Resilience on the brain

Warren Belasco is taking me on a fascinating and thorough trip down memory lane in Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, which I plan to review later. In a chapter on the modernists’ take on the future of food, Belasco makes a point that speaks to resilience, even if he doesn’t use the word:

Vulnerable to numerous maladies and very expensive to feed, house, and maintain, these hybrids [chickens] required a lot of chemicals, drugs, and machinery. These higher input costs favored further concentration of production, which in turn increased biological and economic vulnerability—a feedback loop resulting, almost literally, from putting too many eggs in too few baskets." (195)

Belasco briefly puts his finger on the efficiency trap that the animal industry has fallen into. The more efficient the animal, the more precarious and input-intensive it becomes to (ab)use it.

As a sidenote, I love making connections like this. I also love Belasco’s prose. It’s hard to tell from this quote, but he strikes the perfect balance, in my opinion, between an didactic and extravagant style.

Photo from Wikipedia: A White Leghorn, the most popular commercial layer.