It is my great pleasure to introduce our first guest blogger, good friend Bruce. He has been a loyal reader of Tropophilia from the very beginning, and asked us if he could contribute some of his own thoughts. Enjoy, and thanks Bruce!
Like many who have recently graduated college, I like to think of myself as a master of frugality – raiding the free bagel stash at work, going an extra two days without doing laundry so that I won’t use up as many quarters in the long run, et cetera. One of my ways to save money is to not eat out so often and to buy cheaper varieties of food at the grocery. I still eat well (I do like to cook), but I have always bought non-organic milk, meat, and produce. While I’m at the store, the bottom line has been all that mattered.
But recently I’ve come home from the store and thought of the implications of this economic behavior. I, like most Americans I assume, really have no idea where my food comes from, how it is produced, and who produced it. And when cost is the only consideration, that ignorance is not really a problem. But what about the hidden cost of a lot of that food? As Field Mahoney points out in a Slate column, even organic food, free of pesticides and produced by those romantic small farms, can come from thousands of miles away and will contribute to the burning of a lot of fossil fuels before arriving in the grocery store. In his book, Deep Economy, Bill McKibben states that “growing and distributing a pound of frozen peas required 10 times as much energy as the peas contained.” That’s a lot of excess CO2.
So my first question is this: should we, as conscientious consumers, consider local production of food as not only a choice we should make, but as a workable and feasible alternative to today’s food production system?
Many people have incorporated local food into their diets; McKibben notes that the number of farmers’ markets in the US has doubled since 1994; in 1970 there were only 340 registered, but today there are over 3,700. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) farms, in which citizens buy shares of a farm in exchange for a portion of that summer’s crop, have also greatly risen in number. The problem is, though, that it is difficult for small farmers to compete against large companies, due to the immense amount of political and economic capital vested in agribusiness (see an interesting take on government subsidized agriculture here). But if we are concerned about climate change and natural resources, can we go on using so much energy to ship and process food – only to make the food marginally cheaper at the supermarket – instead of growing it locally at a slightly higher marginal cost? If we are discussing changing the way Americans consume energy, shouldn’t we start with changing what we consume?
I believe that our society’s food choice mirrors a greater question that we will face in the 21st century – can we keep up with the current worldwide level of economic growth, both here and in places like China, and still survive as a planet?
Or should we? Ed Diener and Martin Seligman report in this interesting study (warning: PDF file) that economic growth is “extremely important for the early stages of development,” but after a certain point, economic factors no longer influence a society’s happiness. Interestingly, people in the United States have been less happy, on the whole, than we were in the 1970′s. In an industrialized society, should we be focusing on other indicators of happiness, such as community involvement, job satisfaction, and health, as measures of societal growth, instead of, or alongside, the Dow Jones Industrial Average?
But I digress. Since this is a blog about change, I’m interested in whether you think it is necessary, or even possible, for a society with a consolidated food system to change the way it thinks about food. In a nation that is concerned about its environmental footprint, can we evolve toward a sustainable, community centered agricultural economy? If it is possible, is it necessary? Is it at least an issue to be discussed in the public forum? I’d love to hear your feedback.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user docman.
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Well Bruce, after only one post you’ve earned us a link on another blog:
http://wecanchangetheworld.wordpress.com/2008/02/04/some-cool-posts-found-through-tag-surfing/
Sure you don’t wanna join us as a regular contributor? :)
Booze locally, too!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ideal-bite/ideal-bite-green-tip-of-t_b_84300.html
Good post, Bruce. Deciding when and which produce to buy can be a complicated choice. But one very simple thing all of us can do to move society toward a more sustainable path is go vegan. America’s factory farms are one of the nation’s great ethical and environmental shames. As Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for President Bush (!), described the case:
“Corporate farmers hardly speak anymore of ‘raising’ animals, with the modicum of personal care that word implies. Animals are ‘grown’ now, like so many crops. Barns somewhere along the way became ‘intensive confinement facilities’ and the inhabitants mere ‘production units.’
The result is a world in which billions of birds, cows, pigs, and other creatures are locked away, enduring miseries they do not deserve, for our convenience and pleasure. We belittle the activists with their radical agenda, scarcely noticing the radical cruelty they seek to redress.”
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_05_23/cover.html
And this, too, comes with a hefty cost to the environment:
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10189184&CFID=5538094&CFTOKEN=71aa5f58c4d46ae0-F0E87042-B27C-BB00-0143A7D288361F5E
Though it may seem unrealistic, the truth is a vegan diet is very healthy and practical, provided you’re willing to do a little bit of research.
Ashish, thanks for the reply!
Although I am not a vegan, I think you make a compelling point about choosing the humane option when eating. But eating local meat can be just as humane. It is not the killing of animals that is offensive per se, it is the inhumane way in which they are treated that creates problems.
Consider the local farmer who does not own a slaughterhouse but raises chickens on his/her farm, treats them with respect, and provides them with enough space and a proper diet – would you buy meat from them? At my local Farmers’ Market, many farmers sell meat raised from their farms, and I wouldn’t consider it unethical to buy it.
So I think that, while choosing vegan is an option, it is not the only one. Vegans can still create a lot of carbon waste by buying vegetables from thousands of miles away instead of buying them at home.
I am guilty of buying meat (and most everything else) from the supermarket, like most. But I am learning, and my buying habits are changing every week.
Also, you could become a hunter like me. Perhaps I will blog about hunters being a greener group than most, and indicate the need for us to have a much better idea about where our food comes from, not to mention spend a little time out doors.
Your point about vegans potentially contributing a lot of carbon waste is fair, but I would wager that even a vegan who isn’t particularly interested in the origin of his or her food has a lower carbon impact than a meat-eater who researches the relevant data on vegetables and fruits. Exhibit A:
“Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the global warming impact of meat eaters with that of vegetarians and found that the average American diet – including all food processing steps – results in the annual production of an extra 1.5 tons of CO2-equivalent (in the form of all greenhouse gases) compared to a no-meat diet. Researchers Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin concluded that dietary changes could make more difference than trading in a standard sedan for a more efficient hybrid car, which reduces annual CO2 emissions by roughly one ton a year.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0220/p03s01-ussc.html
As the article indirectly points out, many of the environmental problems associated with meat wouldn’t really go away even if the animals were raised in a more humane fashion.
At the level of the individual, buying humanely-raised meat would certainly be an improvement from buying meat from factory farms. But what we should be concerned about when we talk about sustainable development, as I understand it, is the choices we would like society to make. And while humanely raised meat will always be an option for countercultural types–and let’s face it, anyone who gives much thought to these matters is going against the prevailing indifference of contemporary American culture–it cannot work for 300 million Americans. For one thing, where is the land to support enough livestock to feed so many people? For another thing, where are the farmers? If meat remains the order of the day, we have reached a point of no return; the factory farm will be our only option.
Hunting has the same problem. It can be practiced conscientiously by a few, but it cannot be relied on to provide for a large swathe of the population. (And then there’s the question of why you should kill an animal at all when you get all the nutrition you need from non-animal products.)
In North Carolina and Virginia, local food production also marginally lowers health care costs by giving farmers an alternative to growing tobacco … even if all the tobacco production is moving to Brazil anyway.
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People will continue eating even if all food is not organic. In fact, if we would produce only organic food we wouldn't be able to sustain more than 5 billion people on this earth. I enjoy cooking and eating and I don't really care where my food comes from as long as it's good. That's how I gained a lot of extra weight but I was lucky to find HCG weight loss center and they helped me get back in shape.
People will continue eating even if all food is not organic. In fact, if we would produce only organic food we wouldn't be able to sustain more than 5 billion people on this earth. I enjoy cooking and eating and I don't really care where my food comes from as long as it's good. That's how I gained a lot of extra weight but I was lucky to find HCG weight loss center and they helped me get back in shape.
Awesome post. I think the best way of sustainable diet is on a word “You are what you eat!”
we are concerned about climate change and natural resources, can we go on using so much energy to ship and process food – only to make the food marginally cheaper at the supermarket – instead of growing it locally at a slightly higher marginal cost.
The problem is, though, that it is difficult for small farmers to compete against large companies, due to the immense amount of political and economic capital vested in agribusiness.
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