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Meaghin Kennedy is a writer and photographer who advocates for a sustainable food system. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
The failure of federal efforts to feed the poor cannot be divorced from our nation’s agricultural policy, the congressional committees that dictate that policy, and the Department of Ag that implements it. Hunger and malnutrition in a country of abundance must be seen as consequences of a political and economic system that spends billions to [...]
I have a confession: I didn’t read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food until last month. I’ve had it shelved on the food section of our bookcase for several years, but every time I started to pick it up, I started another book instead. I don’t think there’s a reason to read too deeply into [...]
“Why can’t we walk into a supermarket in December and buy an amazing tomato?” That’s the question Barry Estabrook uses as a jumping off point for his new book, Tomatoland. For me, this complicated question begets two other questions: do we want to? Should we want to? When people first begin to eat seasonally, they [...]
The CAFO Reader has been a long (clearly, I started over four months ago!) and challenging read. I couldn’t breeze through each section, listlessly absorbing information. I labored over each essay, taking notes in my attempt to grasp the complicated negatives of this overarching system. Here’s a quote I recently read by Barry Estabrook, author of [...]
Part Six of The CAFO Reader may be drably titled “Technological Takeover”, but several of the section titles were more to the point: Franken Food and Nuclear Meat. What image comes into your head when you hear the phrase ‘technological takeover’? I’d say something like machines taking over the world. If someone asked the same [...]
“When we demand the highest quality food, we promote our farmers.” I attended a panel discussion several weeks ago at NYU that corresponded perfectly with the section I just finished in The CAFO Reader–in fact, the timing of the panel felt almost like I had planned it. On April 14th, Civil Eats sponsored a discussion [...]
I found Part 4 of The CAFO Reader to be dense and slightly repetitive. To clarify, it’s still a vitally important section to read—it just took me longer to sift through, especially as the authors started to repeat each other! Before starting this section, I already possessed some background knowledge on the small and diminishing [...]
“We are what we eat eats.” Each summer in elementary school, my brother and I would participate in the summer library program. The program involved reading a set number of books (which being the bookworm I was, I would complete before two weeks of summer had passed) and various themed programming. I remember entire summers [...]
“Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm. Which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure nor depended on large quantities of commercial fertilizer.” –Wendell Berry Part Two of The CAFO Reader moves from the higher level pathological explanations behind the creation and justification of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) to eight [...]
Fittingly enough, Part 1 of The CAFO Reader starts from the true beginning of the development of industrial meat production. Rather than explore the physical formation of the first factory farm (though, that is touched upon briefly), the five authors investigate the underlying justification of CAFOs through explorations of the mechanistic philosophy of Galileo, the [...]
