Louise Fresco challenges popular assumptions that mechanized agriculture is inherently bad. In her talk today at the TED conference in Long Beach, Fresco also took on the romanticization of small-scale farming as the only environmentally sound way to grow food.
“Doing everything by hand is simplistic and it’s not moral,” she said, because it can’t produce enough food to meet the world’s growing demand and it keeps those farmers in poverty.
Fresco/TED photo/James D. Davidson
Fresco, who teaches at the University of Amsterdam, illustrated her point by talking about our relationship to bread, a food staple around the world. She held up a loaf of Wonder Bread and a whole-grain bread made in small bakery and asked the 1,200 attendees which they preferred. The resounding answer: the whole grain loaf.
“Don’t despise it,” she chided them. “It symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become available and affordable to all.”
Fresco said people choose the loaf made by a small bakery because we associate it with a romanticized view of how food was grown before mass farming. “We have a mythical image of how agriculture was in the past. The reality was quite different.”
Mechanization of agriculture decreased the number of people working in back-breaking agricultural jobs, she said, and increased food production — by 25 percent since the 1960s. But it also often damaged the environment, she said.
“We need clever, low-key mechanization that avoids the problems of large scale mechanization,” she said. Fresco advocates a regional approach to the entire food network, including what she calls urban food systems. “I want to see fish farms in basements. Greenhouses on top of buildings.”
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