By Tom Philpott
Remember when gas was a dollar a gallon? The era of the fast-food "dollar menu" may be going the same way. Cheap food has been with us for a while. After World War II, global grain prices fell steadily for decades. US and European farms scaled up, resorted to synthetic and mined fertilizers and pesticides, invested in massive planting and harvesting machines as well as novel seed varieties. All of this pushed crop yields into the stratosphere—and crop prices into the dirt. The era of cheap food was upon us, giving rise to things like corn-sweetened Big Gulps and the dumping of boatloads of US corn on foreign markets. But now things are changing fast...[continued]
