From 71042.2023@compuserve.comWed Mar 13 12:10:20 1996 Date: 13 Mar 96 10:52:56 EST From: Bill Duesing <71042.2023@compuserve.com> To: SANET-MG Subject: 21st Century Food 21st Century Food First published in plain, the Magazine of Life, Land and Spirit , 1995 by Bill Duesing After air and water, food is our most important connection to the environment. Food is the way we take energy from the sun (and nutrients from the air, soil and water) into our bodies so we can grow, breathe, think, work, play, love and learn. We are solar-powered beings. Bringing our food supply closer to home is one of the most effective and powerful strategies we can use to create positive changes in our health, in the environment, in our society and on this planet. Growing greens and potatoes in gardens, sprouting seeds on our kitchen counters, stopping at nearby farms to buy milk or vegetables, preparing family meals from basic ingredients and other ordinary acts of feeding ourselves are critical steps to a better future. By the middle of the next century, the United States population will double and the amount of arable land will be reduced to just over one half of an acre per person, according to David Pimentel, an ecologist from Cornell University. The price of food will be driven up, and as a consequence, our diets will change. This was just one of the warnings about the future food supply which came from this spring's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Strong demand and resulting high prices for water, energy, and American grain, as well as a doubled population and a significant loss of cropland to erosion and development, will put a great strain on the earth's productive resources. Forty years from now there will be only one third of an acre of cropland, per person, globally. Currently, there is just under seven tenths of an acre per person. Nearly one billion people are poorly nourished, and all the world's major fisheries are being overfished. About 35,000 children die every day of hunger and related problems. (Four thousand of those are infants who die because their mothers were convinced to give up breastfeeding in favor of using infant formula. The global food system's pressure to eliminate healthy, traditional ways in favor of a new, packaged, processed, dangerous and profitable product is enormous and starts with the very young. ) Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute believes that crop improvements and new technologies will boost the earth's annual grain harvest to two billion tons. That would be enough to feed 10 billion people at India's nutritional level. This yield would feed less than half the world's current population at the present U. S. nutritional level, or the world's present population (5.7 billion people) at about Italy's nutritional level. The average American consumes nearly 1,800 pounds of grain a year, the average Italian, nearly 900 pounds and the average Indian consumes just 440 pounds of grain per year. The U. S. diet requires great quantities of grain because so much of it is fed to animals in order to produce meat and dairy products. Pimentel believes that by the middle of the next century, higher food prices and resource constraints will cause the percentage of animal products in American diets to be cut in half, while the percentage of grains and vegetables will increase. He also predicts there will be a much more limited variety of vegetables. Brown sees additional problems in the rising incomes in China and the rest of Asia, which he fears will encourage more people there to want meat and dairy products. This development will require even more grain. China already imports great quantities of grain from our country. Some scientists believe that we can feed 10 billion people by the year 2025 and still leave some room for nature if we just develop and implement enough new, high-tech agricultural practices. These would include genetically engineered crop plants (which produce their own fertilizer and insecticides) and synthetic growth hormones for chickens, pigs, fish and beef. More synthetic fertilizers, enhanced computer technology and fancy new farm equipment would be required for the few, very large farms which scientists think will produce most of the food. However, these scientists have little or no idea what the vast majority of humans will do to earn the money needed to buy this food. They have no plan to cope with the negative effects from the global climate changes that are bound to occur from increased energy use by these high-tech agro-factories and an increasingly distant food system. We have been spoiled in this country with plentiful, seemingly low-cost food, thanks to fertile soil, subsidized grains, water and energy, and to our willingness to accept the environmental and social damage caused by industrial agriculture. On average, Americans spend about 15 percent of their disposable income on food -a much smaller percentage than people in most other countries spend. The poor in this country, however, spend up to a third of their income on food. These figures don't include food's many hidden costs. The food system consumes large amounts of our tax dollars in energy, agricultural, advertising, regulatory, waste disposal and health-care subsidies. The system also depends on generous tax benefits. Its appetite for fossil fuel and nuclear energy to transport food, to manufacture and recycle bottles, cans, and plastic-paks, to build and power fancy new stores and restaurants and to market promotional "give-aways" is voracious. As solar-powered beings, we require relatively little energy. Depending upon our age and activity level, we need between 2,000 and 3,000 Calories (kilocalories to a scientist) worth of food energy per day. This is equivalent to the energy in less than one tenth of a gallon of gasoline, or about one cup. The amount of energy needed to keep an efficient automobile going for four minutes will keep a human going for 24 hours. The relevance of the term efficiency depends on what it is that's being measured. Compare a supermarket lettuce, grown in an irrigated California desert, to a lettuce growing in our garden. Efficiency is one justification for nearly every aspect of the store lettuce. Labor efficiency is a reason for large scale farms and stores. The irrigation system, trucks, pesticide factories and applicators, the federal regulatory system, the supermarket's cooling, heating and lighting systems may all have increased efficiency. This efficiency relates to the First Law of thermodynamics which says that energy and matter are always conserved. That is, neither of them can be destroyed. The-miles-per-gallon rating on a car is an example of First Law efficiency - how many miles result from each unit of energy consumed. Improving First Law efficiency is an important conservation measure. For our future, however, it is more important to consider efficiency as measured by the Second Law of thermodynamics. This law says that energy moves in one direction only - towards being less useful. All the energy in any meal that we eat flows into the environment as waste heat. It is conserved, but is less useful than the food or the sunlight from which it came. That energy's potential is reduced; Its disorder or entropy is increased. The disorder resulting from our profligate energy use is rampant and increasing rapidly. To measure efficiency by the Second Law, we have to compare the amount of energy used to the minimum required. Using this important criterion, the lettuce in our gardens is close to infinitely more efficient than the California lettuce. (Just when I thought we'd hit the low point in efficiency, on May 24, 1995, the USDA proposed the importation of lettuce from Israel, after "efficient" treatment for fruitflies and other pests.) Using our bodies to tend organic gardens is the essence of efficiency according to the Second Law of thermodynamics. Since all the energy used is solar, the entropy created is within the planet's normal energy flow. Human beings, in places ranging from the Kalahari Desert in Africa to the Arctic Tundra, and even in our fertile temperate zone, fed themselves within their local ecosystems, using only renewable (solar) energy and their ingenuity. For most of our species' history, humans have obtained their food energy from their immediate environment, directly from the plants which collected it and the animals that passed it along, using that stored solar energy first to hunt and gather, then to grow and raise plants and animals. Eating came only after this work, plus any necessary fuel-gathering, grinding and cooking. Wastes were deposited back into the local environment for decomposition and recycling. In many societies, this work not only fed people, but also left generous amounts of time for family, community and cultural activities. More nourishing ecosystems were created in the process. The astounding bounty of edible plants and animals that the Europeans found in New England, and the fecundity of the inhabited rainforests were the results of centuries of human's interaction with and management of ecosystems. All that bounty was not an accident. This brings us to a promising path that leads toward feeding ourselves in the 21st century. This path empowers individuals and families, provides healthier diets and addresses large global problems head on. It involves individual participation in producing food where we live. This greatly reduces our food system's energy requirements, increases our food's freshness and flavor and fosters holistic interaction with our ecosystem. In addition to gardening, this path also involves eating less meat, cooking more, spending less money in the global food distribution system and giving more to farmers and gardeners in our local communities. Bringing our food closer to home is not only a powerful way to effect positive change, it is probably essential for our survival. I suspect that if we are to have any hope of feeding everyone on this planet from its available resources, we need to be able to do it almost everywhere, especially in a land as abundantly blessed with resources as this one. When we realize that we can convert our lawns to valuable farmland, and can produce bountiful harvests using ecological methods, we are well on our way to solving global problems. Bill Duesing, Solar Farm Education, Box 135, Stevenson, CT 06491 (203) 888-9280, 71042.2023@compuserve.com