Conservation in the food chain
Posted by Yankee on March 27, 2006 - 12:32am
Today, the San Francisco Chronicle has a human interest piece called "The oil in your oatmeal: A lot of fossil fuel goes into producing, packaging and shipping our breakfast" that essentially distills the end of the Harper's article into a concise recounting of the amount of fossil fuel energy that goes into making "a bowl of imported McCann's Irish oatmeal topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet's Fair Trade Blend coffee."
My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. So for just over a buck and half and an hour spent reading the morning paper in my own kitchen, I'm energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I've just added a little butter, milk and a shake of salt) from a different perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one.Then what you'd be likely to see -- what's really there, just hidden from our view (not to say our taste buds) -- is about 4 ounces of crude oil. Throw in those luscious red raspberries and that cup of java (an additional 3 ounces of crude), and don't forget those modest additions of butter, milk and salt (1 more ounce), and you've got a tiny bit of the Middle East right here in my kitchen.
Maybe the author Chad Heeter is sensationalizing the case a little bit, but the issue is an important one, I think. Now, I know that many of our readers are skeptical about sustainable agriculture and whether eating local and/or organic will be able to feed the world. In all likelihood, it will not. There are way too many people in the world for that, and too many of us live in places where we cannot have access even to the staples. Besides, there was certainly transportation of food before the advent of trucks and cars, so it's not the case that increasing our reliance on local agriculture should mean the end of all oranges from Florida or lettuce from California. It simply means that we should strive to increase the production of local food so that less energy is needed to package, store, cool, and transport our food over thousands of miles. A step toward flattening the peak, if you will.
The way I see it, the call for favoring locally grown foods does not by definition have to mean relying on them exclusively. I'm not talking about what happens long after the peak—I mean right now, while we still have 6.6 billion people in the world and no immediate plans for the decimation of the population. If we can advocate for conservation of heating oil or gasoline for our cars, why can't we have a similar sort of "conservation" of long distance foods? It seems reasonable that if people opt for locally grown items whenever possible, they'll be cutting down on some unnecessary expenditure of fossil fuels.
Obviously, I'm not the modeler on TOD, but I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how many barrels of oil we would save if, say, we decreased the distance that food travels on average by 15% or 20%. (And just to head off the inevitable discussion, yes, Jevons Paradox undoubtedly applies here. We all already know that.)
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There are plenty of good arguments in favor of eating local foods whenever possible, but for me, I trust my taste buds.
I rather like the seasonality and look forward to the first parsnips, green beans, lettuce etc. Currently I'm eating: leeks, purple sprouting broccoli (yummy), swede, carrots, parsnips, celery, shallots, tuscan kale, russian red kale, salad onions, garlic, raddichio, jerusalem artichokes, squashes. I don't have a greenhouse, one would increase the variety of vegetables at this time of year. May will probably be the nadir of supply and choice - when the winter veg has run out and the early summer crops are barely starting.
Sadly I am just reaching the end of my stored onions and potatoes (have given too many away, methinks!) - I grew small amounts of 12 different varieties last year and will be planting 20 varieties in a couple of weeks time. It's quite depressing, taste-wise, eating shop bought potatoes again :-(
Since I already live on a small farm, it was pretty easy to eat about 80 percent of our food locally. Especially since we have a herd of delicious Angus cattle.
But we also bought local organic pork, chicken and fish. We have a ranch co-op already in place that sells local meats.
We also have many organic orchards here, so we had lots of apples, apricots, peaches, etc. We also canned a lot of stuff from our big garden. Have you ever tried pickled green beans? Delicious ...
We still have to buy coffee, dairy products (no local dairy) sugar and flour. This year someone is starting a local wheat farm/mill so we can localize that, too.
And of course I still have to buy ice cream ... :-)
I have: I grow a very early variety that will produce nice excellent tasting tubers but is rather prone to blight (Dore). It will produce before summer though which is the main blight season. I also grow a late variety (Texla) which shows remarkable resitance to late blight. That way I circumvent the blight problem a bit. I hope.
Posted by Ken Meter at 8:23 AM on 10 Feb 2006
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/9/211544/4045
The author has some good statistics. Among them is that California is already a net food importer. Currently it is cheaper to buy an artichoke from South American than one grown locally in California. Of course, as energy prices go up, I'm sure that will change.
As I have previously said, I think that one of the best long term investments that we can make is to invest in organic farming--if nothing else, by leasing out the land to an organic farmer. Short term, the ROI will be poor, but the point is to secure a long term supply of food. It's a win/win proposition: you can make money off Peak Oil while making a positive impact on the community (and perhaps providing a job for your unemployed college graduate).
Another positive move is to sign up for a local food coop program, whereby a group of people make monthly payments to farmers, in exchange for weekly deliveries of produce during the growing season.
It's a good way to learn farming, if you want to learn but don't have your own land yet. Also, the surplus goes to local food pantries, so you can help the community while helping yourself.
I found there is one in walking distance of my home, at a local college.
I wanted to thank you for that mention of Garret Hardin in a recent thread. I had forgotten that seminal article on the commons he wrote in 1968. It is dead-on relevant for this group. Your book suggestion is on order. I think the TOD readership might want to either reacquaint itself with, or become familiar, with this man. He is a giant.
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html
One of these days I'd like to see a thread on the tragedy of the commons, because it is the single most important concept (IMO) prerequisite to understanding how the world has gotten into its present situation, and, again in my opinion, Garrett Hardin presents unique solutions backed up by rigorous science.
The problem, of course, is that facts and scientific interpretation go contrary to what most of us want to believe.
As I have stated before, there are no limits to human self-deception, and unless and until we face up to the tragedy of the commons there can be no hope of a better world.
In the Environmental Economics class I used to teach back in the seventies, I used Hardin's "Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle" and found the freshman students, even the average ones, were able to grasp the material, and some became passionately interested in the environmental movement as a result of studying the book. Truly, it is a life-transforming volume--and the classic essay (included as an Appendix to the book) is the best place to start.
BTW, Hardin's thinking is consistent with both capitalism and mainstream economic thinking, because he insists that prices should reflect all costs, not just "accounting" or "internal" costs but also external costs as well.
I know of no economist (no matter how disreputable) who claims that "external" costs should not be taken account of in decision-making. The problem comes in how to implement the idea of internalizing external costs, and also how to implement "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon."
Obviously, markets cannot function where the commons is destroyed--and that applies not only to population increase but to pollution and to overuse of any and all natural resources.
Unfortunately, Hardin's rigorous scientific conclusions are rejected by politically correct Democrats and both religious-right and "free-market-fat-cat" Republicans. That is one reason I seldom vote for either members of either two major parties--because they both fail, and fail equally, to come to grips with the most fundamental problems.
Here it is. You hit the lotto, set up a bank account for your family with exactly one million bucks in it, and it's a joint account. You invite your family to a table and explain that this joint account is to teach them to cooperate. You hand out the VISA Debit cards and have them sign a no-harassment contract.
Each family member will realise that they gain most by draining the account as quickly as possible, so the race is on, once the first makes the move. The end-game occurs when the last bit of money is in the bank and all of them show up at the bank to extract the last bit of money. With family members packing heat, a shooting or two occurs. And everyone who survives is permanently angry at everyone else. Meanwhile, you DID make sure to hide in Ft. McMurray (which they conviently don't know about) so when they waste money looking for you in resort towns in Europe they never find you.
This thought experiment has all the ingredients of a tragedy of the commons. A commons, the joint account, game theory dictating that players maximise gain by draining it despite it being to others' detriment, and selfishness overriding cooperation. We know that married couples have money squabbles any time a joint account exists, like the extreme case above.
But, but...the free market says that is what the consumer wants!
coff coff
Free Market my !jack male donkey
VIA http://www.pastpeak.com/ I present the free market at work
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/articles_2004/usda_slaughters_creekstone.html
http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/preventtesting010305.cfm
And that leads to:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/ap/politics/3743815
BIG TOPIC CHANGE!
Jay Hanson, Reg Morrision, author of "Spirit in the Gene", and ANGRYCHIMP are engaging in a totally mind-stunning debate on instinctive conspiracies & open conspiracies.
If you have not joined the Yahoo forum DIEOFF_Q&A, NOW IS THE TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans SMarter than Yeast?
It would also be interesting to do an ERoEI analysis of dehydrating or sun-drying essential fruits and vegetables before shipping them to markets vs moving all the water inside these consumables. For example, I love bananas, but when the energy costs of shipping them whole from Central America exceeds my budget, I will gladly buy dehydrated banana chips if the cost is reasonable. Obviously, taste & texture changed, but the essential vitamins and minerals are still there.
This might be a crucial factor going forward to prevent vitamin deficiency diseases like scurvy, beriberi, etc in habitats that cannot grow these foodstuffs locally due to climate [or an alternative foodstuff]. This is based on my assumption that industrial vitamin and mineral supplements have a lower ERoEI ratio than what Nature can provide, or which the future lack of industrial technology can sustain. Perhaps other posters have better facts?
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
'Then there's the rise of perhaps 600 million middle-class Indians and Chinese, already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and foreign flavors.'
No, actually, they aren't. As the first comment here pointed out, it is actually possible to taste the difference between good and 'convenient' food - and strange as it may sound, most people actually choose good, apart from the English speaking world at least.
To put it a slightly different way - when Germans visit America and return, they always remark on how chlorinated the tap water is, and how good it is to actually start enjoying real food again (and no, they don't just mean bread, chocolate, and beer) - the amount of sugar, salt, fat, preservatives, flavorings, colorings, and processing are simply unaccustomed, and quite honestly, they see no reason to get used to it.
And let's not even mention genetically modified crops. It has taken more than a decade for American agribusiness to use various trade organizations to get GMO food into Europe, and still governments here are talking about accepting the fines and not allowing U.S. GMO imports - after all, European citizens remain the ones who determine who keeps power in Europe's capitals, not American multis.
This may also be one of the main reasons Europe has retained local farming to a major degree - people here want it, regardless of how 'inefficient' and 'costly' it is. Politicians can't simply wave the magic wand of 'free market' without people asking why is it every time the free market wand is waved, the rich get richer, and no else does.
Well, that just might be the explanation - unlike Americans, Europeans just don't care much about the sizzle - they actually taste the steak, and that is what they are buying.
I don't think the Chinese and Indians (both with truly thousands of years of culinary history) are any less capable of knowing when something tastes better or worse, regardless of how loud the sizzle.
Perhaps I have gone native after all these years, but I sure do like the stuff my mother-in-law buys twice a week at the farmers' market, and the milk (still warm from the cow), meat and game we buy directly from farmers and hunters we know.
Of course we also buy canned and packaged stuff (we're not saints), and for every person buying at the farmers' market, there are probably many here who are only interested in how cheaply they can get processed, preserved, packaged food at Aldi. The fresh stuff is "too expensive" and some of the small farmers who grow it are being driven out of business.
Indeed, the tap water here (near Munich) is filtered but otherwise untreated and tastes great. What I want to know is, in a country where they have the best tap water in the world (at least the parts of it that I've visited), why do so many people prefer bottled water that costs more than gasoline?
And even in an Aldi, a lot of the food is not that processed, and a surprising quantity is actually regional. Of course, the percentage of processed and non-regional products has been growing for years.
Rather seems eating locally would worsen the problem, so the best option would be to change ones diet to incorporate only the things that can efficiently be grown locally. Good thing I like potatoes and beetroot.
If one assumes the difference in solar radiation received between Sweden and Spain is not a magnitude different, then the heat required to create a conducive inside climate suitable for tomatoes to grow must account for the greater part of this difference. If a cheap way can be found to heat these Swedish greenhouses by wind, tidal-gen, hydro, biofuels, etc, then the embedded energy cost can come down to be price competitive with Spain's outside fields. If not, you are correct with what you state in your last paragraph.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
The heat energy would be almost free but the capital cost for the piping and the certified parts inside the condensors would be expensive. But it would probably have a very long life lenght with good materials and control on the water chemistry of the circulated water. The lifetime energy efficiency might be good.
It is probably a lot simpler to get all the paperwork done for heating with biomass in a simple boiler. But there are a lot of uses for that biomass and almost none for low grade waste heat.
But greenhouses still have their problems. The biggest one being that they heat up a lot during a summer day, and that heat is usually vented, then they cool too much at night. My favourite solution to this is described here.
The system stores excess daytime and summer heat underground and releases it at night and later in the season. I'm building a completely passive version of this system on my farm this summer. It should extend the growing season well into the fall. Of course, since the system is almost closed, I have to find a source of carbon-dioxide. The conventional system is burning propane. For some reason, I don't like that. Carbon-rich composting is the best idea I've come up with.
When things start to cool off outside, the heat transfer from the water will prevent your plants from getting any nighttime frost damage.
I believe this is similar to a system used in the Andes mountains for growing potatos.
However, if you can incorporate a phase-change (ie. water vapour to/from liquid) you improve the energy storage by approximately two orders of magnitude. This is easy to do and doesn't require much in the way of high-technology.
The passive system I'm building relies on nothing but ADT drainage tubing installed in the soil beneath a terraced greenhouse. The temperature and elevation differentials circulate the air through the system. The main variable I have to tune is the total amount of drainage tubing.
In order to achieve that 15-20% cut you would have to interfere with the market, so as the closer the origin of the product the lower its price. That's not easy since agriculture is a perfect competition market. One thing might help though, ending with the outrageos subsidizing. For instance half of the EU budget goes to argiculture, that's a capital mistake.
There are of course other problems, most countries import products bcause they can't grow them at home. For instance China imports a great deal of corn from overseas (much from the US); what in fact China is importing is not corn, but the water spent in growing the corn crops.
I don't believe that the Green Revolution will work at a local level, that's not the way it works. You might have some room to scalling it down to a continental level (i.e. Europe, North America, South America, etc) where with a smaller transport network you can have the same menu at the table. Scalling down beyond that will mean cutting down on the menu and probably on the caloric content of it.
And finally bare in mind that we are 6500 million today, but business as usual will take us near 8000 million 15 years from now.
the remark 'For instance half of the EU budget goes to argiculture, that's a capital mistake.' is the sort of attitude which needs a lot more discussion.
Of course, any government program will have elements of both absurdity and stupidity, and no form of social organization or economic distribution is perfect. Noting flaws, looking for objective points of discussion, and trying to improve how things are done is necessary.
But when I look around at the all the farm fields, forests, the sheep flocks wandering through this region of Germany grazing slowly from open field to open field (and adding their small part to sustainable fertilizers), I just can't see the 'capital mistake' - even in the sense of a pun - this is a good use of capital.
And for the slightly innocent - another reason Europe is so tenacious in maintaining food sufficiency, however defined, is a few thousand years of experience in war teaches you a few basic lessons which even a generation or two of peace and prosperity won't shake loose.
As a side note - the cover of Der Spiegel is featuring the resource wars - and the two most prominent featured faces are workers. Europe also knows that destruction is a poor way to build. But I can only imagine a Time or Newsweek cover dealing with the theme would likely prominently display weapons - the difference between an old industrial has-been like Germany and the post-industrial wunderkind America could be illustrated right there. America seems to feel the resource wars will be fought with tanks, carriers, and cluster bombs. Other political systems are pretty sure it will be fought mainly with contracts, machinery, and workers. Of course, there is a tank in the upper left corner of the Spiegel cover - this is Germany, after all.
Who then is making a capital mistake, absolutely no pun intended, by thinking carrier battle groups are useful in resource extraction? Ask the Iraqis - it seems as if bombs and guns don't actually increase oil production - who could have guessed?
A strangely ironic thought - not only may America be the first society that went from barbarism to decadence in a leap (sorry, no cite), it may also be the first that actually attacked itself, becoming its own barbarian at the gate, offering nothing but violence and death to itself.
"Capital mistake" is not put, at least I didn't use it that way.
Can you tell me why half the budget goes to agriculture? Why won't it go to the auto industry (it would help in Germany), or to the aerospace industry?
Think about it, what are you the tax payer and consumer, winning from this heavy subsdizing of agriculture?
true, I am the one that made the pun - it was not in your original post.
But as for subsidies/tax breaks - the car industry in Germany already gets enough by off-shoring their ownership so they don't pay taxes here anyways.
And the current thinking in farm subsidies is simply making certain the green land is preserved by paying a straight yearly lump sum to farmers, regardless.
Coming originally from Northern Virginia, and watching the total destruction of all farm land in a radius of at least 30 miles of where I was born and grew up, the German idea seems quite intelligent, actually.
And prudent.
I regard trimming down government to essential services a must if energy supplies and perhaps also the monetized economy starts to shrink. Governmnet absolutely have to run some things realy well, the rest is an opportunity to free people to do more productive things.
The same is tourism. A landscape which is mixed with trees, small groves of forrest, grain fields etc looks more attractive than giant monoculture fields, like we have in the former GDR today.
A lot of subsidies, being paid in the EU pays the farmer for this task. How many farmers would leave rural areas and go to the cities? It is important to provide living conditions, so people stay (somehow) in these places. Sad enough, the former east looses more and more people who go to the western cities.
A third point is now the new discussion about farmers becoming energy farmers. They can put wind turbines on their fields, run small scale biogas power plants, plant fuel crops etc. To me, this seems to be very important. Again, after around 100 years, the rural land restarts to provide energy sources for the city. The income from this sources beame a siginficant amount.
Drinkin water: I live in Berlin and water from the tap there is still very good. I never buy bottled water. However the water supply was privatized a couple of years ago, the new owner (a french company) as far as I can tell, tries to make more profit and neglects maintainance in the grid. Which is a pitty. Prost.
My opinion about organic farming feeding the world: I studied a lot about soils, and I think it is in the medium run not possible to do so. Our soils are overused. As well here in Germany!
Those subsidies for landscape management you speak of are marginal compared to hole bundle. Farmers receive money mainly to produce more or to help them when natural disaters occur, like droughts.
With the industrialized agriculture of the present day, it doesn't help much in avoiding more people to go livin in Suburbia. With machines a few people can run a very large farm.
You fix people on rural with investment in other industries. In a way that's what happening in Leipzig I believe.
Surely you jest. Fewer markets are more manipulated than agriculture. Those subsidies you mention are part of the manipulation. I believe the US and Japan are also guilty of that, so there's no reason to single out the EU.
I have always loved to rant about agricultural subsidies. But I've gotten older and wiser (well, older) and come to the conclusion that at the prices people are willing to pay for food, European farmers (especially the non-industrial ones who grow good food) can't stay in business. If people were willing to pay what food is really worth, there might be a lot less need for subsidies. But people want their MTV, their SUV and their Seychelles vacation.
Another point: We could accuse our leadership of dereliction of duty for letting us get into our energy predicament. How would we feel if we were also dependent on hostile foreign powers for our food? Subsidies may help prevent that if they help keep more local farmers in business.
That's a consequence of a perfect competition market; being unable to differentiate the product the farmer has none or very little profit.
You surely have a point on foreign independence, that's why I suggested scaling down to the continent level. But you won't achieve it with subsidies, because your competitors will answer in the same coin, subsidizing their own production.
The only way of achieving independence from foreign products is to block them, with quotas or other measures of the same kind. Of course none of these actions would be orthodox on a free market, but maybe these are not the times to be orthodox.
Think of wine. Wine is a successfull business beacause it changes from place to place. The wine I make here will be different from that you'll make where you live (if you can grow vinewards there).
If I grow organic and you grow organic what's the difference?
If your organic business cames successful, I'll just copy it and get a share of that success. This goes on until pofit is equal to zero.
Think again of wine. Port wine has been successful for centuries, why? You can't make it outside the region.
I've been searching out farms and farmers that make money independantly (mostly) of subsidies. The common trait is that they aren't just producers, they are also marketers. Not only do they sell food that has personality (heirloom and unusual varieties of meat and produce, ie. tomatoes the size of my head), but they are selling their, and their farm's, personality as well. (One brings produce to market in a wagon pulled by draft horses. Several publish newsletters with details and current events pertaining to their farms. Yet another, brings one of their pet ducks to the market.) These efforts don't necessarily bring them a premium over grocery store food, but it does build a loyal customer-base.
Here's hoping that there is a surge in interest in locally produced foods over the next few years. I'm writing this in the midst of a huge agricultural area, which, almost paradoxically, is completely dependant on food shipped in from elsewhere.
If you think people are sceptical about "Peak Oil", just wait until you start trying to convince them to change their food habits! Them thar is fighting words pardner...>:-(
Back in the 1970's, as some of us gray haired types will remember, there was the same talk....Rodale Press created a newsletter and project they called "The Cornucopia Project". I was an avid reader of the newsletter, and had been involved in "raised bed" organic gardening as a hobby of sorts anyway...
all of those who were followers of the "sustainability" press just knew for sure that food prices were soon to take off...fuel supplies could not be counted on, fertilizer would skyrocket in price, transport costs would end the over the road transport of food, and even water and top soil were about gone....and we waited....and waited...and waited....
Guess what? Food prices actually declined as a percent of inflation. My family, which had a history of canning such staple foods as beans and peas, finally stopped, because there was no way you could compete with green peas and pinto beans on sale at the super market for .25 cents a can...it was cheaper than dog and cat food....(brief aside...I notice that TOD never touches on the EROEI of keeping kitties and poochies well fed....nice to see some things are sacred!)
Anyway, some folks do still garden in our neck of the woods....of course, home gardening means you need a pick up truck or SUV to carry the garden supplies....and who does try to garden today without the status of a nice Troy built tiller (or a John Deere lawn tractor with garden accessories....my granddad farmed about 80 acres with a Fordson tractor that produced less horsepower than most folks lawn tractor...(!)
The whole thing becomes farcical in the extreme...transportation costs are still a very small part of food costs (the office overhead and advertising costs are much greater), and if fuel costs move much higher, the transport of canned foods and bulk items (sugar, flour, cereal, etc, all non-refridgerated goods) can be done on rail or barge reducing transport costs to near nothing as a percent of total costs).
There are a few areas where massive reductions in fuel costs are available beside transport...
>Wasted fertilizer. Fertilizer prices until recently have been so low that the farm rule has been, "If a little does good, more will do better". This must change for both environmental reasons (water pollution issues are VERY SERIOUS in many areas). Computer sensing and evaluation of carefully metered fertilizer use could save tons)
>Wasted energy in processing of foods. The amount of heat energy allowed to go to waste at many processing plants is astronomical. Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems are gaining a footing in many food processing facilities. This is to be encouraged.
>Wasted energy in packaging. This is nothing short of a wasteful atrocity.
What most people do not realize is that much packaging is in no way a service to the sanitary delivery of food items, but a marketing need to occupy "slot space" or visable shelf space in the market. The battle is to be as visable to the customer and tie up supermarket shelf space. Thus, brightly colered packaging that is two and three times larger than need be. It is a pain in the backside to have to cut through and remove layers of cardboard, paper and shrink wrap to get to a few ounces of food buried somewhere in the middle.
This must stop.
But, people will eat purchased food. We are still a long way from the days, as one peak oil advisor actually encouraged people to start doing, of eating grasshoppers! We need to be careful here not to come across as rejects from the loonie bin. Work toward the efficiencies listed above, and don't buy a 3/4 ton pickup to haul around your Troy built tiller and tell your friends your saving fuel by home gardening, unless you want to become the amusing cliche' in your neighborhood! :-)
I never felt all that enthusiastic about trying them myself - but as Australia has no shortage of insects perhaps we'll ride out any food crisis better than most :-)
There was a recent study of obesity that set out to discover the secret of why obesity is so much less prevalent in France than America when their cuisine has such a heavy emphasis on cream, olive oil, butter and alcohol. Their conclusion was that the French simply eat a lot less of it.
The "French Paradox" was only a paradox because the whole diet was not considered - the more whole plant foods you eat, the better your health will be, period.
If there is any good news about turning sugar to ethanol for the cars it is that if sugar gets too expensive, companies that process food will switch to a calorie-free sweetener. Better to put the calories in the cars instead of biodiesel to have to get liposuctioned out (and converted to lipodiesel by enterprising surgeons). Becuse sugar doesn't add to fullness from eating, one can be fat and chronically hungry (by dieting) at the same time. All the added sugar helps contribute to obesity and diabetes. Sugar could easally be called a toxin, given the diabetes it generates. Sugar is hard on kidneys too, though nowhere near as toxic as antifreeze.
We can easally undo subsidies to sugar growers and let food processors switch to Splenda (600 times sweeter gram for gram) and put the sugar in the gasohol. Clean the air a little, and cut obesity. Sounds like a winner to me!
Oatmeal from Ireland. Oh, please. I suppose Fresh Fields would have that sort of thing if I really wanted it, but you could just as well scoop it out of a large bin in the bulk food section.
Raspberries from Chile? There is another example. When I was a kid we grew all of our own raspberries, and we had such an abundance that we froze them so we would have them year round. These days I don't buy the things out of season. If you want fruit on your oatmeal, try canned peaches instead.
I suppose I could buy oats at the feed store instead, but who knows what chemicals they put on it? I'm not really paranoid about pesticides in foods meant for human consumption, but when it comes to stuff that's not meant for human consumption, some caution is in order.
Generic oatmeals are inferior but edible, in my experience.
Oats for horses is probably safe to eat if you clean it first and cook it enough, but it has a lot of crud and dirt and suchlike in it that you don't find in oats for human consumption.
The fondness for expensive imported products I can understand as a form of status-striving, but the notion of buying such things as bottled water are to me signs of ignorance and shameful decadance.
When vacationing in Jamaica, the locals sometimes called me "two wata' man" because I tied a shoelace to two empty plastic one-liter liquor flasks (with labels removed) and went everywhere with the two bottles slung around my neck.
If you do not trust your local water, boil it. Or, better yet, move to someplace that has abundant good water--preferably so pure that it needs little or no treatment. Why live in a place that has yucky tap water? Or polluted air? Life is too short to poison your system.
Vote with your feet.
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I take water very very seriously and wonder if such a device will kill amoebas in the cyst stage but will check it out.
Note that civilization cannot grow without safe beverages: Hence Asians brew tea with water that has been vigorously boiled, and most of Western civilization drank beer or diluted wine, because those who drink polluted water sicken and die.
The cavalier attitude that many take to what they ingest in the form of food and beverages is a puzzlement to me.
You are right though water discipline is important. Three days no water your dead. It doesn't matter how much oatmeal you have :)
2 vectors for water serilization. The UV light is mostlikely not the UV light that makes ozone. The problem becomes as the UV light goes deeper in the water, the less ability it has to effect spores in the water.
If you really have an interest in treating your own water:
Activated charcol, filter, UV Light, Ozone via discharge (be sure to remove the water otherwise ytou will destroy the electrode), Ozone via UV light, and RO Filter.
The people who sell salt-water fish tanks (like Foster and Smith) can set you up with all the bits you'll need.)
UV light does not MAKE ozone an electrical arc in presence of O2 does. UV rays in the upper atmosphere are stopped by ozone (it blocks some of those wavelengths) remember all the fuss about the ozone layer in the 80's
UV light kills everything, it damages the first few cell layers of our skin, Microbes don't have layers to sacrifice so they die.
Ozonation is good for pools etc but is not portable this device is and applies to travel/camping.
Yes, it does.
185 nm is the common wavelength for making ozone. And you need to go through extra efforts to make this wavelenght in a UV light source.
UV light kills everything
Not spores, unless the dwell time is long enough.
Part of what goes on at TOD is education. I spent alot of time before I decided on the water purification system I've put together. That, and I consulted with waste water treatment operators.
It recommends 90 seconds to kill everything
That's fine. But 90 seconds is a bit short, and I'm betting cyts would make it.
For $18 you can make a 12DC powered UV sterlizer. But that one doesn't make Ozone.
and I've been all over South America with it and never gotten sick.
Which is a testiment to how effective stomach acid is. Not how well the glow-stick does VS cyts.
If you are able to scoop cut oats (I believe that is the difference, that the "Scottish" oats are cut rather than rolled) from a bin, you save a lot of upstream petrolium and packaging.
But even as "bad" as 10,000 mile oats are, they pale in comparison to the upstream petrolium and packaging involved in the typical American single-serving oatmeal packet. Actually it's not just upstream. Buying a box of 16 servings means more frequent trips to the market by the consumer.
FWIW, I eat rolled oats. I get the big (2 pounds 10 ounce) paper cannister from Smart & Final, and it lasts me quite a while.
I don't eat oatmeal that often (because it takes so long to cook), so buying McCann's isn't going to bankrupt me. On ordinary workday mornings, it's usually wholegrain Cheerios.
Depends on the slow-cooker, I guess. Mine takes a lot. I see it in my energy bill when I use it a lot, and it warms the whole kitchen.
The pot shouldn't be warming the kitchen. That is unusual and I wouldn't be doing an overnight effort if mine did, so I understand.
But more to the point, the price you pay for the current isn't necessarily the best conservation criteria. You know that you are using baseline juice from offpeak generators. No one will throw more coal on or add additional NG to get your oatmeal cooked. There is no marginal consumption of energy or corresponding pollution. So you pay... but get to eat with a happy heart.
Differential metering is usually available, but the utilities make it difficult for consumers. This is one of those great, often mentioned and obvious conservation incentives that somehow always falls through the regulatory (or de-regulatory) cracks. My guess is that when demand destruction occurs the utilities will make it broadly available... since pricing offpeak power is better than not selling power at all.
In any case, I'm probably better off cooking it in the morning. I get up really early (eat breakfast at 6am), so if I used the crockpot, it would actually be cooking while people washing dishes, doing laundry, watching TV, etc. If I cook it in the morning, few people are awake and using the juice.
I do eat lots of oats and am thinking of growing my own, but at 59 cents a pound for easily available good not-over-processed organic oats, that idea is not based on economics but on sentiment.
After all, I've sowed enough wild oats, now maybe it is time to sow some domesticated ones:-)
I'm no economist, but I remember that the revolution of 79 and the consequent Iran-Iraq war only had impact on the economy in 82.
And the impact is different from place to place. For instance in Asia farmers just can't grow their crops because of prohibitive fertilizers prices, so in the next year or so it will be felt there.
In Europe, in part due to heavy taxing of petroleum derived fuels, the rise in the barrel price is not entirely felt at the pump. Here you have an increase of 34% at the pump since January 2004, while in the same time span crude went up 100%. And still that rise in fuel is offset with agro-diesel subsidies.
Wendell Berry
With agriculture so dependent on petroleum as a feedstock, I'm wondering why we are not currently seeing higher prices at the market.
Vermont
Because this is the underpinning of the Various(I was going to say US, but it's the same for the EU, Japan, China) Powers(VP).
Agriculture is the Cash Cow of the VP's.
Agriculture is hierarchical. And very few people benefit from it.
The most significant growth is taking place in those areas
producing the least food.
Jared Diamond calls agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the human race". "With the advent of agriculture [the] elite became better off, but most people became worse off"
Eastern Arkansas-the leading rice producer in the US-will grow 20% less rice this year. Corn will be way down. Reports from Texas(#3 in rice) are that rice production
will be down at least as much.
http://www.microsoil.com/liebigs_law_of_the_minimum.htm
From my family's memories only bread was imported. Everday from Little Rock, 70 miles away, on the train, fresh.
James
The other consideration is that the raw commodity price is a small proportion of the cost of many foods on the shelf. Wheat farmers used to get about a nickel of the price of a loaf of bread and as wheat prices haven't changed much, I suspect that is still true. The other day the price of a 50 lb bag of spuds was the same as a 1 lb bag of ready to cook hashbrowns in the refrigeration section.
It also looks like Sus. Ag. practices not only used less fossil fuels, but improved carbon sequestration.
We need more rigorous studies like this in the US looking at energy usage to food production. Right now I believe we are in many cases substituting cheap energy for expensive labor.
We need to determine which energy inputs give us the FROEI (Food Return On Energy Invested).
My dad was laid off when I was a kid for 2-3 years. He worked cash under the table as a mechanic and got catfish out of a pond up the road. Every deer season he got his bag and my moms.
The FROEI of caught/hunted game is pretty high. This does not apply to metro areas obviously but it works out in the stix.
Country boy can survive.....
Sure, a little hunting and fishing here and there can indeed help a person living in a rural area survive during hard times. The trouble is that the forests and lakes can only generate so many pounds per year of meat and fish for a given area, so it really doesn't take too many people seriously dependent on hunting and fishing for food to quickly deplete the stock of fish and game.
The hunting and gathering mode of existence could only support relatively small bands of widely scattered people (who jealously guarded their territories and regualarly slaughtered each other). This is one of the reasons why agriculture came into being: it enabled a far greater concentration of effort and resultant food production, though as pointed out by others at TOD it has not been without its own set of problems.
How much wood can a woodchuck chuck? Who cares? But they are mighty tasty, as are all the other four-legged furry critters. Game, of course, is exceptionally lean, and the big problem is to get some fat into your diet--just the opposite of today's diet.
You can get a lot of lard from an autumn-fat bear.
I like the article, and the rough math used to illustrate the upstream costs. It is great as an educational device.
That said, I think it is foolish to conflate the costs of shipping a "mostly air" 12 ounce box of breakfast cereal, and say a 40 pound sack of grain.
It is likely true that higher oil prices will drive shorter distances in food delivery, but I think there is even more room for adjustment in the packaging of our foods. I understand that the modern American supermarket carries 30,000 items. I doubt that they are uniform in upstream energy costs. As I said at Gristmill when they covered this story, think of the costs of bulk popcorn, and then think of the costs of our modern microwave packets.
There is a lot of room for improvement, should the "convenience vs. costs" trade off be tipped by higher costs.
Primary energy consumption for food transport in KJ/Tonne-km--
15839 for air
2890 for road
423 for water
677 for rail
This amounts to 30x as much energy for transport compared to energy contained within the food for a watery leaf food such as watercress grown 3000 miles from where it is consumed to much less than 0.1x as much for a calorically dense nut grown within 100 miles of where it is consumed. (Assumes road transport).
I put some numbers here for plant foods:
http://members.atlantic.net/~dec/foodEnergyTransportEnergy.html
The really distressing thing about this is that it is precisely those foods that provide the most nutrition and beneficial phytochemicals for the least amount of kcals that cost the most (relatively speaking) to transport.
When we drop the leaves and tomatoes, we will suffer. They are the last things we should give up, not the first.
But again, transport costs aren't everything. Since they can be eaten raw and do not require extensive packaging or processing (if any), they are not such a bad deal on the whole.
The same is not necessarily true for grain foods, which must be cooked and have a much lower nutrient density. And most vegetable fats should be skipped except for possibly raw nuts, seeds, avocadoes, olives: again, minimal or no processing.
We should all be skinny raw vegans who grow most of our own food or purchase food mostly grown close to home. Those who do not wish to be vegan are welcome to eat cicadas, mollulsks, roaches, and grasshoppers. I'd rather take B12 and D2 supplements.
Eating wild game is not the solution: if everyone in the USA did that, it would all be gone in short order.
Interesting that there was a "sprouts" boom in the 70's coinciding with high fuel costs ;-)
My dogs are also vegan and it helps a lot to reduce cooking time to sprout their legumes and soak their grains prior to cooking. They get raw pureed fruits and vegetables also (as well as ground flax and sunflower seeds) but these are not a major source of kcals for them.
Most rices will not sprout but quinoa, oat groats, rye, and wheat berries will.
And I have many pots of greens on the terrace, now, but I eat so many greens (about a kg per day) that I can't currently produce enough to meet what I consume, so I still buy them.
But I am looking at the dandelion intruders with evil intent these days.
Surely the market must be efficient enough now though that the sprouts in my market are at least grown in my city?
If not, the hippy methods still exist
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html
The article starts to break down agricultural fossil fuel inputs. I used both of them, along with an examination of the Cuban response to a dramatic reduction in petroleum availability in the early 90's due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, to put together a little talk for a Peak Oil conference this past Saturday in Durham, NC. You're welcome to take a gander at it as well. It's easier to link to it than to rewrite all my thoughts on this topic as a comment so...
http://poweringdown.blogspot.com/2006/03/post-peak-eats.html
I think the ongoing discussions about our food infrastructure are a perfect example of how easy it is to fall into the trap of assuming that the only (or almost the only) thing that will change is the price of energy.
Of course that won't happen; the location and method of food growing and processing, as well as the transportation methods, will all respond to rising energy prices.
In particular, the notion that there's one big solution (e.g. localization) is over simplifying the situation. As traditional energy forms grow more expensive we'll see production, processing, and transportation methods that use such energy more efficiently benefit. We'll also see a shift to renewable energy as decisionmakers throughout the production chain seek to avoid the high and volatile energy prices of oil and natural gas.
(Don't mistake this for "the market will save the universe" idiocy. I'm merely pointing out there's a huge element of dynamism in any infrastructure this large, complex, and geographically diverse, and that ignoring it is a recipe for making bad predictions.)
Which reminds me: The whole EROEI thing really needs to be focused to ERO(non-renewable)EI. Truly renewable energy includes those forms we can use as much of as we like at zero marginal cost per unit of energy, like wind, solar, wave, and tidal. For those forms of energy, the only concern is the economic cost needed to exploit them; if it takes a huge number of calories of renewable energy (and no non-renewable energy) to produce a few calories of a particular food product, then that item can be produced sustainably even though its traditional EROEI is terrible. As renewable energy costs continue to decline (and utility-scale wind power is already cheap) and we build more infrastructure for harvesting renewable energy, the limitations of fossil fuels on our food system will be relaxed.
The short-term situation will be difficult, no doubt, but I think it's clear that it's more like passing through a very tight portal than it is entering a small and ever-decreasing tunnel.
I'd expect raisins to stay on the shelves even if grapes become more rare or seasonal.
LOL, everybody remember why "preserves" are called that?
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
-- William Carlos Williams
I suggest the movie The Corporation is just as important for our community members to watch as The End of Suburbia. If you can't get the movie, at least visit the website and watch the trailer. These business entities are increasing their stranglehold on all aspects of our lives including, importantly for this thread, food production. Their interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of people discussing family or community farming here on TOD.
These corporations have all the rights but none of the responsibilities of individuals. And they are very, very powerful.
Sure, the Wal-Mart example isn't a great one, because their insistence on low prices forces factory organic farming, which is a little depressing to the crunchy granola types (myself basically included). But what if we made such a stink in NYC that the Gristedes grocery chain ended up carrying, say, 30% of its produce from local sources? That would be a real victory, IMHO. Whole Foods--a big corporation in some senses--already makes noise in this direction (despite the fact that they have been excoriated for turning local and organic into luxury items. You can't win 'em all.)
I still contend that the problems from peak oil will come less from the technical side and more from the social, political, and psychological aspects. So the question becomes just how bad does it have to get before we are forced to respond realistically to cascading issues like peak oil, water shortages, overpopulation, topsoil depletion, and global warming? Will we respond rationally today and dedicate ourselves as a species to solving these issues around the entire world? Or will we go right down to extinction, the last man, woman, and child braying at the heavens for just a little more market magic? The actual landing point will be somewhere between those hypothetical extremes of course, but most of those landing spots look like crashes, not soft landings.
It's much easier to choose an alternate path on food, than on transportation, or how our electricity is generated.
I see most of the ideas discussed in this thread as a way to deal with high prices, not as legitimate post-peak strategies.
I don't think we'll be able to grow enough food for everyone using "sustainable" methods. The best farmland is owned by the large corporations. Will the government confiscate it? Or will the "free market" force us to work on these farms if we want to eat? Either way, it suggests a level of economic disruption that is scary to comtemplate.
Usueally the answer is a market economy with manny entrepreneurs, in this case farmers.
And civil unrest is very bad for business. China remembers this; many of their rebellions, wars, and dieoffs were due to food shortages. They are the only large country that still keeps significant food stores.
But I am not sure how well this will work in countries with an economy saturated with debt on every level.
For some values of "we" it is not the case that no such plans exist.
Well don't leave us hanging!
Who do you think is planing to do what to whom, and when?
The average American eats about 2,000 calories daily. Those are dietary calories, not chemical calories (1 nutrtion calorie = 1 kcal in chemistry), so that's 2,000 kcal/day.
300,000,000 Americans. 365 days/yr. That's 2.19x10^14 kcal/yr to feed the U.S.
From http://www.eppo.go.th/ref/UNIT-OIL.html
1 kcal = 3.968 Btu, so that's 8.69x10^14 Btu/yr.
A barrel of oil contains 5.8x10^6 Btu (approximately).
Therefore, the food intake of the U.S. is equal to the energy in about 149,826,207 barrels of oil per year. The article says the 400 kcal breakfast required 2800 kcal in fossil fuels (a factor of 7). That would put the US consumption of oil for food at 1,048,783,448 barrels per year. That's about one seventh of our entire consumption.
I don't know: maybe they're right, but I have a feeling that if you keep adding this up for everything we buy (textiles, electronics, etc.) plus our commuting and electrical generation via oil you would end up with a figure very much greater than our total consumption. I'm just recommending a pinch of salt we our breakfast oil. :-)
I wish the story linked back to the original study. I can't seem to find it or even a site for the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture. They have a Center of Sustainable Systems, but nothing there on this study. I guess I'm just a little suspicious when I see numbers thrown around with no sources directly cited to back them up.
None of this, mind you, is meant to imply that we shouldn't reduce our energy consumption in food production: it's a good thing to do. I just don't trust the numbers...
Food production accounts for 17% of all fossil fuel use in the US.
Average consumption is 2100 kcal/day but production is 3774 kcal/day.
refs are in Eshel and Martin, Diet, Energy, and Global Warming
full paper--
http://laweekly.blogs.com/judith_lewis/files/diet_energy_and_global_warming-1.pdf
Thanks
Then I've thought about what I call 'guerrilla farming' which means going out in the dead of night and planting not easily recognizable as food plants in odd bits of land that only grow weeds now. That's tempting, but it would take considerable sneaking around and what I can only call ninja skills, for both planting and harvesting, because the SWAT team would surely be called out or at least the cops and the guys with the strait jacket and the big net if I were caught so much as planting a single nettle plant on the most inconspicuous block of nondescript greenage on the most abandoned ex-tech property. I'd be in even more trouble if I planted/harvested in public land.
I could buy some land way wayyyy far away, and farm there, but we're talking hundreds of miles, and it would easily still cost me a hundred grand or so. Plus the gas to travel back and forth to it, plus the hinterlands in the US are already rife with the "brigand culture" some of the more aware Collapse writers have warned us will be a feature of rural life when it all goes to hell for the US economy.
This is why I do indeed thing Matt Savinar is right, we're going to get busted right down to the bottom when/if the collapse happens. I hate to get political, but US society is designed to keep nonfarmers from learning to farm, because then it hurts business for the supermarkets. It's why all landscaping in the US is inedible, the one single exception I've seen being the "natal plum" which is a nasty looking, milky-sapped, Christmas tree bulb of a thing, which no one thought anyone would eat. They turn out to be good though, street people and little kids will try anything. Oh and you can eat "sour grass" but it always horrifies people when I pop some of the cute yellow flowers in my mouth, and tell 'em it's good.
Nope the vast majority of the US population is kept ignorant of how to be self-sufficient in the same way as albino lab rats are kept in an artificial environment, and most of us have about the same chances as that white rat when turned loose into the wild.
Well put!
Within a 30-mile radius of any major city on the Eastern Seaboard and in many other parts of the country farm land is rapidly disappearing. The reason is simple: the land is more valuable for housing development, and farmers can make far more by selling off their land to developers than by stuggling to make a profit growing crops and butting heads with Big Agri-business.
Consequently, many of the farms that still exist and are close in to a metropolitan area are owned by your 'gentleman farmers' who either raise horses or do farming as hobby but mainly want a large spread of valuable land as part of their estate. This is hardly what I'd call farming in the true sense of the word.
So, if one takes a large, well-established metropolitan area, such as the Philadelphia area for example, you are going have to be rich in order to buy a decent size farm within a 20- to 30-mile radius of center city. And even if money were no object, there just isn't nearly enough farm land left within that radius to support even a small fraction of the several million people who live in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Let's face it, large metropolitan areas are almost totally dependent on the import of large amounts of food grown elsewhere. I really don't see how this is going to change regardless of what sort of farming one plans on doing.
This is one reason why I am not as down on the deep exurbs as a lot of people at TOD. A person living in a McMansion on a two-acre lot is theoretically capable of growing a not insignificant fraction of his food needs in time of extreme crisis. An urban dweller cannot.
We can't have it both ways. We cannot cram our expanding population into even more crowded urban areas and expect them to live independently. On the other hand, independent living requires a minimum amount of land capable of being cultivated, and you can only obtain such land (at affordable prices) far from urban areas. So take your pick.
Join, or start, a garden club. Help your neighbors get their crops in. Everybody growing, swapping, and trading, is much more productive (and safe) than trying to be the only one. My memories of the 70's victory gardens is that results were somewhat uneven. Non-gardeners had a rough time getting started without some help. A garden club will also tell you what grows "like a weed" in your area, so you don't beat your head against the ground trying to grow something unsuited.
Finally, on getting "busted right down to the bottom" ... in what year, at what oil depletion rate?
If we get they symmetrical production curve proposed by Hubbertians, it will take as long to fall from peak to half-peak production as it did to climb from half-peak to peak production. Thirty or forty years?
Is there any real indications that todays farmers know how to "farm"?
I am not being a smart azz, but most "farmers" now are machinery operators who engage in "mono-cropping" of one major commodity crop (i.e., corn, soybeans, wheat) and do most of their actual eating from the supermarket themselves.
My late grandfather, who ate out of a garden, killed his own hogs, cows and chickents for meat, and milked cows, was always amazed and dismissive of the "farmer" with the $80,000 combine (don't laugh, that was big money in the early 1970's when he still farmed) who had to go to the store constantly to get groceries! How many of the "modern farmers" could actually feed themselves even with 100's of acres of land?
Quick Trivia Game:
Q. What is America's fastest growing "crop" in acres cultivated, if we define a crop as a plant that is fertilized, pest controlled, and watered, both naturally and artificially, and which is cultivated and maintained by fossil fuel machinery?
Answer at the end of this post.
By the way, did anybody ever bother to do a study on how much fossil fuel is consumed feeding America's cats and dogs and other assorted pets?...these creatures are often better fed than many of the world's human citizens.
Would we consider the pet reduction issue a priority in a real "die off" before we let humans die off?
O.K., time for the answer to the trivia question, which was "Q. What is America's fastest growing "crop" in acres cultivated, if we define a crop as a plant that is fertilized, pest controlled, and watered, both naturally and artificially, and which is cultivated and maintained by fossil fuel machinery?
Lawn grass. How's that for a kick in the pants....imagine a nation so wealthy that it spends vast amounts of water, fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, plus machinary and fuel to raise ad maintain a crop that feeds no one!
The myths that this nation engage in, and the counter mythology of the "sustainable" concerned are a long way from thinking through all realities on these issues. Would I do without a perfect lawn, and Fido and Kitty to poop on it before I would go without food?
Golf courts are spare farmland.
A lot of horses could end up as spare protein and their stables as small dairy farms with goats or cows.
No money "wasted" on prepairing for an emergency, only money used for people hobbies.
The fastest growing "crop" in Sweden is probably spruce...
If you look at a typical dry dog chow you can see the bulk is cheap scrap grain and cheap scrap legume with sparing amounts of cheap scrap animal flesh and rancid fat, some of which is rendered from euthanized pets, supplemented with a variety of vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids. I suspect the EROEI is similar to most processsed human foods with most of the energy due to processing.
Yes, I cook for my dogs using the National Academies Press doggie DRI book and they do eat better than most of the people I know. Also now that I am feeding them raw fats instead of rancid fats, their coats smell of flowers instead of dog. I consider the processing energy to be minimal because I presoak before cooking so as to mimimize cooking time. Their fats, fruits, and vegetables are uncooked but pureed or ground.
They do eat a lot, however, about 1000 kcal each, and their grains and legumes took some energy to grow. Also, although large dogs do have considerable energy requirements, they are considerably less energy intensive than human children.
During the Nazi occupation of Greece when 800K Greeks starved, there were no dogs or cats to be seen. But I think it might also be true that some people might rather die than to be separated from their pets, if they really love them (as I do), or find little reason to continue if they should lose their pets. It happens even in times of plenty.
Some people have confessed that they love their dogs more than their children. There are probably too many people who should have children.
I am doubtful of the euthanized pets being used for petfood.
By products of meat industry yes but I worke in a vet clinic through highschool. No vet would do that and PETA as well as other animal organizations would have a field day in the media. Where is your source.
There is nothing better than a meal consisting of new potatoes, green beans, sweet corn (not the Monsanto type) and freshly caught seabass.
Not to mention the onions, garlic, letuce, tomatoes, beetroot, courgette, pumpkins, peas, several types of beans to dry, andive, leak, white and red cabbage, rubarb, strawberries, blackbarries, plums, apples and pears from our 100 m2 garden(probably forgot some)
Partially it's a cultural thing, whites/blacks/hispanics don't mind unwrapped vegs, go over to the Chinese market (and perhaps stay for the lower prices and more local food!) and more vegs tend to be wrapped. They really tend to be wrapped in a Japanese market. It's all cultural since you're supposed to wash your veggies or sear 'em well in the wok.
OK now back to what farming or "farming" CAN I do. I'm in a tiny studio apt. I probably can get away with some guerrilla farming, of greens with easily spreadable seeds. I do believe veganism is unnatural and fatuous and thus as a meat-eater as mentioned above I should be willing to eat meat in all of Mother Nature's wonderful forms, and that does mean bugs. Easily raised, mealworms are supposed to be quite good. As well as other tasty bugs. If I moved up to a larger apartment, a certain amount of fish raising becomes possible (have you prices tilapia recently?)
Then there's pseudo-farming, as in my guerrilla farming, the feed a squirrel/eat a squirrel algorithm, "pet" rabbits and guinea pigs, etc.
It's just rather exasperating when you see how things are set up, public plants and trees are intentionally nonedible (edible ones tend to drop unsightly fruit and acorns and so on or get picked by ppl of the wrong caste) and how much people are trained to depend on the corp's.
I can only hope the crash is slow enough that people will have the time to adjust and learn to live sustainably.
The point is it's viable, it's good for the biosphere, and it could be good for you. Conditionally, because nothing magic happens to one's health when omitting animal foods unless they are replaced with plant foods that are better.
How many papers on veg*nism have you read? It not so easy to dismiss after adequate consideration.
It is more than just viable, but also has many advantages in affluent countries, including greatly reduced risks of CHD and certain types of cancers, gallstones, kidney disease and stones, rheumatoid arthritis, GI diseases, reduced risks of overweight, obesity, NIDDM, and better antioxidant status.
Walter Willet has stated that these results are not just due to better nondietary lifestyle factors, but also due to lower intake of harmful dietary components (saturated fat, trans fatty acids, oxidized cholesterol, oxidative stressors, animal protein) and higher intakes of the beneficial components (fiber, especially soluble fiber, folate, phytochemicals, antioxidant nutrients, plant proteins, plant sterols and stanols, salicylic acid) that tend to replace flesh in the diet.
The most longevous populations get little to very little animal foods in their diets. It is not much of a stretch to go to zero from there but can result in a dramatically lower environmental impact if one makes the right choices. Even a change from 10% animal to 0% animal food in the diet can slash CO2 emissions in half. This will not be true of course with highly processed plant foods.
It is considerably less energy-intensive to eat a locally grown plant-based diet and take a few mcg of B12 produced directly from bacteria rather than to indirectly use an animal's flesh which obtained it from bacteria in the soil. In addition, the B12 in supplements is more available than that from animal foods. This becomes increasingly important as we age and the intrinsic factor. gastric acidity, and pepsin which allow for adequate assimilation, decline.
I wish to be spared of the bug eating but would not rule it out entirely if straits were very dire. There was a recent NYT magazine article on the personalities of animals including drosphila melanogaster.
Anything other than hunter-gatherer is unnatural for us, not what we're designed for. Not that we can't live as a seething blanket of 12 billion eating our allotment of factory-grown soy protein and eked out vitamins etc., but why would anyone want this kind of future for mankind? Why are all these crackpot schemes designed to allow even more starving billions to be crammed onto the planet being developed and espoused?
Vegans SCARE me.
And as a result of fool city people coming in and feeding the dear creatures, they are getting larded with fat. Something I never saw before.
By sheer witless good luck, and by avoiding the popular choices of the time, I am now a living representative of what we all could have if we didn't have so many people. Lots of land, lots of water, lots of food, lots of cooperative friends. And we could live on pretty close to no oil, just as did the people here 100 years before me.
Sure, lots of work too, but why risk boredom?
Of course it would be nice to keep this little laptop that connects me with all you smarter but less lucky people.
I think Magnus is correct.
Hunting and gathering is the way we lived for 99% of the time we've been on the planet, but for technology to advance we need food surpluses that can support at least small cities.
Gardening will do that. Horticultural societies can be very impressive in what they can do, as for example in China before plow agriculture was introduced. Of course these societies used slaves instead of fossil fuels. The pre-Columbian civilizations of Latin America were based on gardening, because there were no suitable draft animals around.
My studies of horticultural societies show that women do almost all of the hard gardening work, while men devote themselves to the more important activities of brewing and drinking beer, hunting, and discussing politics. Ah, those were the days . . . .
The more posts on TOD I read, the more I am convinced that we should go back to asking the truly fundamental questions, questions such as: "How big should a city be?" that Plato and Aristotle focused on. Or "How can excessive concentration of wealth be prevented?" Or "How can population be stabilized?" Or "How can we get the best people into leadership positions and prevent power from corrupting them?" These and a few others are the fundamental questions, but few have the courage to face them nowadays.
By avoiding fundamental questions we have piled up a huge mountain of troubles for modern societies.
My own answer depends on the question "what is a city?".
I figure it is an area where it is reasonable to travel to reach manny people, workplaces and traders. This means that mass transportation like fast trains make manny towns into my country into a few cities or city regions. I think this way of distributing a city makes nearly unlimited growth in city region size possible. I regard it as a good political goal to make large parts of my own country into a few such city regions by further developent of rail traffic and city planning of dense houses around the railway stations. Travel by car is more like travel by foot, you get a round city although a large and sparce one.
> "How can excessive concentration of wealth be prevented?"
Is that a problem as long as the wealth is wisely used? It is essentially the same question as how to get good leaders that do not become corrupt. Resent local history tells me that concentration of wealth among good entrepreneurs have done enourmous ammounts of good, but power structures inheriting the wealth seldom do an outstanding job. It seems to often hinge on a few individuals who happen to be at the right place at the right time being smart enough to do productive things and wise enough to do good things. The randomness of the process is a little... worrisome.
Both Plato and Aristotle believed that human fulfillment could only be achieved within a city-state. I think I see the glimmerings of the city-state idea in your words above.
When political units become too large, they tend to become ungovernable empires that tend to split up. When political units become too small, they become weak and helpless.
The nation-state of today is more-or-less an accident of military technology, though that statement is an oversimplification.
I like the way the Swiss work their democracy--much autonomy in small cantons, a new president every year, and universal military service for men. Now that women have the vote in Switzerland, maybe they also should be subject to military service.
I like the (probably not true, but who knows?) story about when Kaiser Wilhelm visited Switzerland around 1910 and said to the President: "You have an excellent army of 250,000 men. But what if I send an army of 750,000 to invade your country?"
At which point the President of Switzerland looked Kaiser in the eye and said:
"I would order each soldier to shoot three times."
Kaiser Bill got the message.
Humans can of course be happy while doing things as you do and have exelent and fulfilling lives. But so manny other lives can also be fullfillig while not being stuck with bad theories on how the world around us works. I do not like the idea of an unknowing haze of a culture with plenty of anecdotes about usefullness of plants but no knowledge of what is beyond the naked eye and a view of the universe that shrinks down to the weak imagination that have given us the current religions.
Countless generations have wonderd "how", "why", "What is that" and now we are finally getting somewhere with understanding and manipulating our physical environment. Its not guaranteed to be nice to know things, now we know that we are fucking up a lot of things, but I prefer that over "blissfull" ingnorance.
Alas, too many people have no fun and no luck. Would that the world were a better place. Let us all try to make it so.
http://www.prosefights.org/whitman/whitman.htm
senior citizen recalls that lots starved to death before green revolution.
world population was only slightly greater than 2 billion when senior citizen was graduated from high school.
http://www.prosefights.org/shattuck/shattuck.htm
world population apparently has increased to about 6.5 billion today, thanks to green revolution.
world population may follow oil and other energy production declines senior citizen, 45 days younger than saddam, speculates.
later, i hope
http://www.prosefights.org/nmlegal/supremecourt/cvpa.htm
Then again, when/if the dollar renormalises and we have balanced import/export levels, agricultural production will be encouraged as US farmers make lots and lots of money at the new, higher prices.
This may happen sequentially. It won't happen at the same time because if the farmes start making money, land prices will go up.