“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Do you know who said that? Someone very smart. Food is not just for energy. Food is healing. Mentally healing, physically healing and spiritually healing. I think most people recognize these facets of food. But rarely do we sit back and think of the way food is brought to the table. It is through the most important industry on Earth with thousands of years of tradition and experience, agriculture.

If you know me, you may know that I have a strange obsession with agriculture, especially with sustainable agriculture. I didn’t grow up on a farm. I don’t know much about growing food. Yet, I fantasize over a world that grows food sustainably with little damage to the environment. Where every fruit and vegetable is bright and delicious. Every eggplant tastes like it was sun-kissed in Sicily. Where there is no shame in eating meat, knowing it was humanely raised and slaughtered. Chemicals and pesticides are of no concern. There are only organically grown foods that don’t cause stomach cancer. Shopping locally at your farmers market with your tote bag and food products come and go with the seasons.

This is my dream and there is currently no hope on it becoming our reality. Every fruit and vegetable is dull and grown on synthetic fertilizer. Our meat comes from unnaturally accelerating livestocks growth by overfeeding them. Fattening them up fast to slaughter, making turnover quicker and keeping costs lower. Agribusiness has cleverly sautéed agriculture into a mix of science, government subsidies, and environmental disasters. This model for mass profits created a dependency on cheap foods that Americans can not imagine living without.

Our current agricultural nightmare is actually quickly coming to an end. If we keep our current course we will have no more trees to cut down to grow food and all of our soil will be dried up.  Agriculture will fail to feed the billions of people on Earth creating the worst food shortage in history.

I know what you’re thinking, “This won’t happen, we will figure it out before then.”

I feel the same way. Human intellect will science our way out of these issues by creating crops that can grow under terrible conditions. We will grow meat in laboratories. Create an entirely new agricultural industry that may be more sustainable but it wouldn’t be any more natural. Even if this does happen, which is highly unlikely but currently seems like best case scenario (in terms of humanity’s survival), this isn’t the dream — pure, natural and delicious foods will forever be lost.

We quickly need to reevaluate our current system but agriculture isn’t regarded as a problem. Politicians and the media don’t cover it even though it is one of the most pressing and consequential issues we face. Agriculture not only affects our food supply, but our collective health, environment and economy. It has been my long held belief that if we fix agriculture, we can fix many issues including health care, global warming, immigration and much more. In more ways than one, agriculture is the unrecognized intersection of the problems we face today as a nation, but it can also be the root of the solutions we seek.