Sustainable food. Yes, absolutely. Of course, we’re all for it.
But what exactly is it?
It’s a question that was debated at Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sustainable Food Institute on Thursday.
There were some agreed-upon yeses, according to The Daily Green.
Local is better
Why? it requires far less energy to get food from the farm to your plate than when food is trucked or flown from afar.
Unprocessed is better than processed
Why? Pretty much the same reason. Fewer ingredients and less manufacturing means less energy.
Organic is better
Why? Doesn’t use petroleum-based chemical fertilizers and pesticides. That reduces the energy needed to grow the crop. Plus less toxins for the environment
But, from where I sit:
*Unprocessed food requires time to prepare and cook. Who has that time?
*Local food is not readily available.
*Organic food is a luxury. People feeding a family on tight budget simply can’t afford it.
How do you balance competing choices — between workers’ jobs, the environment, and your own health? One example of the complexity of these decisions is the case of green beans in the UK.
Rich Pirog, program leader for the Marketing and Foods Systems Initiative at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture said green beans imported from Kenya to the United Kingdom represent 1.5 percent of the total fruits and vegetables eaten in the U.K.
Yet, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released in shipping the beans represents half of the total emissions to import all produce to the U.K. each year.
Still, the money from the green beans helps Kenyans develop their country - about 70 percent of the country’s green beans are imported to the U.K. But then there is the question of the 190 million cubic meters of water necessary to ship the beans. That water might be a lot more useful in the sub-Saharan country, he said.
I wonder, when we say sustainable, what do we really mean?
Words from a friend of the Earth, the sky and humanity:
………Sustainability by its very nature implies a balancing of accounts between natural production and society’s consumption of these resources. Judging from recent history, it can be clearly stated that re-investment in these ecosystem cycles has not kept pace with their utilization and harvest. The shortfall in this equation has resulted in diminishing supplies and regionalized scarcities along with a serious and pervasive reduction in Earth’s ability to keep up with demand.
……..“Enough” must come to replace “more” as the measure of success for societies and for individuals. Re-investment will have to take precedence over wealth, while growth and development must be balanced against survival and sustenance. In essence, sustainability requires permanently eliminating profit as the motivating force for economic activity, and replacing it with the goals of resource security that may then become attainable as we make the adaptation to nature’s budget.
………All of this will be brought about either by the impending collapse of natural and financial systems as we know them, or through the enlightened and conscious choices of civilization.
………We can no longer sustain unsustainability.
– Johnny Sundstrom –
I don’t think we can call anything “sustainable” - organic or otherwise - until we take into consideration the full life cycle of the food, including transportation. The farm could be practicing sustainable methods, but if you’re flying your free-range beef halfway across the country, it’s significantly less green than eating locally.
But it’s true, local is expensive. I went to a farmer’s market the other day and got sticker shock from tomatoes. But the farmer’s market drew in a large and happy crowd of families. It seems that the market is more about local community than sustainability.
At least you have farmer’s market. Ours here is once a week in a parking lot and all you can get is jam.
Doesn’t this go back to the same issue that Mathis Wackernagel talked about when he spoke to Earth & Sky about sustainable consumption? He was saying that it’s hard to break out of your own culture, with respect to living in a more sustainable way. For example, if you’re an American, it’s hard to use less trash than your neighbors, because we live in a culture where everyone comes wrapped three ways, and where you have to be very mindful not to come home with plastic-wrapped boxes inside plastic bags inside paper bags.
Same with food. If local organic food isn’t readily available, as Eleanor says - or if it’s crazily expensive, as Lindsay says - then it’s going to be hard for people to go that direction.
It’s a culture-wide shift that’s needed …
It seems to me that a shift like that would have to start with what we’re doing here … just talking about it and raising some awareness that a change would be good for humanity’s potential to sustain itself.
Deborah
Hi,
Another wonderful discussion. At least for those in my generation of elders, as Deborah points out, ” raising some awareness that a change would be good…..” may be our most important contribution to the children among us.
As noted above, people like me have been consuming unsustainably for a lifetime. Our “footprints” are huge and in a remarkable number of instances not getting smaller, as the practical requirements of reality appear to suggest is necessary. Too many in my generation believe there is no end to the per capita consumption of the limited resources of Earth because, for them, the Earth is like a mother’s teat at which humankind will endlessly and insatiably suckle.
I try to make what amount to small, incremental changes in lifestyle that appear at least to me as very little steps. My hope is that having many elders make small forward movements will end up making a big difference for our children.
Youth have not yet become “set” in OUR conspicuously over-the-top consumptive ways of living, I believe. They are more open and emotionally accessible to necessary change. Their efforts could be exponentially more powerful than the small ones made now by those in my not-so-great generation….a generation misled by economic powerbrokers of the global economy and megalomaniacal heads of multinational corporations, their bought-and-paid-for politicians in the developed world, and their many minions in the mass media; a selfish, ME-centered generation that has evidently chosen a patently unsustainable, primrose path for its children to follow into the future.
Perhaps “raising some awareness” and making some needed changes are in the offing.
Always, with thanks,
Steve
The idea we can “go back to the good old days” of sustainability is flawed. We use less acreage per person today than ever before. This is only made possible by modern agricultural techniques and cheap transportation. If we tried to use personal farms to feed every one, we would need to dissolve all the cities and put all the folks to work on farms. The cost would be in science and technology because the folks (nearly all) working on the farms would have little time for anything else. There would be no room for wild life habitat. Also, there would be no food out of season. If we decided to lean on green houses, many acres would be covered by glass and the labor would be intensive and the energy required to keep the greenhouse warm and lighted in the cold season would be incredible.
Like it or not, we have the best food system ever devised by man. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides give us opportunities never before seen. I am not saying that there is no room for improvement, but that the improvement will be toward more technology and mechanization, not less.
I think few today would like to live a life on a farm. Up before daylight, hard work all day and to bed well after dark. There are no sick days, no vacations or relaxing until the crop is planted, cultivated, sprayed, fertilized and harvested. If nature hands you a hail storm or a drought, your work was for naught. Be very glad that most of us don’t have to do that work because others do it for us. Homestead farming takes all of one’s time and effort leaving no time for blogging, video games and shopping.
The good old days never existed.
How about go ahead to the good new days, with a mix of appropriate technology and decentralized food production,processing and preservation. The fellow sounds like a plant to promote the status quo, a spokesman for the dominant paradigm. He certainly doesn’t have any cultural values that resemble true farmers or an understanding of the human dignity of a modern rural lifestyle. He doesn’t speak for me or millions of others who’s lifestyle includes growing food sustainably or producing forest products sustainably. I agree that we won’t find our future farmers among the video game and shopping crowd. As we learn more about our envirnoment and the impact of all of our actions we will have no choice but to do things differently to meet human needs for survival.
Calling our food system the best ever devised is like the brainwashing from the chemical companies…like the slogan, without chemicals life itself would be impossible….well in the case - how did we make it this far as a species?
Our modern food production is the most energy wasteful system ever. It is called efficient because so few people produce the food for so many, but when an automobile efficiency is measured it is about miles per gallon. The energy used to produce modern food in America is the most inefficient on the planet from a calories of energy used for calories of food produced.
Everyone in this country knows someone that has died from cancer…how do we address that issue from a food source consideration? I submit cleaner food is the key.
The fact that we spend a smaller percentage of our income on food is a plot to keep consumers sitting on their butts playing video games and watching TV and becoming the perfect ultimate consumers for the system that methodically removes them further and further from any connection with the source of their own life needs.
Stay in the city Benjamin, the people in the rural areas don’t need repopulating with people of your vision or lack of. There is an element of human dignity that comes through work, particularly when the work is the labor of choice. Of course we are not looking for the next level of a video game, just an a little rain…. The good old days are yet to come….
Jason Rutledge, farmer,forester, in Appalachia
Interesting positions, Jason.
I am not from the city, in fact I live three miles from a town of 260 in cattle country. I was originally an ag major at Texas A&M university. I have worked dairy farms, row cropping of field peas, melons, corn and soy beans. I have raised, cut and hauled hay. I have planted trees in the reforestation efforts at old strip coal mines. I have had plenty of “human dignity” coming from work.
In fact, I really liked the feeling of agricultural work. I now own a truck and transport non-perishable foodstuffs among other things.
All that said:
Our agricultural “system” is not perfect. A great improvement would be to drop all subsidies and other government meddling in the marketplace. Also, taxes on agricultural lands should be dropped considerable. The family farm is in grave danger and almost gone. Because of taxes, regulation and the like. If you want to farm, it is most advatageous to be big with lots of friends in Washington.
I said we have the best system yet devised. I did not say it was near perfect. I share your point on decentralization.
Ben
I think awareness is critical to making any improvement possible. But we must do it in moderation as we don’t want to cause new problems by being too hasty or radical.
Anyone who lives in suburbia (a great percentage of the US population) and rural areas has some tract of land at their disposal (usually kept as grass) that could grow food bearing plants instead. These small gardens would easily supplement what may be purchased from local farmers markets and grocers. Personally, my husband and I are scientists, and I don’t believe our work productivity suffers due to our small backyard organic garden (which btw yeilds far more than we can use ourselves.) People in cities could have balcony pot gardens and could purchase more of their food items from local farmers within 50 miles. Reaching perfect sustainability is a lofty goal, but we can’t begin on this path by imposing that everyone changing their residence or radically altering their lifestyle. That would be like taking a novice mountaineer up Denali; there would be too much passive resistance. The change to sustainability as manifested through community-sized efforts (or efforts spurred by churches, academic institutions, clubs, etc.) that encourage incremental lifestyle changes (planting gardens, car pooling, making local purchases) will add to a revolution.