Sustainable Diets [Guest Post]

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 21^st 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.