Wasting the Abundance

How much food have you thrown away today? Didn't quite finish that second or third bowl of cereal and dumped it down the garbage disposal? Tossed the last two bites of that sandwich? Scraped the remains of dinner into the kitchen garbage? Did you go shopping today and clean out your refrigerator by throwing away all that food from last week that had gone bad? How about those leftovers from the restaurant three nights ago that you never ate? We all do it. I did all these things in the last week. We usually don't even think about it.

So let's stop for a second and do a little bit of that thinking. My cereal was mostly corn, wheat and sugar. All are grown, harvested and processed many miles from the store in which I purchased the cereal. Taking into account the production of the packaging of all the ingredients before they arrive at the cereal plant and all the packaging to get the cereal to my kitchen, not to mention the production of the cereal itself and we can quickly see that there are many very complicated processes involved. Each of them consumes energy which usually comes from some fossil fuel like diesel for the trucks and coal to generate the electricity.

When I pour that last bowl, eat only half of it and dump the rest, I'm also wasting some of that energy that went into getting that cereal into my bowl. It doesn't seem like much when considering a bowl of cereal. However, recent studies have indicated that in industrialized nations like the US 30 - 50% of all food produced is thrown away before it can be eaten. This means that up to 50% of the carbon emissions related to food production and transportation are causing global climate change for no benefit. I don't know how you feel, but that sounds really stupid to me.

The irony, or perhaps the underlying cause, of all this waste is that we do it because our food supply is so abundant. We grow and produce so much food in the US that we can throw away half of it and still suffer an epidemic of obesity caused mainly by eating too much (or at least too much of the wrong kinds of food). The true tragedy is not the cost of the waste or even the distasteful moral issue of so much waste in the face of so many struggling with food security or even starvation in other parts of the world. No, the tragedy is that while we are wasting this colossal abundance we are lulled into believing it will continue forever.

The belief in never ending abundance causes us as a society to be wasteful of all the limited resources that are consumed daily to produce this amazing bounty which we discard without a second thought. Our modern farming practices are heavily reliant on the consumption of water for irrigation, diesel for production and transportation, petroleum for pesticides, other fossil fuels like natural gas to produce fertilizer and the land on which to grow it all. Supply of all of these resources are beginning to be challenged and will be more so in the near future as world-wide demand for food continues to increase partly due to population increase and partly to the rest of the world wanting to eat what we do.

Before a crisis looms caused by a shortage of any of these resources upon which our farming practices rely, we need to supplement our food supply with crops grown in ways that are not reliant on these limited resources. Many organic farming practices can produce the same yield per acre with no chemical fertilizers or pesticides and a fraction of the petroleum. The problem is that all of these practices are only successful on a small scale so that more people have to practice them to support the same sized population.

We won't get there overnight, but we can each make a small contribution by being more mindful of how much food we buy, eat and throw out. We can also support local farmers who practice organic techniques which have a lower impact on the environment, our bodies and our limited resources. If we don't we may be staring into the first of many crises regarding our food production sooner than we want to admit.

Nature From Within

Humans are part of nature. Whether you live in a densely populated city or on a rural farm, you live in an ecosystem that consumes natural resources and supports many organisms, both plant and animal. We cannot escape this fact, whether we acknowledge it or not. In fact humans create many unnecessary problems when we do not recognize the consequences of our actions to the environment around us.

The blinding and isolating effects of "modern" society allow humans to pretend to live outside of nature in our artificial environments. We go to great lengths quite often to isolate ourselves from the world in which we live. Just look at our sealed and air conditioned homes and cars. Cellophane wrapped, boxed, frozen, freeze dried, vacuum packed food. Earbuds, "smart" phones, iPads, wall-sized TVs and other stimulation prosthetics.

We cause the most harm to the natural environment in which we all live through our own ignorance of the debilitating consequences of our activities. What was the complete effect on the environment caused by the purchase of that chicken sandwich you had for lunch? From building and operating the concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) that houses 100,000+ chickens under one roof from where your chicken breast was raised. To the effect of growing the grain the chicken was feed and the water that was pumped for it to drink to the waste it excreted during its short life. How about the processing plant where it was slaughtered, butchered and packaged? How about all the diesel fuel that was burned to ship and distribute the fertilizer, pesticide and seed to grow the grain and the grain itself? How about to ship the packaged chicken to the fast food distribution center and finally to the chain restaurant where you bought it? What are the effects on the environment for all the packaging both of the chicken feed, the antibiotics it was feed, the boxes in which the packaged chicken was shipped and finally all the packaging for everything else in your sandwich like the bun, the condiments, lettuce, tomatoes, etc.

And that is just for one chicken sandwich. Every single activity in which we participate every single day of our lives has direct, yet sometimes very hidden impacts on the environment from which we cannot escape no matter how hard we try. The more we pretend that we live outside of nature, instead of within it, the more harm we do to it and ultimately to ourselves.

The Cost of Mordern Farming

Current farming practices allow humans to produce more food per acre than was even imaginable 50 years ago. However, this huge gain in food production has a tremendous cost. Not only are these practices incredibly energy intensive but they rely on many toxic herbicides and pesticides which find their way into both our food chain as well as the environment at large.

Why is this a problem? In addition to the obvious issues with ingesting toxic substances, some of these chemicals are indicated as hormone mimics which can contribute to a whole host of issues from infertility to obesity to some forms of cancer. Moreover, the amount of fossil fuels required to grow a pound of food accounts for almost half of all costs considering the production, transportation and distribution of everything from the pesticides, to fertilizer to seed applied to an acre of a crop. Add in the tilling, plowing, seeding, watering, harvesting, processing, packaging and transporting of the crop itself and you can see that humans pay a very heavy price in energy consumption to achieve the fantastic levels of food production we currently enjoy.

But that is not the only cost incurred by our factory farming and mass food production practices. Most agriculture in the U.S. is now irrigated, and a significant amount by non-renewable aquifers like the Ogallala in the central plains. This one aquifer irrigates 30% of all irrigated land in the U.S. By the latest estimates, the deepest wells will start running dry in 25 - 30 years at current pumping rates. This is in an area that is already semi-arid and supported only a fraction of the amount of current agriculture before the massive pumping and irrigation from the aquifer.

Another hidden cost is the effect of both fertilizer and livestock excrement runoff into our nation's waterways. The excess nitrogen and other nutrients in this runoff causes excessive algae and bacterial blooms in rivers, streams and eventually the ocean. These blooms deprive the waterways of oxygen resulting in the die-off of whole ecosystems, from the micro-organisms all the way up the food chain to the fish and the mammal and bird predators who eat the fish.

Finally, in return for this incredible production of food, we have given up the two most important aspects of the food itself; its taste and nutritional value. Almost all fruits and vegetable hybrids sold in grocery stores today are bred for neither their taste nor their nutrient value but for their shelf life, color and hardiness for shipping and transport from the field to the store aisle. Unfortunately, taste and nutritional value are usually sacrificed for these other attributes. Like the large, beautiful rose hybird that has not even a hint of fragrance left, our fresh fruit and vegetables pale in taste and nutritional value compared to that which our grandparent's generation were accustomed.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with all of these practices is that they are not sustainable. Not just because we are using up all the water in the aquifers or all the oil to power the farm machinery and trucks, but the arable land whose topsoil is eroding away due to the very practices that squeeze so much food out of each and every acre. We have to try something different before we are forced to do so by the constraint of our limited resources.