In the early republic, around the War of 1812, nearly 90 percent of the population worked to produce the nation’s food; it was a grueling physical life, and in addition to being costly, the food produced was of uneven quality, in tightly limited supply, and could and did kill through disease. Now less than 3 percent of our population produces enough food to feed us all. It is easy to wax poetic about food before the rise of industry—about eating the way our grandmother’s grandmother ate—but the fact is we spend less money than almost every other country in the world on food and we spend less
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