Sick Of The Recalls!
If there is one defining reason for my interest in off-grid living and homesteading it is the steady stream of product and food recalls that bombard this nation every day of the week in every month of the year. We have toy recalls, meat recalls, candy recalls, drug recalls, pet food recalls… with 99% of them coming out of China, a country that doesn’t seem in the least concerned with the health of the planet and their own citizens – and certainly not the health of people here in North America.
It seems to me that our population is too great for our food to be produced here in the United States, especially when farmers are subsidized in a way that encourages large-scale monocropping of corn and soy bean at the expense of the diversification of our national food supply. While homesteading to grow your own food is a great solution if you have the time, land and resources, I don’t think it’s a viable option for the hundreds of millions of people who live in apartments and urban centers in North America.
Likewise, locally grown, small-scale, multi-crop, organic food growers can not possibly supply the dietary needs of that many people. And none of this is to mention the similarly mountainous problem of making our own consumer products.
Thus we are left with only two solutions, only one of which seems remotely plausable: #1 Stop breeding and #2 put pressure on our leaders so that they, in turn, put pressure on China to enforce stricter regulation on their food and product manufacturers while ramping up our onshore inspection of imports. Well there is a third choice: ignore the problem until a widespread catastrophe finally hits and wipes out a huge chunk of our population. This would be a similar alternative to solution #2 but much less desirable. So which is it going to be?
I understand and share your concern. But I don’t think we’re strictly limited to only those two options. I think we *can* grow more of our own food. A lot more. As we did during WWII and the Great Depression.
True, there are some who cannot produce much or any of their own food due to their living situations. But with a total population of less than 300 million, your statement that there are hundreds of millions living in apartment and urban centers – and who are therefore precluded from growing any food – seems overstated. (I’d be curious to see real numbers on what our population distribution really looks like at present.)
Suburbia is a nightmare of inefficiency. But it does offer this possible silver lining: lawns. I’ve heard that America currently devotes more acreage to grass lawns than to growing corn. And we grow a helluva lot of corn. You may be right that small scale production cannot meet all our needs. But it is a significant step in the right direction. It also has the advantage of being far more feasible than your two proposed solutions. Moreover, it’s within the grasp of a huge portion of our population, and it could be very rapidly implemented. Politics and diplomacy would take much, much longer to have any effect.
The average homeowner doesn’t need to become a homesteader to make a difference in their own life, merely a gardener. Homesteading is a LOT of work, but gardening on even a moderate scale is well within the reach of fully employed suburbanites. It’s all a matter of priority. I think more people will be willing to prioritize the investment in their own food than an investment in political activism, or forbearing to reproduce.