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Our Decrepit Food Factories
Michael Pollan, New York Times Magazine
The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”
Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?
To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.
… this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”
From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.
Michael Pollan is a [NY Times] contributing writer. His new book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” will be published next month.
(16 December 2007)
A worrisome forecast for the world’s crops
Robert C. Cowen, Christian Science Monitor
Studies on rising ozone pollution, shorter winters, and an expanding tropical belt do not bode well for agriculture.
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If you are concerned mainly with temperature when you think about climate change, your perspective is too narrow.
Think also about other atmospheric changes such as rising ozone pollution. A recent study indicates that its increasing harmful effect on plants could cut the global economic value of crop production by 10 to 12 percent by this century’s end. The research projects that regions such as the United States, China, and Europe would become net food importers.
Think, too, of how plants respond to a warmer environment. New research shows that a longer growing season is not always beneficial. Or consider new evidence that the tropical zone already is expanding faster than computer-based climate simulations have forecast.
These examples from the latest research make the point that ecologists trying to anticipate global change still have a lot to learn.
(13 December 2007)
The Price of Things
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
John Michael Greer has an interesting article about agriculture over at energy bulletin here: www.energybulletin.net/38349.html, because of its emphasis on the paying of a (largely unspecified) price for things. Generally speaking, I approve of Greer’s willingness to be clear on the fact that transitions are not always easy – I think there are threads in the peak oil and climate change movements that both overestimate and underestimate the sheer amount of trauma change will cause – I think generally Greer, who doesn’t sanitize things, but also is alive to possibilities, does a good job.
But here, I think, Greer’s vision of a future agriculture falters, based, I think on an implied mathematics in which the full price of one side of an equation (the cost of transitioning to a sustainable agriculture) is laid up against an account that elides the costs of the other side of the equation. That is, Greer is right to want us to be open about the price of transitioning to another sort of agriculture. But he potentially overstates the price of this transition, by ignoring the gains offered in such a change, and thus, leaving readers with a misleading sense of the balance sheet.
This is not an error made by Greer alone, and I use this article as an example in part because I think it is a useful demonstration of how much what we “know” is naturalized into our lives so that we cannot see the consequences. I admire Greer’s writing and thought, and don’t intend to single him out here – but his are assumptions I see made often, and worth deconstructing.
(14 December 2007)
Food vs. Fuel
Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek
The world’s food system may be about to go into crisis, and the U.S. government’s energy policy may be partly to blame.
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If people can’t eat, they can’t do much else. One of the great achievements of the past century has been the enormous expansion of food production, which has virtually eliminated starvation in advanced countries and has made huge gains against it in poor countries. Since 1961 world population has increased 112 percent; meanwhile, global production is up 164 percent for grains and almost 700 percent for meats. We owe this mainly to better seed varieties, more fertilizer, more mechanization and better farm practices. Food in most developed countries is so plentiful and inexpensive that obesity-partly caused by overeating-is a major social problem.
But the world food system may now be undergoing a radical break with this past. “The end of cheap food” is how the Economist magazine recently described it. During the past year prices of basic grains (wheat, corn) and oil seeds (soybeans) have soared. Corn, which had been selling at about $2 a bushel, is now more than $3; wheat, which had been averaging $3 to $4 a bushel, has recently hovered around $9. Because feed grains are a major cost in meat, dairy and poultry production, retail prices have also risen. In the United States dairy prices are up 13 percent in 2007; egg prices have risen 42 percent in the past year. Other countries are also experiencing increases.
Higher grocery prices obviously make it harder to achieve economic growth and low inflation simultaneously. But if higher food prices encouraged better eating habits, they might actually have some benefits in richer societies. The truly grave consequences involve poor countries, where higher prices threaten more hunger and malnutrition.
(12 December 2007)
How Much Food Can I Grow Around My House? (video and audio)
Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment via Global Public Media
In summer 2006 Judy Alexander embarked on an experiment to see how much food she could grow, and how many neighbors could benefit, from the garden around her house. Check out her homegrown rainwater collection and irrigation system — watering her 60+ edible crops. Meet the bees, the chickens and the worms. And catch her joy in producing so much food for so little effort. Episode 87.
(11 December 2007)
Future of Food in the Kootenays Conference (audio, slides, documents)
Deconstructing Dinner via Global Public Media
In November 2007, Deconstructing Dinner attended one of the first regional food security conferences ever held in Canada. With a population of less than 10,000 people, the City of Nelson, British Columbia, hosted over 250 people for the first evening of keynote speakers. With an equally impressive 170 in attendance on the second day of keynote speakers and workshops, the conference acts as an example for other communities wishing to begin organizing themselves to take greater control over the food available to them.
Deconstructing Dinner hopes the raw recordings, shows, and resources presented on this page will aid groups in Canada and throughout the world looking to ensure a socially and environmentally responsible local food system that benefits local economies.
(10 December 2007)
Much online material at original – slides, talks, etc.
