Bryan Walsh, “America’s Food Crisis and How to Fix It,” Time, August, 20, 2009

Describing an Iowa pig’s miserable, short life as “the state of your bacon–circa 2009,” this author recaps the “horror stories about the food industry” and how he believes things have gotten worse. “The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices,” Walsh writes. “But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can’t even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming–our energy-intensive food system uses 19 percent of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy. And perhaps worst of all, our food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous.”

Some Americans are working to transform the way the country eats, Walsh notes, citing as examples ranchers and farmers who are raising sustainable food, scathing documentaries like Food Inc. and investigative journalists like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. But he believes that for most people, the price of food will remain the biggest obstacle to how willing they are to rethink the way they shop for—and eat—food.

“What we really need to do is something Americans have never done well, and that’s to quit thinking big,” Walsh writes. “We already eat four times as much meat and dairy as the rest of the world, and there’s not a nutritionist on the planet who would argue that 24-ounce steaks and mounds of buttery mashed potatoes are what any person needs to stay alive.”