Taste Matters
Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food
Why can't everybody on earth have healthy, delicious and inexpensive food? Author of "Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food" and contributing author at Harper's, Frederick Kaufman, joins Mitchell Davis on Taste Matters for a conversation on the loss of real food in the marketplace. From trading to intellectual property, learn how food has become more virtual than real in today's world. How is commodity defined in food? How do big industrial pizza chains affect small farmers? How did the word 'sustainability' become co-opted by large corporations? Mitchell and Frederick attempt to answer some of the big questions that face the world in our quest to re-discover real food. This program was sponsored by S. Wallace Edwards & Sons.
"The price of real food depends on people pricing imaginary food. You might think that's a subtle distinction, but there's so much more imaginary food being traded in the world than real food!" [6:30]
"We're so in love with virtual reality but we have to remember where to draw the line - when food becomes virtual, it stops being food." [09:00]
"What happens is, oddly enough, the more demand there is for tomatoes, the fewer tomato farmers there are. So in other words - big tomato crushes small tomato." [11:15]
"We who are interested in the local movement have our own particular understanding of what sustainable means, but the word has been co-opted by much larger forces... It's become one of the great marketing terms of the 21st century." [14:00]
"Corporations like Monsanto are really bad players - and we have to figure out a way to push them out and stop them from their monopolistic practices, litigation and bullying. I don't believe that labeling is the only or most efficient way to push these guys out." [21:20]
--author and contributor editor at Harper's Frederick Kaufman on Taste Matters