By Christopher D. Cook

'TIS THE SEASON for consumption. As America stuffs its shopping cart with rich, comforting food for holiday feasts – and the specter of mad cow disease stumbles back into the headlines with uncanny timing – the ways in which we make and eat food are especially ripe for examination. What are we really eating? What is it doing to our bodies and the planet?

The nation's flood of food is a monument to our obsession with excess and efficiency. Today's supermarket features a vast cornucopia of foods from across the globe, displaying the terrific powers of industrial agriculture, boundless trade, and rapid long-distance transport of perishable goods. These corporate food bazaars seem to imply a gastronomic democracy, offering consumers copious options (and portions) at fairly affordable prices. Yet when examined closely, this amazing harvest isn't as cheap and convenient as it seems.

Absent from our grocery receipts is a host of expenses we pay for the illusion of limitless choice and affordability. The true costs of this culinary convenience run roughly $100 billion a year, perhaps more. Among these hidden purchases: a public health crisis marked by ballooning obesity rates ($78 billion alone for treating diabetes and heart disease stemming in good part from unhealthy food); millions of food-related illnesses each year, thousands of them fatal (another $10 billion in medical costs and lost work time); emergency room visits and chronic injuries to uninsured meatpacking workers and farm laborers; and unemployment payments and other expenses for the disintegration of rural farming communities. These are some of the immense costs we all pay, through taxes and public spending, to subsidize today's unsustainable agribusiness.

Food, that most basic necessity, has become a force behind an array of social, economic, and environmental crises – pesticide-saturated harvests, extreme labor abuse, treacherous science, and the control of nearly every aspect of human sustenance by a few increasingly monopolistic corporations. There's even a connection to war.

"Food is fuel," former Archer Daniels Midland chair Dwayne Andreas once remarked, not a little self-servingly. "You can't run a tractor without fuel, and you can't run a human being without it either. Food is the absolute beginning."

Andreas's metaphor is apt – for much of the U.S. food menu relies on fuel through agribusiness's reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, which in turn relies on U.S. military might. Cheap food also fuels war-weary soldiers thousands of miles away, while rationalizing low wages at the bottom of our workforce here at home.

But humans need good fuel to survive the long haul. For the 5,000 people who die each year from food-related illnesses, bad food marks the end, not the beginning. Food-poisoning casualties – including some 325,000 people hospitalized annually for food-borne illnesses – are just the most palpable price we pay for a food system gone badly awry.

Our ignorance is nurtured by – and also strengthens – the tightening corporate stranglehold on our food system. In recent years leading firms like Tyson Foods, Safeway, ADM, and Cargill have gobbled up competitors and consolidated their near-monopoly control over the entire food chain. In just three years, between 1997 and 2000, the top five food retailers in the United States (Kroger, Albertsons, Wal-Mart, Safeway, and Ahold USA) nearly doubled their market share – growing from 24 percent of all retail food sales to a startling 42 percent. The top four beef producers control an almost unprecedented 80 percent of the U.S. meat market. Control over seeds is equally concentrated. Each time the Justice Department approves another merger or takeover, farmers and consumers lose power over what we grow and eat, how it is grown, and how much it costs. We're rapidly losing control over "the absolute beginning" of life.

The price of 'success'

This corporate-controlled system, structured to serve the volume and speed requirements of supermarkets, food processors, and restaurant chains, threatens our health, environment, and future sustenance.

Consider for a moment:

Industrial agriculture endangers sustainable living by eroding topsoil and water supplies through large-scale monocrop farming, and poisoning rivers and streams each year (and killing tens of millions of fish) with roughly one billion pounds of pesticides and one billion tons of toxic manure waste from huge animal factory farms.

That meat and chicken in your shopping cart are filled with growth hormones and pesticides, nothing likely to kill anyone but enough to pose possible long-term health risks. What can – and does – kill is all the bacteria in the meat, a plague exacerbated by the way animals are "farmed" and processed in enormous warehouses and on lightning-speed assembly lines.

Thanks in part to all that meat and dairy, and the proliferation of fat and sugar in processed foods, nearly one third of Americans are obese, and close to two-thirds are overweight.

Those meat factories, by virtue of their intense speed and volume, maim and cripple tens of thousands of workers each year – many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America, discarded and replaced every few months. Our meat supply, and our fruit and vegetable harvests, rely on this steady flow of cheap, highly exploitable, disposable labor.

The manufacture and transport of this superabundance runs on oil and diesel. The average food item on your supermarket shelf has traveled at least 1,500 miles, and all that long-distance shipping requires millions of gallons of diesel fuel. On today's industrial farm, giant tractors and combines spew diesel fumes and kick up dust pollution (now a serious health threat in the Central Valley and other areas), while huge single-crop harvests are coaxed by 15 million tons of petroleum-based fertilizers each year. Experts such as Cornell University's Dr. David Pimentel have found that U.S. agriculture – largely through its reliance on petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides – uses some 400 gallons of fossil fuels a year to feed every American. That's more than 100 billion gallons of oil and oil equivalents used in the United States annually just to manufacture food.

The bulk of the food in your cart is owned by a handful of powerful corporations that exercise increasing control over what we eat, how it is made, how much it costs, and who produces – and profits from – it. Due to this corporate takeover, more than 15,000 farmers are economically disappeared each year (that's one farm every half hour), the victims of market centralization and the profit exigencies of food corporations and supermarkets. As farms go under, the social and economic fabric of rural communities is shattered, and generations of skilled growers are lost.

A menu for change

If we are to have a truly healthy cornucopia that sustains society, the entire system of making, distributing, and marketing food must be sustainable. What's needed is a whole new way of thinking about food – one that encompasses health, affordability, accessibility, ecological sustainability, and an economics that enables small- and medium-size farms to keep growing food (and poor people to afford it).

More broadly, we need systemic overhaul: serious antitrust measures to disrupt corporate monopoly control over food; a phased-in restructuring of the $20 billion in annual farm subsidies from large-scale agribusiness to sustainable, diversified organic farms; aggressive regulation (and enforcement) of the meat industry's shoddy food safety practices and mistreatment of its workers; a ban or serious reduction in the toxic pesticides dumped on our food; and major public investment in community food security projects – such as farmers markets and locally produced school lunches – that connect small local producers with consumers to supply healthy, affordable, sustainably produced food (the U.S. Department of Agriculture ladled out just $4.6 million for such efforts this year).

There are many other ideas afloat promoted by groups across the country. Many advocates are moving "beyond organic," cultivating markets for local, small-scale farmers, and challenging a corporate-dominated food system by creating direct economic relationships between growers and consumers. With corporations like General Mills and Kraft cashing in on the $13 billion-a-year organic boom, activists are fighting to protect and improve federal organic standards, and warn that a corporate takeover could lead to a watered-down definition of organics and poor environmental practices (for instance, large-scale monocrop organic farms, while reducing pesticides, still can erode soil and deplete biodiversity).

Every time we shop or dine we participate – intentionally or not – in this intensely destructive food system. Unless, of course, we have the time, knowledge, and money to seek out something different. Our mundane everyday purchases – at the supermarket, convenience outlet, fast-food joint, health food store, or farmers market – are investments in either the dominant agribusiness system or an alternate one that prizes consumer health as well as economic and environmental sustainability.

Yet individual consumption changes are just the beginning. The solution to today's agribusiness madness must amount to more than merely creating new markets for the products we cherish – more than rehabilitating "bad" corporations and avoiding fast food. Activists and concerned gastronomes must (and many do) press for system-wide change and public policy overhaul.

Otherwise, lacking fundamental change, we all suffer: some directly, from food poisonings and foreclosed farms, others gradually, from pesticide sprayings and fat-laden, carcinogenic diets. There are only short-term winners: large-scale subsidized farmers and agribusiness executives and shareholders. But even they must eat.

Christopher D. Cook is an award-winning journalist, former Bay Guardian city editor, and author of Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us (New Press), from which this piece was adapted. For more information go to www.dietforadeadplanet.com.