09/12/2026
This is an interesting article about ethical diets and food production in the world. Published in tricycle magazine. It is written by a female monk who lives in Italy. Her name is Ayya soma. I'm just posting a few paragraphs here to whet your whistle.
Every morning here in Italy, I walk from a rural monastery to the nearby town for alms with my fellow monastics, and we see countless signs advertising farm land up for sale. In the past six years alone, 60,000 agricultural enterprises in Italy went out of business for the same exact reasons as in the United States, and you go to Northern Europe and you’ll find a similar situation. Twenty years ago, for example, in Ireland, Ireland had over 600 commercial vegetable growers. Today, fewer than 75 remain, and despite its fertile land, Ireland now imports over 80 percent of its food, leaving its supply chain severely vulnerable to global shocks, pandemics, wars. Sounds familiar.
This current system is designed to disrupt regional food security across the globe. Farmland is currently being absorbed by industrial conglomerates or converted into housing developments, logistics warehouses, and data centers to enrich the wealthy. Once that living land is lost, it is nearly impossible to restore it. Once again, this is by design.
When small farms vanish, we all lose. Generations of agricultural heritage, local land stewardship, and regional culture all disappear along with those farms. That is not a small thing. What disappears is what the Buddha numbers among the highest of blessings in the Mangala Sutta, bahusaccah, learning and the passing on of skills and craftsmanship, a condition that aids us in the path towards awakening.
The truth is, cheap supermarket food is a very dangerous illusion, whether it’s derived from plants or animals. So we do not pay for it at the checkout register, but we pay for this cheap food through government subsidies and through countless environmental, social, and health repercussions. Honestly, the most obvious horrible trait of this system is its perpetual cruelty towards animals. We have probably heard. About are or seen pictures of the horrible conditions of factory farming, in which animals are packed and crammed into feed lots, immersed in their own waste, routinely mutilated to prevent stress-induced aggression. Animals forced to eat food that their bodies are not built to digest, like soy, corn, and grain, which breeds systemic inflammation and disease in the animals, which is then passed on to the humans who consume them. But it’s very important that we understand that this isn’t just about animal livestock. Unfortunately, crops grown through intensive industrial agriculture, euphemistically called conventional farming, are just as destructive. Whether it’s growing soy to feed cattle or growing almonds for almond milk, conventional farming is a destructive modern invention that relies on heavy machinery, synthetic fertilizers, and toxic pesticides that strip topsoil, poison watersheds, and kill millions of field mammals, birds, reptiles, and pollinating insects every single year, but most importantly and most harmfully, I would say, it is a system that relies on human
