Seeing Through Industrial Food's 'Personal Responsibility' Smoke Screen

I grew up in a home where family
meals were the norm. Nearly every night, nine of us would crowd around
the kitchen table to enjoy a home-cooked meal together, recount our
days, laugh and argue, celebrating each unique personality's contribution
to the whole. Each meal made the fabric of our family stronger. Those
experiences have stayed with me as I've grown and started a family of
my own, where I happily continue the tradition of sitting down together
nightly to share a meal and exchange stories.

For us, food is at the core
of what makes us strong, happy and healthy as a family and as individuals.
It isn't about calories, nutrients, micro nutrients and so on. It's
about engaging our senses, strengthening our community by buying local
foods whenever possible and sharing with our friends and neighbors.
It's about creating a healthy foundation for our growing children.

We knowingly spend a greater
portion of our income on food than the average American household, which
works because we forgo things that bring us less value, e.g., cable
television, new cars, fancy vacations and more. This sort of conscious
decision making is at the core of personal responsibility, and is something
we work hard at every day. Living in a rural community, surrounded by
farms and dairies and being outside the reach of most mainstream media
surely helps.

But today, the individual's
ability to exercise personal responsibility has been severely compromised
by our industrial food system. Yet defenders of the status quo consistently
use "personal responsibility" as a smoke screen to cover the
tracks of industrial food, tracks that run roughshod over the mirage
of choice and personal responsibility.

It is clear that industrial
food knowingly develops and promotes food-like substances
that make us fat, spread diet-related diseases and disregard unsustainable
impacts on our environment. Backed by hundreds of billions of dollars
in product development, marketing, advertising and lobbying, along with
government regulations favoring industrial food, there is seemingly
nothing standing in their way.

Except for those who believe
it is time to rein in processed foods. Our numbers are rapidly growing,
making us increasingly capable of driving real, meaningful change, especially
through entrepreneurial means (see Pro
Food). These changes
will take many forms, but here is one that I find particularly compelling.

First, we significantly reduce
the number of highly processed food-like products (and the many empty
calories they deliver). Next, we repopulate those now-empty shelves
with whole and minimally-processed foods. Finally, with fewer processed
foods, which take up considerable floor space in today's supermarkets,
we begin replacing these unsustainable retail dinosaurs with intimate,
community-oriented food stores (<5,000 square feet), designed from
the ground up, to help consumers expand in-home food preparation, what
we used to call "cooking." And with triple-bottom-line operating
models (see Pro
Food advantages),
these new stores will sustainably balance people, planet and profits,
something industrial food unfortunately can't do without ultimately
destroying itself.

Clearly, such changes would
rock today's industrial food system, but leaving it as is perpetuates
the problems we face. As most major food companies are publicly traded
they must increase sales, reduce costs or both, quarter after quarter,
to increase shareholder value or face the consequences (Note: shareholders
(owners) are not the same as stakeholders, which would include eaters,
whose interests, beyond food expenditures, are secondary). This singular
bottom line focus drives them to do whatever is necessary to maximize
profit, which they typically achieve through sales of new products with
high initial profit margins. That is upwards of 17,000 new "food"
products are introduced
every year.

These highly processed, engineered
foods, never before seen, but often extending an established brand name,
are not guaranteed financial success, so food companies invest tens
of billions of dollars every year in sophisticated marketing programs
and advertising campaigns to build demand, with a heavy emphasis on
hawking heavily sugared wares to children and convenience to their ever
more harried parents. Undeniably, these highly sophisticated product
development and demand creation engines are significantly influencing
consumers; worse, these campaigns are often coordinated to affect us
in subconscious ways: the potent combination of food science and marketing
at work!

Without continuous financial
improvements, the value of food companies would suffer greatly. That
isn't happening. Consider that since 1979 (30 years ago) General Mills
stock price is up 577%, while Wal-Mart has registered an astonishing
420,000% increase (from less than $0.12 per share to $49.14; hasn't
always been in food retail, but rapidly ascended to #1 in category). Then there's Cargill with estimated
revenues at $120 billion, which would make it a Top 10 publicly traded
company. Clearly, food companies are meeting shareholder expectations,
which doesn't bode well for consumers, who are largely "responsible"
for this financial success.

As for the significant financial
pain and organizational upheaval the changes Pro Food envisions will
have on the industrial food system, while the transition will be difficult,
not sudden, America's entrepreneurs will get a running start. And if
there is one thing we can count on, it's our entrepreneurs: the best
in the world at picking themselves up, brushing themselves off and getting
back to work.

The results of such a revolution
in how we grow, process and consume food will be significant. Sustainable
businesses will become the norm, offering rewarding careers for people
interested in more than a single bottom line. Regional economies will
begin rebuilding after being decimated for decades by large food retailers.
Our food system, through hard work, sustainable technologies and a longer-term
perspective, will regain its balance with nature. And, most important,
food will become an enjoyable, enriching part of our daily lives, rather
than just another accessory.

Join the Pro Food Revolution...already
in progress.