(article, Culinate staff)
Two recent New York Times articles explore the modern meat-and-milk industries in depth. The first, an op-ed by Mark Bittman, endorses synthetic meat products made from plants; doing so, says Bittman, is the right move for the health of the planet, the animals thereby saved, and yourself. (Bittman doesn't address, however, the environmental and health costs of the massive-scale soy farming and laboratory production necessary to make those fake meats.) And the second, a brief history of the American dairy industry by economics writer Adam Davidson, explains why we're awash in milk even as dairy farmers are struggling. It's the same old story, of the little guy squeezed out by the consolidated and merging big guys: bq. Dairy farming has its own 1 percent: that tiny sliver of massive farms, with thousands of cows, that make the biggest profits and are better equipped to pay agriculture-futures experts to help them manage risk. They continue to invest and grow. Unable to keep up with the changes, many smaller farms have gone out of business in the past decade.