#farming

The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#vegetarianism #food

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us. ↗

— Jeannette Walls

#common-sense #daughter #farming #mother #ranch

I know the pleasure of pulling up root vegetables. They are solvable mysteries. ↗

— Novella Carpenter

#farming #education

Sustainable farms are to today's headlong rush toward global destruction what the monasteries were to the Dark Ages: places to preserve human skills and crafts until some semblance of common sense and common purpose returns to the public mind. ↗

— Gene Logsdon

#sustainability #age

...no matter how rhapsodic one waxes about the process of wresting edible plants and tamed animals from the sprawling vagaries of nature, there's a timeless, unwavering truth espoused by those who worked the land for ages: no matter how responsible agriculture is, it is essentially about achieving the lesser of evils. To work the land is to change the land, to shape it to benefit one species over another, and thus necessarily to tame what is wild. Our task should be to delivery our blows gently. ↗

— James E. McWilliams

#farming #food #politics #age

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#farming #health #paleo #diet

As with any violent ideology, the populace must be shielded from direct exposure to the victims of the system, lest they begin questioning the system or their participation in it. This truth speaks for itself: why else would the meat industry go to such lengths to keep its practices invisible? ↗

— Melanie Joy

#factory-farming #meat #love

Though the industrial logic that made feeding cattle to cattle seem like a good idea has been thrown into doubt by mad cow disease, I was surprised to learn it hadn't been discarded. The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#nature

Family, work, familiarity. Listen, if I had a magic wand and I could make myself really be happy, I'd zap me onto a farm. And I know nothing about farming. ↗

— Scott Baio

#be happy #could #familiarity #family #farm

When you look at environmental problems in the U.S., nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is "optimal" only as long as degrading waterways is free. ↗

— Gidon Eshel

#farming #geophysics #pollution #food