Having been smacked around in another thread for mentioning many of the issues addressed in this thread, I’m a bit wary. However, I’ll jump in. I will, however, restrain myself to a short post and it will take restraint because Food is a subject I am passionate about - Food and Food Farming.
Having the luxury of plenty of time, I cook “from scratch” most days. Everyone did, once, but there are many demands on our time nowadays; some are for necessities and others are not. For example, I can find the time to spend hours a week fooling around on the internet, but I hire someone to clean my house.
I choose to buy local, free-range chicken and eggs, which is easy for me as I am a farmer myself. I raise beef and lamb and put in a garden every year, can my own jams, jellies, pickles, tomatoes, salsa, etc. These are, I know, luxuries to many people: but luxuries are, after all, the things we can choose and these are my choices.
I am surrounded by industrial chicken and turkey farms here, and while I am no fan of the way they raise meat birds, I have never heard of nor seen meat birds kept in battery cages. The beef and lamb I raise is pasture fed and not grain finished. I have raised dozens and dozens of veal calves over the years and have never mistreated one nor seen it done anywhere: raising veal is an iffy business at best, calves are delicate and tend to die if they aren’t kept in good conditions.
BTW: crops are not sprayed with fertilizers, plants do not absorb fertilizer through their leaves but through their roots. Contamination can occur, certainly, but not because the leaves are sprayed, whether that fertilizer be compost or chemicals.
“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” is an extremely interesting and valuable look at how American food gets into American stomachs. It is not, as someone implied, a PETA manifesto, but a clear-eyed and rational examination of some aspects of food production. I doubt that anyone could read it without understanding how the world of growing food, transporting food, cooking food, and eating have changed since the end of WW II. Nor could anyone fail to understand that the choices we make when we buy food are important choices, that our diets and desires are having an enormous impact on the earth. Since Americans and Canadians spend the least portion of their incomes on food on the planet, I fail to understand the shrieks of outrage over the cost of a free range chicken. We spend about 7 - 9% of our incomes on food, whereas at the end of WW II it was closer to 20% and we still lived like kings compared to most people in the world.
Another very thought-provoking book is The 100 Mile Diet, by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon. (Vintage Canada, a division of Random House.) In it the authors describe the year they spent living on food from within a 100 mile circle of their Vancouver apartment. I do not follow this diet slavishly, but I make a real effort to buy local when I can. And I will not buy any food from China, nor at Walmart. Small potatoes, to be sure, but I am doing what I can.
Said I’d be brief . . . the worst of modern industrial farming is not the problem of animal cruelty, although that problem exists. The worsts: the destruction of the soil by intensive, monocultural cropping; the use or overuse of fresh water resources; the destruction of land ill-suited for any kind of cropping at all; the vast stockpiles of animal manures that are, in fact, toxic waste and unusable for fertilizer; the poisoning of field workers and the land by herbicides and pesticides; the destruction of the gene pools for many plant species . . .no, better stop.
I think we can do much better. I am not advocating a sudden abandonment of modern farming methods, but that we should begin to farm as stewards of the land and not miners.