Food, sustainability, and the environmentalists
A food-politics writer expresses angst at the obscurity of his topic 24
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Posted 9:49 AM on 21 Mar 2006
by Tom Philpott -
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Read More About
Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Follow Tom’s Twitter feed here.
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CowsEatGrass Posted 9:22 am
21 Mar 2006
Agricultural Imagination
Great points! Even better, I see all of the pieces starting to weave together here.
It reminds me of an article I read about the Agricultural Imagination. This is what comes to my mind when I try to answer your question of "Why is it so difficult to get people interested in the politics of food?"
It seems intuitive that food would be one of the easiest and most natural issues for people to be interested in--and they are...to a point. Then things get dirty, that is, they get very complicated.
To be an "old school organic" farmer is to learn to dance with the inconsistencies and contingencies of the natural world. Inconsistency and ambiguity are what modern technology has been most effective at eliminating--for better and for worse.
I think the people you speak of who have the discussions about biofuels and hybrids do so from the standard modern point of view; the "technological mind." When the same problem, the end of abundant, cheap oil, is looked at with the "agricultural mind" the problem turns out to be very different. Biofuels and hybrids look more like fixes for symptoms rather than solutions for the real problem.
Figuring out how to get at one's own agricultural imagination is difficult enough, let alone trying to access others' "In a culture where food production takes place in such abstraction." Cutting through the food-as-sport mentality requires more than simply appealing to people's stomachs, it requires something much more like challenging the technological view of the world at it's very root.
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Backcut Posted 10:15 am
21 Mar 2006
Enlightenment!
This is all good stuff and it seems that corporate interests are just biding their time until they find other ways to dominate markets and reap huge profits. Especially oil and energy companies.
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Joe Stirling Posted 10:34 am
21 Mar 2006
short sighted plant breeding
Hi,
have you considered that argiculture is inherently unsustainable? Check out forest gardens and coppicing to learn about these approaches and how they create habitat while (potentially) producing as much food (nevermind medicines, timber, etc) than a conventional farm, without inputs.
Before europeans landed in North America there were forest gardens from the Atlantic to lake Superior (Carolinian). These were purposefully managed by First Nations people, which brought the habitats to maximum health, allowing the greatest biodiversity and straight out amount of life to flourish. Ideas from permaculture can help us to further intensify this life to produce for a larger population.
peace,
Joe
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birdboy Posted 11:08 am
21 Mar 2006
Reality bites
Sorry to fill my usual role of 'Debbie Downer', but you know as well as I do that the only way the Earth can feed it's current population (if indeed it can), is to destroy habitat, haul in artificial fertilizers, use genetic tinkering and pesticides to aggressively fight Nature's way, and burn plenty of cheap oil in the process.
If we were to suddenly stop all non-sustainable agricultural processes, war and starvation would be the result. If we make the transition slowly and our population continues to grow, the value of food (cheap labor or not) would skyrocket. I doubt if most of us could afford to eat sustainably, if by sustainable you mean in balance with the Earth's ecosystems.
Americans are perfectly happy being ignorant about where their food comes from, or at what real cost- as long as the cost to them is cheap. This will not change as long as big business is providing the food (from those beautiful green farms with happy cows they like to show in their commercials).
a liberal in redsville
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CowsEatGrass Posted 12:04 pm
21 Mar 2006
Re: Reality's Bite
I have to disagree with you on some points, here, boy-of-the-birds. I just might even throw in some blatant optimism (however undervalued it is amongst the green crowd).
I have absolutely no doubt that the current population can be fed with sustainable agricultural practices. No chemicals, no GMOs, no fossil fuels, whole and balanced nutrient cycles, plenty of habitat for wildlife, plenty of healthy food.
That said, you are correct that if this came overnight, it would not work and chaos would ensue. Same thing if oil went away overnight. Things are not going to happen this way.
There would be significant changes required (naw, really?).
-A significant portion of the population is going to have to be involved in producing their own food (at least half, likely more).
-People that do not participate in producing their own food will have to pay a much larger percentage of their income for it than they currently do.
-Diets will have to change. Less meat, more regionally-produced foods, more seasonal foods.
-More food processing and preparation will need to be done on the farm and in the home of the consumer.
-Large farms will need to become many small, diverse, healthy farms where people actually live.
-Distribution would have to be completeley dismantled and rebuilt piece by piece.
This list is, of course, eternally partial, as Sustainability, in my mind, is a constantly transforming goal rather than a set of practices.
This also means that there will be sweat and dirt involved in many more people's lives (sorry). Please also note that this is a double slap to obesity--more people eating healthier and doing physical work.
Your last paragraph points to the real problem, which is that people are not going to want to hear this. They like their food easy and cheap (like their politicians?). This is the problem we must address. The techical information on how to do this is there--most of it is at least a hundred years old. There's simply not enough motivation to get it done right now.
"Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
-Thomas Edison
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Tom Philpott Posted 12:07 pm
21 Mar 2006
Good stuff
Thanks for the feedback. Believe me, I have wondered whether agriculture is sustainable at all -- often at 6 am on a big picking day, or while regarding a patch that's way, way in the weeds. Permaculture -- essentially a form of what Joe Stirling calls "forest gardening" -- is certainly a goal worth striving for. We'll have to relearn a lot of what has been forgotten over the last few centuries in "the West."
For more interesting discussion of my post, check out Oil Drum--http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/3/21/14447/8752. Many enlightening and challenging insights--including an amusing assessment of my dietary habits, physical stature, and the state of a certain digestive organ.
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caniscandida Posted 5:13 pm
21 Mar 2006
Tirso Moreno
It would be very interesting to hear what Mr. Tirso Moreno, farmworker, and Grist's up-for-questions person this week, has to say about this subject and this conversation.
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atreyger Posted 2:17 am
22 Mar 2006
there's food to be grown
I'm with CowsEatGrass on this one. I think that sustainable agriculture is absolutely achievable. It's not if you want to grow bananas in the North, but both sets of my Russian grandparents have grown their own food for probably as long as they have lived. Growing food for a family is a hell of a lot less time consuming than it is to feed a CSA.
Of course, the amount of food that they grew had to be supplemented with things they could not grow, like grains, meats, and some fruits (the orchard kind) but the bulk of it they grew and ate for a year by storing in deep basement (my grandpa had a garage with two basements, bottom one stayed at about 55 F), pickling, jams or compot (a delicious beverage, sort of a non-alcoholic sangria type thing), using an acre or two at any point in time. When there's a will or a need, there's a way. If the food will become scarce, people will find a way to grow it.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:44 am
22 Mar 2006
Animal waste input
Actually Tom, green manure in the form of grass clippings, leaves, food waste, can substitute for animal waste as organic garden fertilizer.
But on a scale to provide for the whole of humanity I think liquid fertilizer from the waste stream processed with solar energy and yielding btproducts like clean water, biofuels, and heat could do the trick.
But organic agriculture will gave to use electric powered robotics to scale up to the level of agribizz food production.
Since the chemicals that fertilize and condition soil, destroy weeds and bugs, and huge amounts of water normal agriculture wastes are not available to organic farming, in order to achieve similar production levels, either human labor, as in the normal organic garden, or machine labor will be needed.
Think of an organic garden bed, nicely mulched to suppress weeds, carefully watered, with insect repelling plants growing amongst the veggies. We all know how much human labor that takes.
Now envision a robot, programmed by gardeners right in the garden to do the pinpoint watering, mulching, planting, insect control, harvesting. Trained to know which plants are keepers and which are weeds, how much water and liquid organic fertilizer to inject around each plant, and how to remove insect infestations.
A whole new farm equipment industry will be needed. Jobs and more jobs, replacing most back breaking (actually poisonous with chem farming!)farm labor.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Wiseacre Posted 8:00 am
22 Mar 2006
savage protien
As Joe Stirling has hinted, part of the problem with sustainability is the biodiversity issue. Biodiversity objectives should inform the notion of sustainability. That said, Tom rightly points out the one challenge of "real organic farming" is in stocking the farm with enough animals to supply nutrients for the vegetable garden. To that challenge must be added that attitudes regarding the raising and slaghter of human dependent (sometimes invasive) species must be consistent with humane practices and 21st century consumer sensibilities.
The soil replenishment and biodiversity/permaculture ideas converge upon one solution not addressed in this discussion. One of the ways first peoples were very efficient at sustainance from an ecosystem point of view, was that they "harvested" protien from a broad spectrum of soil and nutrient cycling regimes. They depended on native ungulates such as deer for a significant portion of their food. Deer and other game animals are capable of growing on a diet of plant parts that grow naturally on lands which are not suitable for cultivated crops. Of course, I am not suggesting a rush to restore the practice of market hunting. Rather, if you believe that we need to move from an extractive economy to a restoration economy, we should consider the value of restoring large tracts of land to the public domain and managing for biodiversity and regulated harvest of wild animals.
It is perhaps not widely known that interest in hunting, and the culture of the hunter conservationist, is in a steep decline. Though I may be called out for herasy, I believe we should debate the relative cruelties of raising confined species which supply meat and, argualbly, justify proprietary, enclosed rearing systems that infringe upon habitat, as opposed to open wild meat production and hunting systems. The cultural contexts and manifestations of the emergent hunting function (bow hunting for dollars? quotas for carnivores?) I leave for further discussion.
An overnight conversion, as suggested by "Debbie Downer", is not what I had in my mind. There are disruptive ideas (good) and disruptive implementation timetables (bad).
What should also be on our radar screen right now is the possibility of a global currency collapse. This is the subject of numerous blogs I frequent and I think it would be useful to look at the sustainable lifestyle project? from that point of view. We could very well (25% chance?) be trying to build the new world economic order over the next several years as the pump and dump mode of wealth consolidation is extended increasingly fewer Americans. For a few decades more. Capital transfer schemes will be more widely used globally to consolidate wealth generated by the developing economies but the competitive/manipulative model of economic power will peter out when globalism collapes worldwide under the weight of increased transfer costs both in social and energy terms. At that point the choice will be to develop cooperative economies or attempt to centrally regulate, at increasingly smaller scales, the more aggressive among us who are adept at manufacturing strength from the complicity of the fearfulness and low self-esteem of the dependent.
Recapturing the commons is very difficult under the strongman/warlord system. And the commons is the key to sustainability. Thats why the US must ultimately be reformed or cease to exist. Not many people understand this. The founding fathers did - that is why the constitution addresses a right to property but is silent on rights in property. If you want precedented concrete rights, be a renter. We all rent from nature....
SJR
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birdboy Posted 1:43 pm
22 Mar 2006
re:reality still biting
Sorry for the belated response, I'm fighting a flu this week (no, not bird flu). I feel I must respond to the optimism expressed by some about the ability of sustainable agriculture (if it does exist) to feed the entire human population. As with everything environmental, it's all about scale. Just because mom and pop grew most of their own food (presumably in favorable climate and soil) does not mean we can support 6.5 billion people, some of whom live in very unfavorable climates with poor soil, without further harming the Earth's ecosystems.
Remember the prediction a few decades ago that the Earth could not produce enough food to match population growth? Remember how food production grew 'exponentially', just in time? How did this happen? While some good practices were begun, like crop rotation, most of the job was accomplished at great cost to the Earth- chemical fertilizers created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticides and habitat conversion killed off untold species, and tremendous amounts of water and fossil fuels were used to mechanize and industrialize food production. All this was in our great country, with wonderful weather and soil quality- what is happening in other countries, like India and China, in order to meet the demand for food? How can you believe this huge machination can be replaced with something Earth-friendly of equal capacity?
And yet, I must agree with CowsEatGrass (forgive my paraphrasing)- IF people produce their own food where possible, or else pay a lot more for food, eat less meat, give up convenience, and if agribusiness 'gives it up' to small farms and we force big changes to distribution systems, THEN, yes, even an eternal pessimist must agree that if HUGE SOCIAL CHANGE preceeds the conversion to (more) sustainable agriculture, it just might work. But in the face of much evidence that people will not change (not to save diversity, anyway), this is not optimism- it is a leap of faith.
Not that faith has no place in reality- reality is built on faith, and if more of us believe that huge social change will happen, then we become part of the solution, focusing our personal energy and outside energy in the desired direction. We MUST visualize such a possible future, because if WE don't, no one else will. But we need the social change, without it, I can't see it happening.
a liberal in redsville
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caniscandida Posted 6:28 pm
22 Mar 2006
Archer Daniels Midland, et alia
ADM is a major contributor, apparently, to PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer. I hate to be cynical about Jim Lehrer, but I wonder if that is why he has never shown too much interest in the kinds of important questions that Tom Philpott is raising.
I join Puer Avialis (birdboy) in being pessimistic on the question of sustainability. The problem as I see it is urbanization: lots of people living close together, doing all sorts of wonderful things (to give them the benefit of the doubt), but none of which has anything to do with food production. Their food comes from specialists, i.e. farmers, living on the periphery, and relied on to bring their food into the urban marketplaces at regular times.
Unfortunately, that is what civilization depends on.
And we in the First World are not helping matters a jot. We are healthier, and longer-lived, and so presumably happier, than human beings ever were. And especially in America, we deeply believe we are entitled to live like this; it is almost (almost?) a religious value. While the malnutrition and indeed starvation of countless others hardly matters. Yipes. We would not even be able to do a perfectly simple comparative calculation, say the number of people who have refrigerators, vs. the number of people who must scrounge for firewood.
And as though that were not enough, there is strong reason to believe that global warming is going to make our doubts about sustainability all the more likely to be proved true.
Help, Grist editors, help! We are not supposed to wallow in gloom like this! Please do something to cheer us up! Remind us of those science-fiction visions, of great ocean-borne rafts growing countless tons of food, of hydroponic space-stations, able to feed us all quite nicely, with lots of elbow-room for the elephants and the tigers, the whales and the wolves. Tell us that the world of Star Trek can come true: no more poverty, no more want.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:15 am
23 Mar 2006
I'm trying canis
"Please do something to cheer us up!"
It's hard to do it all alone though. Not much good news around, but I collect what I can find.
Recent battery advances using nano technology, high efficiency solar concentrating cogeneration, rapidly dropping wind power costs, and systems that use algae to produce biofuel, clean water, and electric power all from the waste stream are a few of the hopeful developments.
The cost of wind and solar power and electric plugin vehicles is coming within the range of affordability of more and more people. These simple technologies have a good chance of also fitting the needs of the developing world.
Only mass production is missing. Blocked by the industry/government energy status quo maintained through bribery of government, restricted capital allocation for new technology, and huge government subsidies for fossil, nuclear, and now agribizz ethanol.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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couchrock Posted 12:32 am
24 Mar 2006
Don't fight markets, use them!
A common thread that runs through many of these postings is hostility to market economics and the laws of supply and demand. The environmental movement would be much more effective if it dropped the discredited Marxist rhetoric and focused on policies that impact supply and demand, as may be desirable.
If Americans eat too much meat, it's because meat is cheap. The crops that feed livestock are subsidized to be cheap, the cost of agricultural water doesn't reflect its true cost, and farming operatons are largely exempt from air pollution standards (esp. SOx, methane, and particulate matter). Americans are further insulated from the effects of excessive meat (and sugary and fried foods) consumption because they don't have to pay the full cost of their bad eating habits when it comes to healthcare (that's what taxpayers and healthy insurance customers are for).
What to do? Reduce crop subsidies. Require farmers to participate in a cap-and-trade emissions scheme that has not been implemented but would do more to cut overall emissions than all of our current laws. Implement a modest tax on water, or at least make the beneficiaries pay for the costs of water diversion projects.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point. Reducing various subsidies and increasing the cost of damaging practices can do a lot to improve from where we are now. Market forces are something the environmental community should learn to use.
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kbentley Posted 6:40 am
24 Mar 2006
the question
There are so many good thoughts here, and so much work to be done. I've read the Oil Drum thread on your article as well, Tom, and through both of these streams, something that strikes me is how folks have handled the initial question: Can sustainable farming feed the world? I think by examining the question, y'all will see it is unintentionally distorted:
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Forrest Posted 7:04 am
24 Mar 2006
Another way of asking
Does industrial farming feed the world?
Did pre-industrial farming feed the world?
Did forest gardens feed the world?
Did hunter-gathering feed the world?
I do not know of a single human society in history or pre-history where hunger - and death by starvation - were absent. In many, they were (and still are) commonplace. The problem is not production of food, so much as it is distribution. In hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, with limited ability to store and transport food, the distribution problems were seasonal, or related to occasional extreme weather events. In modern societies, the distribution problems are generally more closely related to what welfare economists call "entitlements" - i.e. the ability of people to purchase food (or purchase the inputs necessary to grow their own - such as land, seed, fertilizer, labor).
If our goal is to feed the world, our focus ought to be on wealth distribution more than on agricultural technology. I have seen no credible evidence that hypothetical utopian organic farming would create fewer calories than current industrial agriculture. But I have also yet to see any evidence that organic farming solves hunger problems.
Since many of the hungriest and poorest people in the world are rural people (laborers, and yes, even small landowners), primarily in Africa and South Asia, one of the most helpful things we could do to "feed the world" would be to raise farm incomes in those regions. Cutting first world agricultural subsidies and increasing imports of high value (and value-added) crops from those regions to the wealthy countries might be viable strategies, as would be investing in agricultural technology R & D specific to those regions (instead of breeding more Round-up Ready okra or whatever). Political stability would be a key prerequisite. Global warming is expected to have a disproportionately negative impact on sub-saharan Africa. Thus, we might go so far as to say that a society that is changing its climate cannot feed the world.
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jdeely Posted 2:34 pm
24 Mar 2006
Just imagine
Just imagine how much cheaper food would be if we eliminated subsidies for farmers in rich countries and poorer farmers were allowed to compete.
Just imagine how much lower American food bills would be if they didn't eat out for lunch 3-4 times a week and for dinner 2-3 times a week. Even meals at home are often pre-cooked meals from Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Safeway etc... What if we acutally purchased fresh vegetables, fruit and cooked our own meals a little more often.
Although we still have many issues with how the global food supply is distributed we are definitely moving towards, if we haven't already reached, a world where the problem is too MUCH food not too little. Even in many so-called developing countries, obesity is becoming a growing problem. Imagine if we ate a little less.
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SMLowry Posted 1:41 am
25 Mar 2006
Growing local
It is my understanding that the so-called Green Revolution -- basically the introduction of WWII chemicals into agriculture so the chemical companies would make profits off wartime research -- did a great deal of damage to traditional agriculture in the so-called developing and undeveloped countries. One of the biggest impacts in India, for example as detailed by Vandana Shiva in two of her excellent books (The Violence of the Green Revolution, and Staying Alive) was separating the people, particularly the women who were responsible for agriculture in India, from the land, introducing the whole concept of monoculture farming along with chemicals, etc., destruction of the commons and ultimately the loss of the ability of villagers to sustain themselves.
In this country tiny, niche markets for fresh produce and hand-crafted items like farmstead cheeses, fresh milk and meat, organic veggies is helping to encourage small, diverse producers (at least that's what I see in my neck of New England) but overall our ability to feed ourselves locally is gone. A sustainable agriculture would necessarily be primarily local/regionally focused. Certainly trade is desireable, especially in climates such as New England (we'd get pretty tired of potatoes and pumpkin and dried apples come February) but I believe we need to at least be able to provide for our bare essentials, and access to quality food should not ultimately depend on the ability to hand over cash. We need to implement barter systems, direct one-on-one barter and community-wide barter networks and/or some kind of physical community currency.
Our global/industrial agricultural system is designed around profit not feeding people. Chemical companies control what is grown and how and the so-called free trade agreements act as global enforcer. One of the reasons for wide-spread diseases like foot and mouth, avian flu and the like is because of industrial-style agriculture and the reliance on global trading markets -- shipping English sheep to France and vice versa rather than keeping English sheep in England, French sheep in France.
I have no doubt that people can be fed, but to do so the food system needs to be localized and people like us who have been spoiled by the wide variety of exotic food choices, will have to acquaint ourselves with what can be grown and raised closer to home. Ultimately this is what's going to have to happen, just as we're going to have to ultimately learn how to live without ready access to petroleum products. We might as well begin the process now.
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Backcut Posted 4:08 am
25 Mar 2006
Imagine a world
where desalinization technology is witheld under the guise of being "too expensive" because cheap water might cause certain groups of people around the world to flourish.
Another 2 cents worth but, "food for thought"?
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sid Posted 1:10 am
26 Mar 2006
without a plan what good is a vision
agibiz runs the world
starvation will be the result
if we care about peasants in india
the first thing we should do is;
to boycott factory farming
especially meat producta
genicide of poultry worldwide in the
name of the avian flu(scam)
caused rampant suicide among the people
whose souls are connected to the animals
they love
the plan is to kill all our poultry so that
we will be forced to buy their toxic products
they are responsible for polluting the lands
and our bodies
if people had the guts to learnthe truth they
would eat weeds rather than mcdonalds
i know that the readers of this know i am right
but they are just too lazy to find out the truth
annd live by it
i'm not saying i'm perfect i need support as much
as anyone
bring down agibiz or die
let's form clubs and take vows
together we can win this
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sid Posted 1:15 am
26 Mar 2006
eat more good food
and zero bad food
factory farming is a scourge upon the planet
start gardening now
it's fun
it's healthy
and it helps the earth
remember the mother earth news?????????
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sid Posted 1:20 am
26 Mar 2006
stop eating factory farmed food
period.......................
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atreyger Posted 5:35 am
26 Mar 2006
where do you draw the line?
For the definition of factory farmed? Is not any farm a production factility, and thus a factory of some sort?
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foodshed Posted 12:04 pm
27 May 2008
foodsheds
We have to be sustainable, perhaps the root cause is that we are living in an overpopulated world, that many are not educated and empowered to protect the environment around them, and that we have basically become dependent on corporations to feed and clothe us. Ultimately, we have no choice but to be sustainable, it starts with food because food is the basic need for survival. If we do not find the food solution, we are doomed, so our analysis of the solutions has to include the root problems, our survival depends on it. It is not debateable.
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