Originally more passive-aggressively titled “We’re Going to Have to Learn to Love Factory Farms,” the Newspaper of Record later amended that to the also passive-aggressive but less aggressive “Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food.”
First come the standard, pseudo-environmentalist nods to Climate Change™ and how humans are very bad for growing and eating food, the insinuation being that we should all probably just kill ourselves for the earth.
Via The New York Times (emphasis added):
“Industrial agriculture” is a phrase used to signify “bad,” evoking toxic chemicals, monoculture crops, confined animals, the death of the small family farm and all kinds of images people don’t like to associate with their food. Factory farms are a constant target of environmentalists, documentarians, animal rights activists, spiritual leaders like Pope Francis and the Indian mystic Sadhguru, and leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.
Even the manosphere podcaster Joe Rogan has called for banning them*, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary, has blamed industrial agriculture for making us sick and fat. The United Nations has pointed out that it does $3 trillion in damage to the global environment a year.
*No one ever bothers to explain what “manosphere” means beyond “media that men disproportionately consume” or why that is necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a pejorative slapped onto any outlet or platform disfavored by corporate state media that’s taken at face value to mean “bad and scary.”
Related:‘Critical Disability Studies’ Professor: Fatphobia ‘Undergirds’ Ozempic Craze
Continuing:
Agriculture in general does have real environmental downsides. It’s the leading driver of water pollution and shortages, deforestation and biodiversity loss. It generates one-fourth of the greenhouse gases that heat up the planet.
And it’s eating the earth. It has already overrun about two of every five acres of land on the planet, and farmers are on track to clear an additional dozen Californias worth of forest by 2050. That would be a disaster for nature and the climate, because the carbon dioxide released by converting wild landscapes into farms and pastures is already the most damaging source of agricultural emissions, worse than methane from cow burps or nitrous oxide from fertilizer.
Related: Letitia James vs. Beef: The War on Food
Then things get interesting, because The New York Times has to toe the line between appealing to the pseudo-environmentalist sensibilities of its readers while at the same time promoting the interests it actually cares about, which are those of its techno-fascistic corporate state partners.
So the key point of the article, if you read between the lines, is the demonization of small-time, backyard-style farming operations to be replaced by giant corporate ag ops (Bill Gates being the largest landowner in the United States at this point, upon which he will grow the Frankenfood that fuels his technocratic dystopian dreams).
Related: UK Mandates Backyard Chicken Registration To Fight Bird Flu
Continuing:
Old MacDonald-style farms where soil is nurtured with love and animals have names rather than numbers may sound environmentally friendly. But their artisanal grains and grass-fed beef are worse for nature than chemical-drenched corn and feedlot-fattened beef because they require much more land for each calorie they produce…
Europe and the United States are flirting with back-to-nature agriculture, too, but that would ultimately just outsource more production, pollution and deforestation to the developing world…
The key point, obscured by our cultural nostalgia for the quaint farmsteads of yesteryear, is that old-fashioned agriculture made much more of a mess when it replaced nature than intensive industrial agriculture makes when it replaces old-fashioned agriculture. Every farm, even the scenic ones with red barns and rolling hills that artists paint and writers sentimentalize, is a kind of environmental crime scene, an echo of whatever carbon-rich wilderness it once replaced.
If you didn’t know how these people operate and their true motivations, you might be forgiven for assuming these are bleeding-heart liberals. Rather, that’s just the marketing technique to induce the rubes to clamor onboard. At the true core of their desire is totalitarian control over the food supply, because a dependent slave is a compliant slave.
It’s very sleazy and underhanded, the modus operandi.
