Page 11 - The Celestia Project

THE CELESTIA MUSEUM

19

Food Security Exhibit. www.greenbuildermedia.com 04.2014

The Celestia capsule
contained this image from
a future museum, showing
how future generations
will look on our current
food trading system as an
unsustainable and
destructive model.

damage to maintain our current food system: transporting inferior What Makes A Food Crisis?
foods vast distances, and shopping at gigantic retail outlets that
constantly hammer prices down (resulting in lower quality produce). The causes of food crises, according to
Wal-Mart, for example, now sells almost a third of the nation’s food. researcher Evan Fraser of the University of
When box stores and factory farms link arms to bring prices to Guelph in Ontario, Canada, tend to center on
their absolute rock bottom, you can bet that the real costs—to the three major factors:
environment and public health—are not being counted. ■ Excessive reliance on a single crop
■ Citizenry that has no farming ability
Factory farms seem to have a monolithic hold on the American ■ Political situations where the normal
diet. But the signs of structural stress are beginning to show. Our
history includes a long list of “has-been” industries that seemed “safety net” for food fails
invulnerable before the sea of time swept them away or shrank their
magnitude. Look at the railroad industry, the steel industry, the ship-
building industry, and most recently, the nuclear power industry.

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