Rousseau was a romantic. And like most romantics he overlooks some details.

Fact being that people didn't get into farming because they just happen to need a hobby. He isn't entirely wrong in his observation: "Food grows everywhere, that's not really the problem."

Food does grow everywhere. Problem is that it may only be eatable once a year. Or in a form that it grows in may not be digestible by humans. Or it may be so dispersed that a single human would need to harvest the output of hundreds or acres, or spend every waking hours harvesting or processing it, to survive.

Organized farming and herding is a result of the simple desire for people to have a consistent and predictable supply of food that doesn't require the monopolization of every waking hour to keep from starving.

For all of its faults modern agriculture has done pretty well at providing a steady and predictable supply of usable, healthy food in amounts that keep the cost low enough that even the poorest in this society can afford to eat.

Go back in time just a hundred years or so and if you look closely you will find that the 'good old days' were not so very good. Many people literally starved to death. Nutritional deficiencies were rampant. Even people with enough food were eating food that was so tainted that a considerable percentage died every year. During the Spanish-American war more soldiers died of food poisoning that from enemy action.

The popular press is ripe with claims of how vaccines are poisoning or killing people. But the writers are seldom old enough or well researched enough to understand that diseases stalked the land and killed seemingly at random. So many fell or where afflicted that barely a family existed that didn't have at least one member that was affected. Everyone knew that vaccines were not entirely safe. But they also knew that they were way better than fighting the odds without them.

Which is my point. Nobody likes industrialization and industrialized farming. Nobody loves the risk and uncertainty of the poisons we use on our crops or the compromises to individual liberty and freedom that comes with regulation. Nobody likes that a certain number of children given a vaccine will have a reaction that may cripple or kill them. Nobody likes the down side of all these adaptations and compromises we have made.

But before we throw these adaptations aside we need to think long and hard about why these changes were made. Fact being that things were bad. So bad that many in this cloistered modern existence have forgotten how bad they were.

When entire families were hollowed out and crippled by food poisoning the intervention of the government and institution of inspections, regulations and controls was seen as a small price to pay for the safety gained. But now, five generations later, the memory of the scourge of tainted food is long gone. Just a footnote in a dusty history book for most.

The industries regulated tell us that regulations are not necessary. All in the cause of freedom they say. Overlooking that all their sweet talk about being responsible citizens and rigorously regulating themselves was heard before. They failed to toe-the-line a hundred years ago and there is no reason to believe that things have changed.

There is saying abut you never know what you have before it is gone.

For all its frustrations, compromises and achingly painful distortions of the human spirit imposed on us by modern life I have no desire to return to 1890. People in 1890 actively promoted and worked toward what we have now because for most Americans the majority of the time sucked.

If you want to return to that day and time do it. But remember that most of the stories about the 'good old days' were were not written by the average people of that day.