The following is excerpted from an excellent Time magazine article titled “Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food”. The piece addresses important questions about raising food in America.

What’s wrong with cheap food and cheap meat in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don’t receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories—some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s—but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it’s no surprise we’re so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.

So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It’s clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down—a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones. Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million—with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.

It’s that very efficiency that’s led to the problems and is in turn spurring a backlash.

A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farm workers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits—and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades—that’s hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren’t the enemy—and they deserve real help. We’ve transformed the essential human profession—growing food—into an industry like any other. “We’re hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm,” says Hahn Niman. “We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it’s enjoyable work.”

To read the full article in TIME, click here