is on the good of order rather than on particular goods. We are looking at the food system, on economic, social, political, cultural goods, as systems. Children fight over toys, and particular goods, adults debate the good of order, systems, structures.

Recent commentators on our food system have given us helpful perspectives:

In Wendell Berry's essay, "Conserving Communities" from Another Turn of the Crank, Berry makes an analysis of the forces at work in a globalized economy. He sees this as a split between the "locals" and the "globals". It is a movement toward a two-party system which divides over the fundamental issue of community. One is the party of the global economy; the other he calls the party of local community:

"The natural membership of the community party consists of small farmers, ranchers, and market gardeners, worried consumers, owners and employees of small shops, stores, community banks, and other small businesses, self-employed people, religious people, and conservationist. The aims of this party are only two: the preservation of ecological diversity and integrity, and the renewal, on sound cultural and ecological principles, of local economies and local communities" (Another Turn of the Crank, Counterpoint Press, Washington, DC, 1995, p.18)

David Korten has described the choice as has Wendell Berry as only one of two: suicide economies or living economies (Economies for Life, David C. Korten, Yes Magazine, Fall, 2002)

"The suicide economy is a product of human choices motivated by a love of money. It is within our means to make different choices motivated by a love of life. We have created a suicide economy based on absentee ownership, monopoly, and the concentration of power delinked from obligations to people or place. Now we must create living economies based on locally rooted ownership and deeply held American ideals of equity, democracy, markets, and personal responsibility.
In the place of a suicide economy devoted to maximizing returns to money, we can create living economies devoted to meeting the basic needs of people. In the place of a suicide economy in which the powerful reap the profits and the rest bear the cost, we can create a system of living economies in which decisions are made by those who will bear the consequences.
In the place of the suicide economy’s global trading system designed to allow the wealthy few to control the resources and dominate the markets of the many, we can create living economy trade through which each community exchanges those things it produces in surplus for those it cannot reasonably produce at home on terms that support living wage jobs and high environmental standards everywhere.
Under a system of relatively self-reliant local living economies, communities and nations will not find themselves pitted against one another for jobs, markets, and resources. In the absence of such competition, the free sharing of information, knowledge, and technology will become natural, to the mutual benefit of all."

Jane Jacobs, a long-time commentator on economic and architectural issues from Toronto, contrasts scale economies with economies of location. (Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies, The Modern Library, New York, 2000, pp. 80, 81, 108) She evaluates commercial systems as having two distinct ethical frameworks: one based upon ownership of property and the other based on a commitment to exchange or trade. (Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival, Vintage Books, New York, p.1992) She calls them Guardians and Traders. Most of the agro-industrial food systems come under the aegis of Guardians and are not really traders in the true sense of her use of that term. The moral directions of each are distinct.
Stephen Martin, of Seton Hall University contrasts oligarchic economies with democratic economies in NCRLC's recent publication, Catholic Rural Life. One works on development from below, the other from above downward.

Jane Jacobs has identified distinct rural regions as delimiting the type of agriculture as related to an economic structure (Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, New York: Random House, 1969)

Agricultural regions: Socio-Cultural Regions:
Supply Regions: supply regions are disproportionately shaped by the markets of distant settlements. They are narrowly specialized agricultural or natural resource goods for distant markets…from the United States to Mexico, Japan, India or Europe. More particularly, from Kansas' wheat fields, Montana's beef production, Iowa's corn fields to other locales around the globe. Increasingly these regions become highly specialized and thereby reduce the rural diversity that exists or has existed in their own rural regions. Iowa is a good example of this. The production for local consumption in agriculture and in food products has reduced significantly over the past 50 years. So that the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture has research which demonstrates that Iowa has lost diversity to a significant degree, from 60 products to 7 major products. Supply regions are very common. They are sometimes referred to as "captive" or "colonial" economies. An economy producing poorly on its own behalf won't necessarily become well rounded and less economically dependent on its narrow specialties. Supply regions are warped by the power of distant local markets, but those distant markets are powerless to help them out. Only vigorous, innovative and productive local economic activity, with settlements generating their own regional diversity in interdependent activity with their rural sectors instead of supply regions can help such regions transform themselves out of colonial servitude into local and regional vitality. Recent research by a former republican candidate for governor in Iowa,Douglas Gross, has shown that poverty is increasing in Iowa's supply regions due to their dependence upon subsidies from the federal government and the inherent weakness of the character of their economic activity.

Abandoned regions: When the power of jobs reaches into a distant region disproportionately, it leads to the abandonment of once vital economic areas. The displacement of manufacturing jobs to Mexico, or Asia; of service jobs such as telemarketing to India…emigration of people to other areas has led to the depopulation of the countryside in Canada, the United States, Mexico and around the world. That's not to say that people no longer have emotional attachments to places just because those places are poor and lack economic activity. Sometimes it is the commitment of people to such places that allows some to make a commitment to the locales and their commitment, creativity and activity can be the source of un-slumming locales. Emigration is a bitter and painful choice.

City Regions: Just beyond the suburbs of cities are rural, industrial, commercial, workplaces mingled and mixed together. They have rich, dense and intricate economies. City regions are defined not by natural boundaries but by having economic life interdependent with urban energies. Look at the case of New Hampshire. An economic diversity characterizes the state, benefiting urban and rural residents alike.

Transplant Regions: Transplant regions are rural areas where city enterprises have moved when city enterprises transplant themselves into the rural areas they balance their needs to be close to their suppliers and customers against their conflicting aims of escaping the costs of city space and the congestion or other disadvantages of the city. The transplants cluster most thickly beyond the city and its suburbs, thinning out at a distance and petering out at the borders of the city. The freedom that allows an industry to move to a distant region without a city creates transplant economies that do not produce much for themselves as regions no matter how successful at attracting industries. Pigs, poultry, poker and prisons are among the current wave of transplant enterprises locating themselves in rural America. When transplants leave one area for another, they leave behind only economic vacuums, along with unemployment and depression. No web of symbiotic relationship remains as it does in city regions when industry transplants itself.


Clearance Regions: Clearance regions result from technological change rather than the lure of other locations by the presence of jobs. New methods and new equipment clear people from the land and from their former livelihoods on it. Clearance regions are the mirror of abandoned regions, those who remain stay badly off while those who leave for distant city jobs may improve their lot.

The standard diagnosis of the trouble with supply regions, abandoned regions and clearance regions is "not enough jobs." The standard prescription is "attract industry." What industries can be lured or hooked? Prisons, poultry and pig factories and poker seem to be the answer. These are typical projects for economic developers for rural areas. And the other answer seems to be government subsidies. These are for the most part industries that are not tethered by localized markets or by everyday dependence upon multitudes of producers and services nearby. Their markets have become far flung, and they supply so many of their own everyday needs for producers' goods and services internally. They have developed systems for acquiring what they must buy from others, whatever the source, that they have developed great freedom in choosing where to expand or to relocate. They can move to virtually any place providing the special advantages they seek: cheap labor, proximity to raw materials, release from environmental regulations, chance to cash in on tax benefits, and other similar subsidies.

The freedom to relocate that enables these economic units to leave regions for distant regions means freedom from local markets, freedom from local communities, freedom from other symbiotic nests of other producers and services. Therefore, their presence does nothing, or little to stimulate the creation of other symbiotic economic enterprises. As long as they remain in a region with a transplant economy of this sort, they produce little and only narrowly for the local economy itself. Such transplants shape a supply region for producing amply and diversely for its own people and producers as well as for others.
There isn't enough demand for the weak economies of supply regions, clearance regions, abandoned regions or transplant regions, which is a reason why they require subsidies and why they sacrifice environmental quality, health, and social well being. The records being accumulated for diminishing human health, for environmental degradation, by the growth in hunger and poverty in rural America all demonstrates the vulnerability of these economies. Footloose economic activity, unrelated to local communities, to local habitations, to the standard of living of an area is immoral, unnatural, unreasonable, irresponsible, naturally unhealthy. As eaters become more aware of the circumstances of healthy, diverse, interdependent local economies, they will act in such a way as to reconstitute the cultures of agriculture, critique those which pivot narrowly on price and profit to the one which is comprehensive, holistic, systemic in integrating all of the elements of the most healthy of cultures of agriculture….that called sustainable agriculture and to communities which are sustainable communities. The reworking of communities, cultures, and food systems remind us that eating is a moral act! Food security is an issue for local communities. They need to have sufficient nutritious food so that they can be healthy. But they also have the right to food, the right to healthy and nutritious food. In order to protect that right, communities should have the power to shape a sustainable local food system. Through zoning ordinances, through local police power, health ordinances, through anti-corporate farming laws, through consumer, retailer, producer practices communities have the right to food sovereignty, the right to local food, for food self-sufficiency. Home rule in food provisioning and in local economic development through self-organizing activity is inherent to the principle of subsidiarity.

Many of the processes at work in natural ecologies and in economies are similar. The focus is on process. In a natural ecology the more niches that are filled, the more efficiently the ecology uses the energy it has at its disposal and the richer it is in life and in having the means to support that life. A desert can be compared to a forest in this regard. The energy of a desert has no way or very limited ways to circulate, a forest on the other hand, gives energy multiple means to circulate. The same is true of economies, the more fully their various niches are filled, the richer they are in having the means to support life.

Rural development in regions of interdependent urban and rural regions are much better off than specialized economies of supply, clearance, transplant regions, to say nothing of abandoned regions. In a natural ecology the more diversity there is the more stability there is, because there are more homeostatic feedback loops, it includes greater numbers of feedback controls for automatic self-correction. It is the same with economies, which explains why city and their regions are economically more resilient and less fragile than other types of rural regions.

It is natural for human beings to build new kinds of work upon earlier kinds because the capacity to do this is naturally built right into us, like the related capacity to understand and use a language in an open-ended way. All normal human beings have the capacity to add new kinds of skills to their earlier skills, new kinds of work to earlier work. This is the capacity we use when we develop economic life. In the process we create problems, but we solve the problems in unprecedented ways. In its very nature economic development has to be open-ended rather than goal oriented, making itself up as it goes along.

Rural economic development is interdependent with city life and urban development. Economic development requires constant new inputs in the form of innovations based upon human insights. If rural regions are to be generated in urban areas, into city regions, they require repeated, exuberant episodes of import replacing, which are manifestations of the human ability to make adaptive limitations. Any region without an innovative or import replacing locale of its own right is bound to be an unchanging subsistence region or else stunted dependent region…no matter what natural attributes or innate attributes its people may have.

To address structural issues in food production requires topics such as: the value of anti-corporate farming laws, fairness of contract production terms, restrictions on processors in monopoly activity, the legality of premiums for large marketers, the appropriate location for land use regulations. It also requires examining whether such issues ought to be addressed by local governments, exclusively at the state level, at the federal or international level. Should the agency of regulation be the city, county or township, the state, nation or international agency such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization? These are legal questions, issues of public policy and social organization. They are moral issues as well.



"Eating is a Moral Act" as a campaign attempts to
open our eyes to see what we otherwise ignore: what is shrouded in a fog of forgetfulness, as William Cronon claims,

To take note of deficiencies of justice
in the midst of mounting riches.

To take note of the hard work of farming,
the dangerous working of fishing,
the tedious work of processing...

all those raw and unsettling realities
not reflected in the soft glow of the candle light in fine restaurants;
human realities blanched pale in the glaring convenience of fast food, economic oligopolies glossed over by plastic packaging by the handful of companies who control our eating
at bargain prices and bargain basement wages.

"Look, take a good hard look at what you are overlooking!"
This is the cry of all prophetic voices
throughout the history:
to see what is otherwise ignored! To see what forgetfulness has created
Though it is difficult to admit,
we all have this tendency to overlook essential elements of justice.
Whether it is the food we eat or the clothes we wear or the services we use
we all have a tendency to take our comforts for granted and to forget about the context of their creation.

We set a fine table for our fine foods and our refined talk.
And on the other side of this otherwise innocuous tendency
comes the surprised reaction when we are confronted with words
warning us
about the long-term results of our lack of attention, our forgetfulness.

This is our habit and it leads to sin,
the sin of overlooking
the wages paid
the pollution made
the plans laid by the rich
and those for whom the buck never stops.

The sting of these words brings a
Predictable reaction:
We quickly reach for some ointment to alleviate the pain
caused by these accusations.

Amidst the soft glow of candle lights at our dinner tables
we begin reciting the soothing mantras
of neo-liberal doctrine:
"It’s a global economy," we whisper to ourselves,
"free markets benefit everyone."

And the automatic ritual allows us
to better ignore disturbing reports
and pass over such facts that, since the passage of NAFTA,
the working poor in Mexico has climbed from 40% to 60% of the population.

We know many such chants.
Here is another one:
"The low wages of the maquiladores simply reflect
the lower standard of living in that country."

It’s a comforting verse.
It numbs the gnawing fact that the average wage of $5.00 a day in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
must buy food that costs the same as across the river in El Paso, Texas.
We ignore many things at home as well.
We ignore the growing poverty in rural America.
We are ignorant of the loss of 300,000 family farms
in the last twenty years.

But of course we can do something about all of this: "Eating is a Moral Act." Our knives and forks are levers for cultural and social change. We can change the food system, we can change the farming system, we can change the health system, we can change the political system, we can decide to do things differently: to eat healthy, to demand a food system that comes from a living economy, to nurture the well-being of land, plants, animals, to think holistically. We can do this and must, for our planet, for future generations, for ourselves. Another world is possible!