Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Resource scarcity and climate change should be driving forward our transition to the energy systems of the future. Though this transition has started in important ways in several locations, change is not being undertaken at either the scale or speed required.
A new documentary, American Meat, is the first food documentary to really delve into how dependent our industrial food system is on fossil fuels. Using this vulnerability to help frame the discussion on the industrial versus the sustainable approach, director Graham Meriwether produces a film that helps make clear that in order to survive the decline in cheap energy, we need to ramp up our small scale sustainable farming efforts. He also focuses on the increasing profitability of such farms, and their ability to create more jobs.
Over the years I’ve written a great deal about SNAP/Food Stamps and other hunger alleviation programs, but I’ve never written anything specifically about WIC, which I have tended to lump in with other food programs. I’ve been thinking, however, a lot about WIC lately, because it has come on the budget chopping block in the US – along with other food security programs including the CSFP which serves low income seniors and the emergency food program that provides commodities to emergency food pantries.
Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.
One of life’s mysteries for me is why country people have inevitably migrated to the cities in every civilization that I have studied. In the United States, where there has been little of the kind of violent upheavals that send third world countries into instability, the reasons for migration to cities seem especially specious to me.
If this world is to learn anything about the day-to-day realities of adapting to–and rejoicing in–the resources that living and eating in a more limited, more localized–and therefore often healthier and tastier–environment may provide, then we need more men like Leroy.
If freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, then revolution could be just another word for nothing left to eat.
A reader, who asks to remain anonymous writes me that her graduate school boyfriend (soon hopefully to be fiance) has decided he wants a farm. What, she asks, do farmers wear? Despite the fact that I have no fashion sense to speak of, I did, in fact, coin the term “slow clothing” and am the official founder of the “slow clothing movement.” Thus, although my clothing motto is (stolen from the late, great Molly Ivins) “Woman who wears clothes so she won’t be nekkid,” I do, in fact, get emails every year during fashion week from Milan, which just shows that the universe is a very weird place ;-)). With these qualifications (ie, none) I do feel I can help our reader – perhaps not by telling her what to wear in her new life, but by offering guidelines about what *not* to wear.
We had a great few days at Hope University in Liverpool. This will not be an attempt at a complete document of that event, you will find the most comprehensive record over at the Transition Network’s conference feed. What I am going to share, with links to some of the key pieces of media from that feed, is some of the notes of my reflections at the end of the conference. As the event drew to a close, I went around and asked people for their brief reflections on what they saw as the character unique to this conference in comparison to others. Three words came up again and again, deepening, focus and maturity.
Phosphate has been essential to feeding the world since the Green Revolution, but its excessive use as a fertilizer has led to widespread pollution and eutrophication. Now, many of the world’s remaining reserves are starting to be depleted.
Using an almost closed-loop aquaponics system – that combines raising aquatic animals with cultivating plants in water – to produce fish, vegetables and herbs, Swiss entrepreneurs Urban Farmers have developed one of the most ecologically friendly ways to eat. They believe the technology can soon be commercialised.
The fact that 1/3 or more of all calories are consumed at restaurants, that half of all meals involved someone else doing some of the cooking somewhere down the line and that one in every 3 Americans eats fast food on any given day all should give us pause.
So is how our food dollars are being distributed – the vast majority of them go not to small bakeries and restaurants in our neighborhoods, but large supermarkets (where pre-made take out foods now constitute a major portion of sales), fast food restaurants and chains.
