Archive for the ‘food and agriculture’ Category
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Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Nicholas Kristof has another column in the Sunday NY Times, The Spread of Superbugs, about bacteria that are increasingly difficult to kill with antibiotics and their links to the way we produce meat in modern agricultural systems.
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Posted in food and agriculture, health | No Comments »
Science Magazine considers whether decreasing meat consumption can increase global food security
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
In this week’s special issue devoted to food security, Science asks what it will take to feed 9 billion people by mid century.
Food insecurity—the inability of people to feed themselves—may rise if food supply cannot keep pace with population. This is a concern that goes back over 200 years to Thomas Malthus.
One theme shows up in a few articles: Can reducing meat consumption help in the battle to feed more people?
Erik Stokstad’s news feature (subscription required)1 provides a nice lead:
The United States, for instance, has just 4.5% of the world’s population but accounts for about 15% of global meat consumption. Americans consume about 330 grams of meat a day on average—the equivalent of three quarter-pound hamburgers. In contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that most people consume just 142 to 184 grams of meat and beans daily. In the developing world, daily meat consumption averages just 80 grams. Those numbers suggest that people living in the United States and other wealthy nations could increase world grain supplies simply by forgoing that extra burger or chop.
However, he interviews researchers and cites studies that raise a number of issues potentially complicating this story…
Tags: meat and diet
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture, population, solutions | No Comments »
How much energy to make a meal?
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Science Magazine (subscription required) is running a special issue this week on food security. There are so many articles, it’s hard to know where to start.
Let’s go with an interesting, visible example from a news article showing that different meals can require vastly different amounts of energy to make (click on this link for a nice downloadable color figure).
(1) Beans: Amount of energy needed to grow, package, transport, and cook (what I assume to be one serving) in Sweden. Note, a megajoule is one million joules, or about 240 dietary calories—the amount of energy in almost 2 cans of soda:
- Brown beans (8.9 megajoules, 2,127 dietary calories)
- Yellow peas (5 megajoules, 1,195 dietary calories)
- Imported soybeans (7.9 megajoules, 1888 dietary calories)
- Imported brown beans (11 megajoules, 2,629 dietary calories)
- Imported canned beans (20 megajoules, 4,780 dietary calories)
Bottom line: Commercial canning is energy intensive and food miles matter.
(2) A single meat-based dinner
Amounts of energy to grow, package, transport, and cook each meal:
- Dinner 1 (19 megajoules, 4541 dietary calories to make)
- Beef (9.4)
- Rice (1.1)
- Greenhouse tomatoes (4.6)
- Wine (4.2)
- Dinner 2 (6.1 megajoules, 1457 dietary calories to make)
- Chicken (4.37)
- Potatoes (0.91)
- Carrots (0.5)
- Cooking oil (0.3)
- Tap water (0)
Both of these dinners yielded about the same dietary energy to the eater:
- Dinner 1: 2.52 megajoules, 602 dietary calories
- Dinner 2: 2.60 megajoules, 621 dietary calories
This means that dinner 1 yields about 13% of the energy required to make it, whereas dinner 2 yields about 43%.
Bottom line: It takes three times more energy to make dinner 1 than dinner 2. More energy use with conventional agriculture means more fossil fuel use and more climate warming.
Science 327: 809 DOI: 10.1126/science.327.5967.809
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Posted in energy, food and agriculture | 2 Comments »
Haiti’s story
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days. There’s a deep social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.
I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on. Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:
- Doctors Without Borders USA
- AmeriCares
- An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.
Tags: Haiti
Posted in conflict, energy, food and agriculture, health, nature and culture, population, race and class, risk analysis, social science | 2 Comments »
Drug resistance and meat production
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
MSNBC is giving front page coverage to a potentially serious problem that scientists identified years ago—microbes are becoming drug resistant because of antibiotic use in meat production.
Researchers say the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals has led to a plague of drug-resistant infections that killed more than 65,000 people in the U.S. last year — more than prostate and breast cancer combined. And in a nation that used about 35 million pounds of antibiotics last year, 70 percent of the drugs — 28 million pounds — went to pigs, chickens and cows. Worldwide, it’s 50 percent.
Governments are starting to realize the urgency of this issue:
The rise in the use of antibiotics is part of a growing problem of soaring drug resistance worldwide, The Associated Press found in a six-month look at the issue. As a result, killer diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph are resurging in new and more deadly forms.
In response, the pressure against the use of antibiotics in agriculture is rising. The World Health Organization concluded this year that surging antibiotic resistance is one of the leading threats to human health, and the White House last month said the problem is “urgent.”
….[T]hree federal agencies tasked with protecting public health — the Food and Drug Administration, CDC and U.S. Department of Agriculture — declared drug-resistant diseases stemming from antibiotic use in animals a “serious emerging concern.” And FDA deputy commissioner Dr. Joshua Sharfstein told Congress this summer that farmers need to stop feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals.
However, entrenched special interests continue to be as resistant as the germs our food system is producing:
Farm groups and pharmaceutical companies argue that drugs keep animals healthy and meat costs low, and have defeated a series of proposed limits on their use.
As Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, Wendell Berry, and others have noted, this is what results from the treadmill of production and the Walmartization of our food system. When the only thing that matters is producing the most food for the least cost, our modern industrialized food system—and antibiotic resistance—is what we get.
One farmer who buys into antibiotic use echoes this conventional wisdom—that the most fundamental principle of food production is about lowering cost:
“Now the public doesn’t see that,” he said. “They’re only concerned about resistance, and they don’t care about economics because, ‘As long as I can buy a pork chop for a buck 69 a pound, I really don’t care.’ But we live in a world where you have to consider economics in the decision-making process of what we do.”
Another farmer, who eschewed antibiotic use, is one of many who are bucking conventional wisdom:
Kremer sells about 1,200 pigs annually. And a year after “kicking the habit,” he says he saved about $16,000 in vet bills, vaccinations and antibiotics.
“I don’t know why it took me that long to wake up to the fact that what we were doing, it was not the right thing to do and that there were alternatives,” says Kremer, stooping to scratch a pig behind the ear. “We were just basically killing ourselves and society by doing this.”
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: drug resistance, meat and diet
Posted in food and agriculture, health | 1 Comment »
Ethical eating: Should we expand the circle to include plants?
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
In a NY Times column yesterday, Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too, Natalie Angier pushes the boundaries of what we consider to be ethical eating.
She works through a series of biochemical and physiological examples of how plants are amazing—almost animal-like. With one of my undergraduate majors in botany, I agree: Plants are amazing and animal-like.
Attacked by an herbivove? Plants can emit volatile chemicals to warn other individuals of the same species (analogous to a warning call). They can turn on chemical defenses that make themselves less palatable (an immune response). And in an amazing display of evolution, some plants can even send signals to the predators of the herbivore to come get a free meal (analogous to getting your big brother to beat up the bully picking on you). For example, some corn varieties when being eaten by insect larva emit a chemical signal to attract wasps that lay eggs in the herbivorous pests, turning the pest into a tasty meal.
But being animal-like doesn’t mean we ought to give plants the same ethical considerations as animals. Sure, plants are amazing, but that’s not a particularly effective ethical argument for diet choices for a couple of reasons:
- Plants, without well-developed brains and nervous systems, are not sentient beings with a capacity to suffer or a will to live (sorry Brussels sprouts). They are watery bags of enzymes and genes with exquisite biochemical and physiological responses. They are essentially green cellulose robots that are evolutionarily and genetically programmed to respond in complex ways to complex and multifaceted environmental stimuli. Eating plants, as many ethicists would argue, is therefore less morally challenging than eating a sentient mammal that can feel pain and possibly possesses a will to live. Just like smashing a mosquito is less morally challenging than smashing your pet dog.
- We have to eat something. And until the day comes when we can mass produce food from tissue culture (don’t laugh, people are trying to culture meat in test tubes), we will have to eat living organisms. Three arguments strongly favor plants over animals in terms of food ethics and sustainability: (1) Plants have less capacity to suffer and feel pain (although some primitive animals like mussels and oysters may fall into this category), (2) we can feed a lot more people on a diet of plants than a diet of animals, as noted in an earlier post, and (3) growing plants for food releases fewer greenhouse gases than raising livestock.
It’s hard to tell whether Angier is being serious or satirical (and whether the rest of the blogosphere and I are being punked by developing an elaborate rebuttal). The following passage suggests the former:
But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way.
Nevertheless, her argument is flawed because it asks us to equate the moral consideration of sentient animals (like pigs) and plants. I don’t know of a single ethicist who would make this argument given what we know about intelligence and sentience.
Furthermore, by equating plants and animals ethically, she implicitly uses this to justify eating meat because plants are objects of moral consideration too. As the title of her article insinuates, if we are no longer able to eat Brussels sprouts, we must not be able to eat anything because of ethical equivalency. We are led to conclude that this is absurd, so, therefore, we should just chill out and eat anything we want.
What Angier’s argument lacks in ethical rigor, it makes up in one important way: It asks people to be thoughtful about what it means to eat other organisms. Humanity should recognize and marvel at these amazing plant evolutionary adaptations—even be thankful for them—and do what we can to preserve them over the long haul.
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Tags: meat and diet
Posted in environmental ethics, food and agriculture | No Comments »
Where might farmers turn for help with climate change?
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
In the Online First edition of Climatic Change, Tyler Tarnoczi and Fikret Berkes assess1,2 the sources and availability of information about climate adaptation to farmers in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
Farmers rely on several information sources for agricultural practices, which will likely be vital in helping food producers learn how to adapt to climate warming:
- social networks/experiential learning
- government
- industry (e.g., seed, machinery)
- producer and conservation organizations
- media
Here’s what they found…
Posted in climate adaptation, communication and framing, food and agriculture, nature and culture, policy | No Comments »
When the levees break, we’ll have a more sustainable landscape again
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
We don’t ordinarily think about climate change and land use change as being a synergistic threat to society. However, the combination of impervious surfaces that increase runoff, declining wetlands, levees, and more severe storms pack a quadruple whammy that could lead to some major flooding in the future. From the cool adaptation work done in Keene, NH, we know that much of our infrastructure (roads, bridges, culverts) can’t handle the added stress of streams and rivers with higher discharge. We’re looking at a potential nightmare of increased costs associated with infrastructure damage.
In this week’s issue of Science, Jeffrey Opperman and colleagues argue1 that our historical paradigm of flood control with levees needs to fundamentally change to achieve a more sustainable socioecological system.
Their solution? Tear down some of the levees to allow some floodplains to flood. This can accomplish several goals:
(1) Flood risk reduction
- Move to flood-tolerant activities in floodplains so that we don’t have to spend so much on disaster relief.
- Storing water in floodplains takes the strain off downstream regions because floodwaters can naturally spill to where they are supposed to rather than swelling channelized rivers. Small amounts of land can accomplish this—they cite a study of the Illinois River showing that a floodplain of 8,000 hectares would drop the likelihood of flooding 26,000 hectares of cropland by 50%.
(2) Increased floodplain goods and services
- Several economic activities are conducive to periodic flooding: pasture, timber, and flood-tolerant biofuel crops, such as willow.
- Periodically flooded soils can also assist with reducing erosion and storing nutrients that would otherwise reach and pollute coastal oceans.
(3) Building resiliency to climate change
- They argue that reconnecting rivers to floodplains can help us adapt to climate change in ways that are socioeconomically beneficial. For instance, we presently have to keep some reservoirs partially empty to accommodate periodic flood waters. But partially filled reservoirs can’t generate as much hydropower or provide as much drinking water. If we used floodplains as a natural pressure relief valve, we can operate reservoirs closer to capacity and benefit economically.
Opperman and colleagues acknowledge that there are political hurdles, such as convincing some private landowners that flooding their land can be useful.
But there are creative solutions that have already been deployed. They cite Sacramento as an example: Some farmers allow their crops to flood, serving as a pressure-relief valve when rivers swell, thereby preventing more expensive damage. In return, the farmers are compensated for their crop loss. It’s a win-win situation that presumably costs less than dealing with infrastructure damage or having to build new infrastructure that handles greater flooding.
Another idea is to allow some of these areas to become wetlands and compensate people as part of a wetlands banking system to mitigate the loss of wetlands elsewhere. This would most likely have several ecological benefits, including increasing habitat for wetland-dependent species such as waterfowl and other migrating birds. It would also likely increase vegetation productivity and carbon storage.
It’s interesting to note that they don’t call for an end to economic activity or human use in floodplains. Sure, we probably want to stop building McMansions in flood-prone regions. However, there are several ways we can use floodplains for ecological and economic benefit. These will likely require compensation, but in the long run, it’s cheaper than having to re-tool major infrastructure to handle greater discharge with climate warming.
1Opperman, J.J. et al (2009) Sustainable floodplains through large-scale reconnections to rivers. Science 326:1487-1488.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doblonaut/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Posted in biodiversity science, climate adaptation, food and agriculture, risk analysis, solutions, sustainable development | No Comments »
Sustainable seafood: Does fresh vs. frozen make a difference?
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
The NY Times is running an op-ed, Catch of the Freezer, by a few ecological economists who were interested in learning whether it’s more sustainable to eat fresh or frozen seafood.
Focusing on salmon as a case study, they suggest that it does matter. Eat frozen when you can to reduce carbon emissions:
When it comes to salmon, the questions of organic versus conventional and wild versus farmed matter less than whether the fish is frozen or fresh. In many cases, fresh salmon has about twice the environmental impact as frozen salmon.
The reason: Most salmon consumers live far from where the fish was caught or farmed, and the majority of salmon fillets they buy are fresh and shipped by air, which is the world’s most carbon-intensive form of travel. Flying fillets from Alaska, British Columbia, Norway, Scotland or Chile so that 24 hours later they can be served “fresh” in New York adds an enormous climate burden, one that swamps the potential benefits of organic farming or sustainable fishing.
There are a lot of other important questions about sustainable seafood, including harvest rates, the industrialization and carbon intensity of the fishing process, genetic modification of farmed species, and organic pollutant loads in wild vs. farmed fish. In terms of transportation and climate warming, this article offers a useful point of view, but I think their statement dismissing the importance of organic and wild vs. farmed is a bit parochial to a discussion of seafood sustainability writ large. It depends on what part of sustainability—warming, human health, fish stocks, genetic alteration—matters most to you.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: seafood
Posted in energy, food and agriculture, shopping guides, sustainability, transportation | No Comments »
Sustainable food: Who’s it for? Uniting ecological sustainability and social justice
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Think of all the reasons why people advocate sustainable food, and the following things probably come to mind:
- Eat organic—to reduce pesticides and nutrient pollution.
- Eat locally—to reducing carbon emissions.
- Eat free-range animal products—to reduce nutrient pollution, energy use, and animal cruelty.
- Eat vegetarian or vegan— to reduce carbon footprints further and eliminate animal cruelty altogether.
- Eat hormone and antibiotic-free animal products— to improve human health.
How about this one?
- Make sure farm workers who grow all of this food and other poor people have access to cheap, healthy, sustainable food.
Not so much.
And that’s probably why Caitlin Donohue wrote the story, “Out of reach: How the sustainable local food movement neglects poor workers and eaters” in today’s San Francisco Bay Guardian Online.
There’s a lot more that can be written on this topic, and there are a growing number of success stories, including
- the urban gardening movement (here, here, here);
- the increasing acceptance of food stamps (now called SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) at farmers’ markets;
- the movement to feed kids healthy school lunches.
The introduction to Donohue’s article frames the cultural disconnect:
On a sunny afternoon in Civic Center Plaza, a remarkable bounty covered a buffet table: coconut quinoa, organic mushroom tabouli, homemade vegan desserts, and an assortment of other yummy treats. The food and event were meant to raise awareness about public school lunches, although it was hard to imagine these dishes, brought by well-heeled food advocates, sitting under the fluorescent lights of a San Francisco public school cafeteria.
The spread was for the Slow Food USA Labor Day “eat-in,” a public potluck meant to publicize the proposed reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, national legislation that regulates the food in public schools. The crowd was in a festive, light-hearted mood. There was a full program of speeches by sustainability experts and a plant-your-own-vegetable-seeds table set up in one corner of the plaza.
A bedraggled couple who appeared homeless made their way through the jovial crowd and started scooping up the food in a way that suggested it had been a long time since their last roasted local lamb shish kebob.
Their presence shouldn’t have been a surprise; most events involving free trips down a food table are geared toward a different demographic in this park, which borders the Tenderloin.
In a flash, an event volunteer was on the case, nervous in an endearingly liberal manner. “Sir,” she began. “This food is for the Child Nutrition Act.” And then she paused, searching for what to say next. I imagined her thinking: “Sir, this food is to raise awareness about the availability of sustainable food to the lower classes, not to be eaten by them,” or, “Sir, this good, healthy, local food is not for you.”
Continue reading here…
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/77043400@N00/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Posted in environmental justice, food and agriculture, organic, race and class | 1 Comment »
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