King Corn...

Continuing my fascination with the global food supply chain, I watched a documentary called "King Corn."

I just love this kind of stuff...it tells a comprehensive story about something that is such a HUGE part of our daily lives (more than we even realize) and sheds a new perspective on it.

Farm subsidies, electoral politics, obesity, diabetes, civilization itself...these things are all connected DEEPLY to corn.

Frankly, for me, it's opened my eyes to nutrition and the idyllic notion of "farm grown" has come crashing down.

It's also made me aware just how much risk we are assuming in some of our eating habits.

I haven't eaten meat or chicken in over a year...and that's not going to change any time soon after seeing what I saw.

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Food Shortages and the Downfall of Civilization...

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Some days, it's tough to not being pessimistic about the long-range future of civilization.

Today's contributor? A fascinating article in Scientific American called "Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?"

The author brings together a number issues, including climate change, population growth, lowering marginal food crop yields (including diversion to ethanol) and reduced water tables to forecast a pretty bleak future..unless dramatic action is taken soon.

Like a Hollywood exec who says, "oh, that scripts is like Bambi meets Rambo" or whatever, it seems like this is the same plot with different actors as the current movie we're in (the economy.)

Whether it is "death by a thousand cuts" or preferring "Chronic to Acute Pain," we as a society (and this extends to companies and individuals as well), are just not very good at saying, "ok, let's make some big sacrifices now so that we are in really good shape tomorrow."

Obviously, this isn't always the case, but it just feels like when we have a ton of evidence that, in some respect, we're headed off a cliff (mortgage mess), that we tend to end up in a situation where we drive off the cliff and then fix the problem (as opposed to just stopping beforehand.)

In the grand scheme of things, historically, the stakes may not have been so high, but in a global interconnected, inter-dependent world, the stakes are high... Climate change, a nuclear/rogue Iran, food shortages, water.

The thing is...I don't have an answer, so I'm just venting here.

(One fact in the article I found interesting was how some countries are leasing land in other countries to protect their food supply, so it's not hard to see a scenario where states that are failing or poor simply sell off land to rich states....say Sudan selling part of its country to China...literally changing the concept of nation-states.)

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