"We have very, very expensive food in this country."

"It's just that the prices are cheap."

So said Paul Hawken, the environmentalist, entrepreneur and author, in a speech that began Cooking for Solutions, a conference on food and the environment, accompanied by lots of marvelous eating and drinking, this week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, Calif.

The American industrial food system, he said, is bad for the planet, bad for farmworkers and bad for consumers. "How did we make destroying our land, our children and our health a big business?" Hawken asked.

This was not an upbeat way to start the two-day event, but it's hard to argue with his analysis. Big Ag produces lots of food -- particularly grain and meat -- at very cheap prices. According to the USDA (cited by Bryan Walsh in this terrific article in TIME), Americans spend less than 10 percent of their incomes on food, down from 18 percent in 1966. Farm price supports, cheap fossil fuels and vast amounts of water all drive down the price of food.

And the true social and environmental costs? Let's tally them. They include millions of tons of fertilizer that runs into rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, created an oxygen-starved dead zone that kills of sea life. Hog and chicken waste that contaminate waterways and the Chesapeake Bay. Overuse of antibiotics on animals that helps create antibiotic-resistant bacteria. If you care about animals, there's the horror of confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. We've got food safety risks. Tons of global warming pollution. And, oh yeah, an epidemic of obesity, which, again according to TIME, adds $147 billion (that's billion with a B) a year to our medical bills.

Ugh. And so, for the rest of day, scientists, activists, academics and a sprinkling of farmers and food company executives such as Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm and Margaret Wittenberg of Whole Foods Market talked about how to make our food system more sustainable.

Here are a just a few highlights:

Fish farms that mimic nature: I was surprised to learn that for the first time this year, more fish consumed in the world this year will be farmed than caught in the wild. The vast majority of salmon and shrimp consumed in the U.S., for example, is farmed, most of it in Asia. To meet predicted demand for seafood by 2020, aquaculture will have to double production. Yet fish farming has a terrible environmental reputation -- excess feed and copious waste cause water pollution, farmed fish escape into the wild and spread disease, the fish meal needed to feed them depletes marine systems.

Dr. Thierry B.R. Chopin, pictured at left, a professor of marine biology at the University of New Brunswick, has a simple idea with a technical name that can make fish farming more environmentally friendly. He raises several species of sea life -- say, Atlantic salmon, mussels and different seaweeds -- together in the same water, they complement one another ecologically and they create multiple revenue streams for the fish farmer. The idea is to duplicate some of the ocean's biodiversity. Waste from one acquatic species becomes food for another, and the seaweed cleanse the water of surplus nitrogen.(The name for this is Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture, or IMTA. Branding is not Thierry's specialty.)

"It's diversification. Don't put all your salmon eggs in the same basket," Thierry said. "It's true in agriculture. It's also true in acquaculture." A company called Cooke Aquaculture is now practicing this approach at a half dozen fish farms in the Bay of Fundy, and it wants to expand to another 8-10 sites.

LEED for Food? When tenants need new space, they can seek out LEED-certified buildings. When consumers buy wood or paper, they can look for products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Refrigerators, TVs, washer-dryers have Energy Star labels.