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The Hundred-Mile Diet
Christopher Ketcham, The Nation
It’s a pitiful thing to contemplate: By my estimation, close to 85 percent, perhaps even 95 percent, of the food that feeds my hometown of Moab, Utah, population 5,000, gets trucked or flown in over the red-rock desert, often from continental distances. Cut off that supply line–an absurd, wasteful and polluting operation where the average morsel travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate–and the city would starve to death in a week.
Eighty years ago Moab fed itself. The locals ate beef from cattle that grazed in the cool of the nearby mountains in summer or on the warm canyon floors in winter, where the townspeople also tended melons, peaches, nectarines, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, romaine lettuce and much else. The last of the old melon orchards are gone, bulldozed to make way for condo sprawl named after the destroyed gardens–a classic pattern that holds even for big cities. Among these is Washington, DC, where as recently as the 1950s most residents got their produce from Maryland farms next door that are now subdivisions of tarmac and drywall.
A few of my fellow Moabites balk at this foolery and plant their own gardens to take advantage of the desert sun. Jon Olschewski, who is 29 and pays his rent waiting tables at one of Moab’s restaurants, where the food tastes like salted rubber, gets up to 70 percent of his family’s diet from his 2.5-acre farm, depending on the season. He and his father, a stonemason, tend twenty-three types of fruit and vegetable and herb–melons, kohlrabi, cilantro, squash, edamame, garlic, dill, chocolate peppers–and cull the eggs of as many as ten chickens a season. “In the first half of the twentieth century, a semi truck of fruit rolled out of Moab every day,” Olschewski tells me. “Out of acres and acres of orchards. Under 5 percent are still here. This town has turned a blind eye to its agricultural roots. And it’s something that nobody wants to talk about.” He likes to quote Eliot Coleman, author of The New Organic Grower, who notes that an average 2.5-acre farm suffices to provide enough produce for 100 locals for a year.
In an era when transcontinental food consumption has exploded–the value of international food trade is up threefold since 1960, the tonnage of food shipped between nations up fourfold (while population has only doubled)–Olschewski and his ilk are a beleaguered minority, to be sure. But their numbers across the nation are growing. They even have a name: They call themselves localvores.
(23 August 2007)
Global food crisis looms as climate change and population growth strip fertile land
Ian Sample, The Guardian
Climate change and an increasing population could trigger a global food crisis in the next half century as countries struggle for fertile land to grow crops and rear animals, scientists warned yesterday.
To keep up with the growth in human population, more food will have to be produced worldwide over the next 50 years than has been during the past 10,000 years combined, the experts said.
But in many countries a combination of poor farming practices and deforestation will be exacerbated by climate change to steadily degrade soil fertility, leaving vast areas unsuitable for crops or grazing.
Competition over sparse resources may lead to conflicts and environmental destruction, the scientists fear.
The warnings came as researchers from around the world convened at a UN-backed forum in Iceland on sustainable development to address the organisation’s millennium development goals to halve hunger and extreme poverty by 2015.
The researchers will use the meeting to call on countries to impose strict farming guidelines to ensure that soils are not degraded so badly they cannot recover.
“Policy changes that result in improved conservation of soil and vegetation and restoration of degraded land are fundamental to humanity’s future livelihood,” said Zafar Adeel, director of the international network on water, environment and health at the UN University in Toronto and co-organiser of the meeting.
“This is an urgent task as the quality of land for food production, as well as water storage, is fundamental to future peace. Securing food and reducing poverty … can have a strong impact on efforts to curb the flow of people, environmental refugees, inside countries as well as across national borders,” he added.
(31 August 2007)
Climate change and N. America farms to be studied
Christine Stebbins, Reuters
Iowa State University researchers will join a study of climate change to produce mid-century projections by late next year of the likely regional effects on North American farms from global warming.
“There is no question now that the climate is changing on a global scale,” said Gene Takle, an Iowa State University professor of geological and atmospheric sciences who will lead a study to project North American climate from 2040 to 2070.
Iowa and Illinois are the epicenter of the U.S. Midwest farm belt, which produces the world’s largest exportable surpluses of corn, soybeans and wheat and vast amounts of meat, dairy products, poultry and vegetables.
Takle said in an interview with Reuters that the research should give farmers, water managers, environmental engineers, transportation specialists and other professionals a better idea of what the climate will be in the years ahead.
“If the climate is changing, you can’t stop it over the next 50 years,” Takle said. “What’s coming is coming and we better be prepared to adjust to it.”
(31 August 2007)
