Green Options

In part one of this blog I acknowledged that I enjoy local food as a special treat in my diet but described three reasons that the true “locovore” concept was impractical:  Limited Food Diversity, Quality Issues, and Water Issues.  I’ll continue.

By Lester R. Brown

Today we are an oil-based civilization, one that is totally dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling. Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped 31 billion barrels of oil but discovered fewer than 9 billion barrels of new oil. World reserves of conventional oil are in a free fall, dropping every year.

As I note in my latest book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, discoveries of conventional oil total roughly 2 trillion barrels, of which 1 trillion have been extracted so far, with another trillion barrels to go. By themselves, however, these numbers miss a central point. As security analyst Michael Klare notes, the first trillion barrels was easy oil, “oil that’s found on shore or near to shore; oil close to the surface and concentrated in large reservoirs; oil produced in friendly, safe, and welcoming places.” The other half, Klare notes, is tough oil, “oil that’s buried far offshore or deep underground; oil scattered in small, hard-to-find reservoirs; oil that must be obtained from unfriendly, politically dangerous, or hazardous places.”

This prospect of peaking oil production has direct consequences for world food security, as modern agriculture depends heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Most tractors use gasoline or diesel fuel. Irrigation pumps use diesel fuel, natural gas, or coal-fired electricity. Fertilizer production is also energy-intensive. Natural gas is used to synthesize the basic ammonia building block in nitrogen fertilizers. The mining, manufacture, and international transport of phosphates and potash all depend on oil.

Most food eaten in the USA is produced on mega-farms, whether inside America’s borders or imported from large farming operations overseas. Within the US, 5% of farms actually deliver 75% of America’s agricultural produce.

Fine Gael, Ireland’s main opposition party, wants to create an environmental and alternative technology zone which could create 50,000 jobs over the next decade.

[photo by Becky Striepe]

Eating food that is locally grown can really help you cut down your carbon footprint. Most food travels hundreds or even thousands of miles from farm to table. All of the processing, packaging, and travel accounts for almost 80% of the energy use in the U.S. food system. Eating more local, unprocessed, organic produce is a great (and tasty) way to cut back on those food miles! Services like Atlanta’s Vegetable Husband make eating local that much easier.

The nasty truth is that a lot of the simplistic, one-size-fits-all, ‘you can save the planet’ policies offered by governments just don’t work. And that failure can leave even the keenest green activist feeling like a fraud and a contributor to planetary despoliation, so what it does to the novice ‘green’ I can’t imagine.

“You’re going to go there, aren’t you?” my husband asked with a scared look on his face last night at dinner.

“No, really, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are, you’re going to go there.”

“No, I’m not planning on going there. And even if I were, I wouldn’t expect you to go, too. I would never expect that from you unless you wanted to.”

Where did he think I was going? To a land that scares many a man - the land of vegetarianism.

Since my six year barely touches meat, my nine year old is a light eater, and I can take most meat or leave it, I’ve begun to cook a lot less. A regular sized portion for my husband and a much smaller portion for the kids and me to split does just fine. Last night was the first my husband noticed. He’s been very supportive of all the environmentally friendly changes I’ve been making over the past couple of years, but this one got him a bit defensive. He understands the environmental impact of meat, but he’s a carnivore through and through.

I really don’t expect him to change his carnivorous habits, not unless he feels he should. But I can make wiser meat choices for him and for the rest of my meat eating (to various degrees) family. Here are five ways.

1. Offer a bigger variety of foods when you’re offering smaller portions of meat. I grew up with a dinner plate full of a big slab of meat, some type of potato or pasta, and one vegetable. That’s how I used to cook my own family’s dinners, too. But now I’ve changed that. Now I offer a smaller portion of meat and several sides including two different colored vegetables every night. By adding more vegetables, beans and whole grain pastas, the meat isn’t missed so much.

I know this might sound pompous (my daughter’s favorite word these days), but I have some free advice about eating. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to eat in a more healthful, environmentally friendly, sustainable way. You don’t have to be an amazing cook, or use a carbon calculator for every meal. All you have to do is think about what you are eating.

I am irritated by the debate, by well-meaning food folks, about whether eating local food is really a good way to reduce the impact of your food choices on carbon emissions. This debate suggests a phony choice - if food miles matter, then nothing else does. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Food miles” are a measure of the distance food travels from farm to plate. As far as I know, this concept caught fire after a 2003 study came out from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture comparing food miles traveled by local produce in Iowa and conventional produce within the U.S. The study found that the non-local produce had traveled an average of 1500 miles,