The damage? I'm too devastated to recreate the quote here, but let's just say it's brought to you by the letter "G".
Who needs some cheering up? I do, I do! How about some stories about the food industry. Oh wait...this will only drive my spirits even further into the ground.
Except that Nicholas Kristof has a cute anecdote about a chicken who thought it was a goose (an example of the soul that industrial food has lost).
And except that in TIME's expose of industrial food, they have this to say:
A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits — and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades — that's hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren't the enemy — and they deserve real help. We've transformed the essential human profession — growing food — into an industry like any other. "We're hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm," says Hahn Niman. "We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it's enjoyable work."They also have pretty photos:
So, things aren't that bleak. I'm going to go home, drink a beer and finish reading a Japanese crime novel about prostitutes, glass ceilings and social strata. Life is pretty good, actually...
