Ep. 1371 Just In-Time Food

The Food Chain

Michael Olson hosts Robert Wolcott & Kaihan Krippendorff, Co-Authors, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-In-Time Transform Business, Society and Daily Life.

It is said that food now travels an average of 1200 miles from where it was grown to where it is eaten.

If one were to look forward a hundred years into the future, from a hundred years in the past – when people lived on farms and ate food they grew those farms – one would think that 1200-mile food chain of the future to be an impossibility. And yet, here we are, eating food that traveled 1200 miles to get to our dinner plate.

This 1200-mile food is very convenient for us city people: Just open the plastic container and eat. No spending hours out in the fields and gardens with shovels, rakes and hoes. Just open and eat, and move on to the more important things we conjure up to do with our time.

But wait! According to Michael Olson’s Second Law of the Food Chain, “The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in our food.”

It is a fact: those of us who eat 1200-mile food have very little control over what is, or is not, in that food. We can only trust the businesses that grow, process, package, ship, store and sell that food to deliver us real nutrition. However, we also know that the businesses that sell the least amount of essential nutritients for the highest price are the businesses that tend to stay in business. And so we wonder:

Can the technology and innovation that delivers 1200-mile food, deliver 1-mile food?
Contact: www.metrofarm.com

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