How about a return to traditional agriculture, which would provide more jobs, cleaner food, and decentralization and localization of food infrastructure? Why the relentless pursuit of industrialization and homogeneity at any cost?
The farm you imagine will never and can never be. If we can't used modern farming methods then we have to work with hard back-breaking labor 14+ hours a day from childhood and until we die, likely around 60 years old.
If you want to, keep your job but plant a garden and grow some food in it - then you will get the connection to nature that it appears some people need, without destroying your life.
I buy almost exclusively organic, local produce and meat. It's amazing how the savings begin to add up when you cook your own meals and buy in bulk when possible.
Sure, not everyone will want to do all this, but I think it goes to show how many assumptions about the current food economy/infrastructure are not true and how much could change thinking creatively, and prioritizing health, the environment, self-determination, etc. over convenience of industrialized and junk/fast foods.
Someone with mechanized equipment and a few acres could produce much more organic produce than I do in the same amount of time, and meat, cheese, and eggs. Enough to supply dozens or more families with food. And because internet access is available, they are not disconnected from the world and could even run a software business like I do (or be an artist, or accountant, or mechanic, or virtual assistant, chef, or any number of jobs).
There are dozens more creative ways to reduce or eliminate our dependence on industrialized food. Technology should promote life, not seek to replace it.
If you read all that, then thanks.
>Someone with mechanized equipment and a few acres could produce much more organic produce than I do in the same amount of time, and meat, cheese, and eggs. Enough to supply dozens or more families with food. And because internet access is available, they are not disconnected from the world and could even run a software business like I do (or be an artist, or accountant, or mechanic, or virtual assistant, chef, or any number of jobs).
People do this, they're called CSAs[0]. When I was younger, my family belonged to one, and I can guarantee you the [awesome] people running it did not have the time on their hands to run a significant side business on the internet.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agricultur...
Most CSAs grow food for considerably more people, are substantially larger than an acre, and may make deliveries, or raise crops to sell on the open market as well as sell shares, and this of course may necessitate multiple full-time workers.
That's my understanding anyway, rough as it is.
Also, it wouldn't take "most people" to support small-farm agriculture. Many would gladly raise organic produce and livestock, and sell locally if the food economy were not stacked against them. It also provides more financial independence than minimum wage jobs, and many full-time jobs. Not to mention it would create many jobs.
In the whole spectrum of human existence, farming sucks. It sucked so much that people remained hunter-gatherers as long as they could to avoid it, and it sucks so much that people leapt at the chance to become industrial wage slaves to avoid it. Turning more people into farmers out of some crazy left wing ideology sounds like a bad idea to me. I think Cambodia tried it once.
It wasn't the case then, and it isn't the case now.
The fact is that industrialized agriculture represents a massive centralization of the production of a basic necessity of life. It is made to be perceived to be less inexpensive through subsidies on low-nutrition crops such as corn, sugar, and wheat, subsidies for import and export, state-funded research into literal Frankenstein's monsters built of corn, fish, and insect genes. Patents for the basic building blocks of life are issued and violations enforced, even cases of accidental spread of these genes by wind. Pollutants and hormones abound.
And what do we get? Lower nutrition when picked, lower nutrition because of shipping and storage, insecticides, hormones, anti-biotics, factory meat and egg production that makes a mockery of animal life, runoff that poisons our water supply and wildlife.
What is good about subsidizing junk crops? What is good about subsidizing the fuel used to ship food across the world when it can be grown literally in one's backyard? What if we funded robotics and technology for small agriculture instead of drones that kill Pakistani civilians and children? What is good about the conflation of money and value, to the point where money is lauded over health and freedom?
Your premise seems to be that people have decided they want industrialized agriculture because farming "sucks." To you this seems to imply that therefore industrialized agriculture is good and that there are not alternatives. We will and should become more and more materialistic, inert, disconnected from family and nature, because what people want must be good. We are not being manipulated by world government systems that have their own benefit at heart.
I reject this premise wholeheartedly.
All science is doing is making the problem bigger and bigger. Stop subsidizing population growth.
I also recommend thinking critically, logically, and avoiding false dichotomies.
We have 1 billion undernourished today (note that there were only 1 billion in the whole world in 1804). And most of the rest of us are getting diabetes due to massive sugar and starch intake, promised by science as being 'good for us'. We also have mercury in our fish, hormones in our cows, insecticides in our veggies, fracking chemicals in our groundwater to get natural gas to make synthetic fertilizer, chemicals fed to pigs to make them grow faster (in the US anyway, china doesn't even allow that crap to be sold)...
So why exactly do some people still think malthus was wrong? How exactly can some people defend population growth?
How exactly are you going to prove this shit is 'SAFE'? When scientists for 50 years haven't even been able to prove if animal fat is healthy for us or not? And we have been eating that for a million years? Do you understand 'First, Do No Harm?'
Even if we're talking about staying at 7 billion vs. scaling to 10 billion, your first solution is to forcibly eliminate the reproductive rights of the browner-skinned half of the world population?
I was blessed with two sons and got myself fixed (note: 2 kids is below replacement rate), so I've done far more good for this planet than you will _ever_ understand.
When you start the discussion by saying we shouldn't even produce enough food to feed all seven billion people in the world and refuse to acknowledge the consequences of that, you're being dishonest. Maybe I should have asked: how many people should we produce food for, and how do we choose which people don't get food?
I'm in favor of reducing the ecological impact of agriculture, improving food quality, and reducing population growth. But you can't just ignore the requirements that we actually need to feed everyone who's already alive, and we shouldn't selectively implement coercive measures on people in other countries we are unwilling to impose on ourselves. It turns out there's a lot you can do within those constraints. That's the conversation worth having. I'm not going to entertain the notion that organic food is worth starving people and selectively depopulating entire continents over.