Truckloads of Roma tomatoes, open at the top, roar down Highway 43 heading to food processors.  The trucks have large fiberglass tubs that are rigged to dump the tomatoes into a hopper and be easily rinsed out by hoses.  Looking into the hoppers I see tomatoes in all states of ripening and decomposition, all destined to be made into tomato sauce, tomato soup, tomato paste and the myriad of other processed food products that render the tomato.  All will be thrown in together in one happy processed gelatinous glob, the hopper rinsed (if the driver has time) and the truck will make it's trip back up the valley to get more.

Highway 43 connects with High 99 at an interchange surrounded by strip malls.  We head north up the valley along a full irrigation canal.  After a while the highway begins to cross dry riverbeds.  Sadly, the names of the extinct rivers are posted on the bridges.  These are not rivers any longer, they're just convenient alleys for run-off if the irrigation canals overflow.  The signs now are tombstones. The Kings River, the Kern, even the San Joaquin River itself are all dead.

Spilled tomatoes periodically dot the edge of the highway.  We pass rows and rows of grapes.  Most of them are picked now, lying on the ground between the rows of vines on brown paper waiting to become "sun ripened" raisons.  Since it is late afternoon I see in the distance the hundred or so workers that picked grapes all day being herded onto buses in the center of a stripped cotton field.  Their shoulders are stooped from the labor, they are tired and dirty and cotton clings to their boots as they shuffle onto the busses.  They don't seem to notice.  A tired oily crow picks at the drying grapes.

Dotting the fallow fields are bright piles of yellow and white chemicals.  The imported chemicals wait to be tilled into the overused earth, artificially inducing the dull sandy loam to produce another crop.  Blue plastic industrial drums are being dumped from a pickup along fields where dark brown workers connect aluminum irrigation pipes.  The snow white pickup truck eases between the rows with the windows rolled up tight and two overweight white men in John Deer hats in the cab.  No one smiles.  None of the irrigation workers even look up.   A brown worker rolls the drums off the back of the truck intermittently.  The truck does not stop.

This is the land we created.  Every time we go to the grocery store and pass the local fruit stand, the farmers market or our community garden we choose to support this bleak industrial aberration of farming.  This dirty, polluted and unnatural environment that produces our food is our all our making.  While we are greeted in the grocery store by bright packages with pictures of lovely little family farms, the reality is we don't get food from there at all.  Food comes from this dismal place.  It next goes to a factory run by chemists and engineers whose scope of production extends out into the natural world in the form of factory farms.  Most chickens never see the sun.  Most cattle never leave a pen.  Everything grown in the San Joaquin is in soil that would not support a cactus were it not for imported chemicals and fertilizer made from imported oil.  We never stop to ask ourselves how safe is food grown in polluted air?  How safe is food grown in soil that would not support any life if not for imported sewage sludge from San Francisco?  We see the nice picture of a barn and a chicken on the meat package and put it in our shopping cart, believing in the lie. 

Unfortunately our capitalist economy supports this lie very well.  Strong distribution pipelines, heavily subsidized farms (ironically the San Joaquin is politically conservative in light of the numerous hand outs), efficient food processing and mechanization make for good economic partners.  But if any part of this pipeline breaks, the fragile San Joaquin agri-superstore will be useless and as a result you will not be fed.  Twenty-five percent of the nations agriculture is from California.  Most of that food is produced right here in the San Joaquin.

Any interruption in petroleum production would not just stop the transportation of your food coming from the San Joaquin.  It would stop the production.  Those bright blue drums of nitrogen fertilizer were not magically made at the local farm co-op.  They came from petroleum refineries.   The bright colored piles of chemicals introduced to the dry desert loam were first created in factories in other parts of the country (and world) and transported.  Everything that is food that comes out of the San Joaquin is made of raw ingrediants going into the San Joaquin.  A long distribution chain fed by oil that starts in another desert in far off Saudi Arabia. 

Every time we buy food, every time we eat, we are part of the agricultural process.  It is far reaching, drawing from distant lands and issuing from places we are not often aware of.  Agriculture has gone beyond the family friendly farm and backyard garden and is being controlled by giant businesses, government regulations, and very long supply chains.  Agriculture is us.  We are what we eat and we are eating some pretty strange things these days.  Things from dark and dirty parts of the earth. Things that, given a choice, I don't think we would eat if we knew about them.