When my son was six we were walking around downtown and saw a Smart car and his first impression was that he could pick up the car and turn it over. He thought it was a "dumb."
The industrial food system can definitely be criticized in many ways: it produces so many calories that obesity is becoming a global problem, and fertilizer runoff has created a huge dead spot at the mouth of the Mississippi.
You certainly can't say it's stupid, though. People like Pimental will cherry pick numbers to make it look bad, but Vaclav Smil's energy analysis convincingly demonstrates the obvious: the industrial food system makes a huge amount of food at very low cost... In much of human history people have lived on the edge of famine and things are much better today than they've ever been.
The industrial food system can definitely be criticized in many ways: it produces so many calories that obesity is becoming a global problem, and fertilizer runoff has created a huge dead spot at the mouth of the Mississippi.
You certainly can't say it's stupid, though. People like Pimental will cherry pick numbers to make it look bad, but Vaclav Smil's energy analysis convincingly demonstrates the obvious: the industrial food system makes a huge amount of food at very low cost... In much of human history people have lived on the edge of famine and things are much better today than they've ever been.