The United States Is Next: Why Our Food System Is More Fragile Than We Think — And How to Build Something Better Before It Fails
🌿 THE ROOT
The United States food system is built on fossil fuel energy, global supply chains, and corporate consolidation — the same foundations that collapsed in North Korea and Cuba in 1990. The question is not whether this fragility is real. It is what communities choose to do about it before the crisis arrives.
THE UNITED STATES IS NEXT: WHY OUR FOOD SYSTEM IS MORE FRAGILE THAN WE THINK
INTRODUCTION
In the previous post in this series we examined two nations that faced near-identical energy crises in 1990 and produced radically different outcomes. The uncomfortable question this raises is whether the United States resembles the pre-collapse conditions of those nations more closely than most people realize.
The evidence suggests it does.
THE NUMBERS
Fossil energy consumption in the United States is five times the world average. To meet the caloric needs of its population, the US expends three times as much energy per capita as developing countries. The average food production process consumes ten times more calories of fossil fuel energy than the actual caloric energy found in the food produced.
Only a fifth of agricultural fuel consumption goes to the actual growing of food. The rest goes to processing, packaging, transportation, and storage. Around 28 percent goes to fertilizer manufacturing, 7 percent to irrigation, 34 percent to the machines used to plant, till, and harvest.
34 percent of fruit consumed in the US is imported, 12 percent of vegetables, 40 percent of lamb, and 76 percent of fish and seafood. Between 1982 and 1998 alone, food miles increased 22 percent.
This is a system of extraordinary complexity and extraordinary fragility.
THE PARALLEL IS CLEAR
The high-input, high-mechanization model used in American agriculture mirrors closely the pre-collapse conditions of both North Korea and Cuba in 1990. The fundamental vulnerability is identical.
A system that cannot function without cheap fossil energy is a system that will fail when that energy becomes unavailable or unaffordable. We have already seen the early signals — in food price spikes driven by oil price volatility, in supply chain failures exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, in the accelerating loss of topsoil.
THE BIODIVERSITY EMERGENCY
China once had 10,000 wheat varieties in 1949. By 1970 only one-tenth remained. In the United States, 95 percent of cabbage varieties have been lost, 91 percent of maize, 94 percent of peas, 81 percent of tomatoes.
A crop does not become extinct when the last plant dies. It becomes extinct when it loses its ability to evolve. In 1970, eighty percent of America's maize crop was destroyed by a single blight that swept through ten million acres of genetically similar plants. That was a warning. The response was more chemicals, not more diversity.
WHAT COMMUNITIES CAN DO NOW
The Cuban model offers the clearest practical roadmap. Cuba succeeded because it invested in local food production before the crisis hit. Because it built cooperative structures. Because it maintained soil health through organic practices. Because it preserved biodiversity.
None of these things require a government mandate to begin. They begin in gardens, in community cooperatives, in the choice to know your farmer, in the decision to invest in local food systems rather than global supply chains.
The Iroquois Confederacy — the Haudenosaunee — held a principle that every deliberation must consider the impact on the next seven generations. The Navajo frame development in terms of circles — family, environment, economics, and spiritual life — rather than a quarterly bottom line.
These are not ancient philosophical curiosities. They are design principles for food systems that have sustained human communities for millennia.
THE SELVA TIERRA RESPONSE
The ecological training center that Selva Tierra is building in Costa Rica is a direct response to everything documented in this series.
The institute will be a working system — growing food, building soil, preserving seed diversity, training community members in regenerative agricultural practice, and making that knowledge freely available to the surrounding region.
It begins with land. It begins with soil. It begins with the decision that food sovereignty matters enough to build for.
We are building for it.
Stay connected. Stay wild.
Related reading: Two Nations, Two Responses | How Corporate Agriculture Captured the World's Food Supply | Regenerative vs Sustainable