Food Production and Global Warming

Connecting the ills of the food system with climate change in a direct cause-effect relationship may be one of the most compelling ways to address the problems we face regarding food. Climate change is an unaviodable fact, and people who try to say otherwise are blinding themselves to reality, but then, that's nothing new. As always humanity likes to not know; it makes our day to day interactions so much easier. But, the time is coming when there will be no way not to know.
The majority of people now largely depend on a flawed system, that, no matter how it is viewed, is doomed to experience some intense shifts and upheavels. The simple truth is that we can't go on like this. People have been saying the same thing in a myriad of different ways for years, but now it is sharply apparent that the United States is a vast, lumbering, antiquated machine. Dropping vital parts left and right, it threatens to bring other countries down with it. Sad to say, but perhaps the superpower status may soon be obscured in a cloud of diesel exhaust, rich with particulate matter. The heavy stench of progress is in the air, but it is no longer clear which direction we are progressing in.
The thing about climate change is that if affects the entire world, not just specific countries. What the United States chooses to do in terms of pollution is not isolated, those decisions will spread and things will be better or worse as a result. Now here is the most obvious thing: If the food we are producing is contributing to the warming of the climate, we should start producing food in a safer manner!! If the meat people consume comes from factory farms which are ". . .responsible for eighteen percent of the world's total global warming effect-more than the emissions produced by every plane, train or steamer ship on the planet"(Lappe 106), then we should change the way those farms are structured! (Factory farms are not the only ill, monoculture is also vastly polluting).
This alone might be one way that shifts to a more sustainable food production system could be initiated and maintained. One of the powerful aspects of this shift is that it would be global and local at the same time. If individual countries made it mandatory for farm sizes to stay small, for food to be produced in beneficial ways, and for diversity to be priority than people and corporations would have to change. Laws governing what people can eat are concerning, but if they are made as a way to benefit the planet as a whole, and to stop/slow/or change the trajectory of global warming, they might be worth considering.