Letter from the Editor

Agriculture

   I was talking with a friend of mine from Italy who was visiting America. He told me Italians in general are very serious about their food. In Italy, the common way to go grocery shopping is to go to the market and purchase produce and meat from individual retailers. It’s old school. They spend their time sifting through the tomatoes looking for the best ones, but not the way we choose our tomatoes at the grocery store. We feel them for firmness after we have judged them by shape and color. We look for perfectly round or oval, bright red tomatoes. Italians look for tomatoes that taste amazing. We raise our tomatoes to ship well and last a long time. Again, Italians want their tomatoes to taste good. We want our tomatoes to look perfect. Italians, well, they are much more concerned with, you guessed it, taste.
   Our produce is designed to withstand the American way of buying produce, not for nutrition and taste.
   The conversation with my Italian friend got me thinking about two things: 1 - I need to go to Italy and eat! 2 - How our American attitudes toward food and agriculture are so F*#%ed up!
   Typical grocery store produce sucks! It is tasteless! If you don’t believe this then grow your own food or find an organic farmer who practices crop rotation and taste the difference for yourself. In fact, bring a perfectly round and red tomato from your local grocery store with you and compare it with a fresh, multicolored, misshapen, heirloom tomato. It’s unbelievable.
Picture this:
   We figure out how to grow produce with more taste and nutrition (hint: crop rotation). We as Americans take food seriously and start choosing quality over quantity. We end the stranglehold that big agriculture has on our small local farmers and show the people who grow our food the appreciation they deserve by paying reasonable prices for health giving food. We end the ridiculous subsidies for corn, a crop that is not the most ecologically friendly, and stop finding a hundred uses from fueling cars to sweetening food for this artificially cheap crop. We grow hemp without THC for all the amazing things hemp can do.
   Who knows? In time, maybe the Italians will talk about coming to America to eat.

 

Michael Edwards

 

Editor in Chief