Page 18 - SpringBoard_CloseReading_Workshop_Grade6_Flipbook

From
Time to Become a “Locavore”
by Neil Peirce
1 The first OK to buy spinach after the big E. coli scare was for crops shipped out of Colorado or Canada. Then the Food and Drug Administration cleared California spinach — except the suspect packages sent out by Natural Selection Foods.
2 Great. But why is three-quarters of all U.S. spinach grown in California, then shipped to markets as far distant as 3,500 highway miles? And especially at this time of year, when spinach can be grown successfully almost anywhere?
3 Agribusiness — that’s why. Supermarket chains, grocery wholesalers and fast-food producers all calculate that it is easier to maximize sales and profits by buying from big factory farms with reliable yields. Why fool with thousands of small farms or co- ops when you can get a standardized crop, packaged to precise specifications, priced at negotiated levels, trucked and delivered by known shippers? And when planes, ships and instant communications make it easy to import seasonal products from virtually anywhere on the globe?
4 Small wonder, then, that most of America’s farmers must struggle to stay in business and on the land — hundreds of thousands have failed in the past decade. Locally grown food makes up less than 1 percent of the $900-billion food industry.
5 And for that, we all pay — year in, year out, and far beyond the inconvenience of a single instance of contamination wiping a popular vegetable off grocery shelves in 50 states.
6 Pick your cost, they’re all serious:
• The loss of local farm families rips at the social fabric of communities, emptying
church and school ranks, removing customers from local cafes, farm-supply and
hardware stores.
• Much of America’s most fertile farmland is around major cities, imperiled by
suburbanization. Lost farms feed just one machine: sprawl.
• Next, there’s the gluttonous energy demand of a nationalized food system.
Industrialized agriculture requires huge amounts of fossil fuel for fertilizers, to power heavy farming machinery, for elaborate plastic wrappings, to refrigerate foods during shipping, and for the big trucks burning diesel fuel on their transcontinental trips.
7 Richard Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University calculates that produce travels an average of 1,500 miles in three days to reach his state — and even more to the East Coast.
key ideas and deTails
Why does Peirce begin the article by talking about the shipping of spinach after the E.coli scare? How might he be playing off his reader’s emotions?
key ideas and deTails
What kinds of questions does Peirce ask in paragraph 2, and what answer does he give in paragraph 3? Why do you think he asks and then answers his own questions?
key ideas and deTails
Peirce offers a bulleted list of reasons to support his claim. What is his claim? Which reasons do you think are the most convincing, and why?
Close Reading Workshop 2 • Close Reading of Argumentative Nonfiction Texts 17
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