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Deep Agriculture by Michael Pollan

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The video “Deep Agriculture,” is an interesting presentation hosted by Michael Pollan in 2009. In this presentation, he states the problems of actual farming in several ways, the most shocking is regarding our health. We live in a food system that comes from another era and does not match today’s context and this mismatch is the origin of a number of problems such as health, logistic, environmental and partially economic problems. Pollan says we cannot have a healthy population, without a healthy diet. Health problems are obvious: Four out of five chronic diseases are diet-related (obesity, cancer, diabetes, etc.). Some of the environment problems are because the chain of production that goes from the cultivation of the food, its preparation, using more fuel than ever. The logistical problems are given by the poor food distribution. There are large plantations of a single crop, called ‘monocultures’, are planted in one area, then take them hundred of miles away to be processed and then travel even more of miles to the respectively distribution. They require cheap pesticides and fertilizer. Here comes a large part of fuel costs mentioned above. The economic problems are associated with all the above: Although food was expensive prior industrialization, and now is cheap, it causes health problems that ultimately costs a lot of money to treat. This money is part of a hidden cost of the cheap food we produce now. Being so dependent on fuel to produce and distribute food, our food have become highly susceptible to any change in the oil price. Additionally, fuel does not only harms the environment. Other logistical problems of agriculture as occurs today is that ancient farmer’s allied species (such as bees) can not do their job naturally. They simply can not live permanently in a place to pollinate crops because there is no food for them when is not the season for that crop; so farmers need to bring bees to pollinate their crops

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