The New York Times: To Treat Food Poisoning, Use More Poison

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No, no. no! Bulldoze this. Plow it, spray it, and plant just one thing! It’s the American way.

What used to be called journalism, when it was a profession dedicated to informing people about their world, should be rebranded journalitis — an inflammatory infection of the body politic that can lead to sepsis and death. There is no better example than the paean to industrial agriculture that appeared last week in the once-iconic New York Times. The Times and other former bastions of excellence in journalism, such as CBS News, the Christian Science Monitor,  the Los Angeles Times and so on, are like elderly movie stars — they are still capable of flashes of ability that remind us why we once loved them, but mostly they are emaciated, irritable, drooling shadows of their former selves.

The point was driven home when the New York Times brandished the following headline: “China’s Small Farms Are Fading. The World May Benefit.” I went through all the manifestations of cartoon-character astonishment — my eyes bugged out, my lower jaw hit the floor with a clang, and all four of my feet came off the ground and vibrated. It could not be possible, I hoped and prayed, that the Times was so ignorant of the depredations of industrial agriculture and the advances of restoration agriculture around the world that it would portray industrialization as something good for China and the world. It could not be.

Yet there it was. In the words of the article by Michael Schuman:

“the obliteration of the traditional small farms as they are consolidated into large acreages may sound tragic, as a traditional way of life gives way to modernization, much like the disappearance of the small American family farm. But  the transformation is good for China and the entire global economy.”

Good for China, one supposes, in the same way the transformation has been good for America, where toxic algae blooms stimulated by the runoff of excess agricultural fertilizer are strangling the life out of the Great Lakes, thousands of smaller lakes, and the state of Florida; where enormous dead zones with the same cause spread outward into the oceans from the mouths of all our rivers; where the overworked topsoil is dying and blowing in the wind and washing away to sea; where our food is increasingly devoid of nutrients and food laced with remnants of pesticides; where species including vital pollinators of crops are winking out of existence at a pace never seen before in human history; where the suicide rate among farmers is higher than for any other occupation — by 30 per cent. No wonder everybody wants to be like us.

But in the twisted view of industrial journalitis, the downside is ignored while the upside is hyped. To quote the article — which by the way is presented not as an op-ed opinion piece but as straight factual news:

“Bigger farms become more efficient. Those farmers can make more money. And more people are free to move to the city, creating even more consumers for Ford cars, Starbucks cappuccinos and Apple IPhones.”

I swear I am not making this up. The good news is a migration of desperate, impoverished and displaced people to already overcrowded and overpolluted cities in search of a place to get Strarbucks coffee and send texts on their IPhones. Meanwhile the land they left behind is being overrun by fossil-fuel-guzzling machinery abusing the soil, applying synthetic fertilizer and poisonous pesticides to larger and larger monocultures.

“Good for China, and the entire global economy?” I have not absorbed sentences this vacuous, uninformed and backward-looking since Donald Trump’s last tweet.

If this were journalism, as in days of yore, it would point out that China’s small farms — even today, 90 percent of them are smaller than 2.5 acres — have fed the population for centuries from plots that are diverse, organic, highly resistant to pests, diseases and droughts, and that require no synthetic chemicals, fossil fuels or cash expenditures. If this were journalism, the opportunities for applying the lessons of permaculture to make these plots even less labor-intensive and more productive would get a mention.

But that is not what we get from the New York Times. Not anymore.