Archive for the ‘food and agriculture’ Category
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »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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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sea-turtle/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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 »
The environmental toll of wasted food in America
Friday, November 27th, 2009
Roberta Kwok at Journal Watch Online highlights a new PLoS study1 describing the environmental cost of wasted food—almost 40% of our food supply. Here’s a summary of the study:
Food waste contributes to excess consumption of freshwater and fossil fuels which, along with methane and CO2 emissions from decomposing food, impacts global climate change. Here, we calculate the energy content of nationwide food waste from the difference between the US food supply and the food consumed by the population. The latter was estimated using a validated mathematical model of metabolism relating body weight to the amount of food eaten. We found that US per capita food waste has progressively increased by ~50% since 1974 reaching more than 1400 kcal per person per day or 150 trillion kcal per year. Food waste now accounts for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and ~300 million barrels of oil per year.
The implications are significant:
- The 1,400 kcal of food energy wasted by each American every day is almost enough energy to feed another person each day. That’s roughly 300,000,000 more people on the planet we could feed with our food waste alone.
- The oil used to make wasted food is about a 15-day supply for the U.S.
- Let’s also not forget the fertilizers and pesticides used to grow this food, some of which ends up contributing to nutrient pollution issues like eutrophication.
- And if this food waste ends up in the landfill, it contributes to methane production and climate warming.
1 Hall, K. et al. (2009). The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact PLoS ONE 4(11).
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture, sustainability | 1 Comment »
Most people just don’t care about the lives and fortunes of animals?
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
In a recent op-ed, Animal, Vegetable, Miserable, in the Washington Post, Gary Steiner examines this question and the ethics of eating meat.
Following in the footsteps of James McWilliams last week and Jonathan Safran Foer a few weeks earlier, Steiner puts meat-eating—rather than vegetarianism—on the defensive, arguing that it is problematic to brand vegans/vegetarians as moral snobs when uncritical carnivores/omnivores feel they have a sense of entitlement to meat regardless of the ethical implications of their food choices.
LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?
Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer’s health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)
None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society’s treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways…
Continue reading here…
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckirkman/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, environmental ethics, food and agriculture | 1 Comment »
Africa: Agro imperialism’s final frontier?
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
In an article titled, “Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?” in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, Andrew Rice writes about how wealthy nations are now staking out land in the developing world—notably Africa—in order to feed their own future populations. Let me say up front that if increasing foreign investment in domestic agriculture can pull African nations out of poverty, then it’s worth a serious look.
However, there’s a related issue that’s worth noting: Sooner or later, the combination of (1) rising populations, (2) higher per-capita meat consumption, and (3) possible shifts to more sustainable meat production (pasture fed)—with its attendant land requirements and higher costs—will likely force the developed world to export more of its own food production to the developing world, where land and labor are cheap.
This could lead to potentially large ecological damage if the modern industrialized agricultural model—rather than sustainable modes of production— is also exported. The U.S. tried this with beef production in the Amazon in the 1960s, and look how well that fared: enormous tropical deforestation and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of cattle ranchers, who intimidated rubber tappers and peasant farmers.
There are several conversations that need to happen:
- Who benefits from foreign cash flows, especially in countries with abysmal records of transparency, corrupt governments, and land tenure rights? It’s not clear it will be the farmers.
- Should the developed world reduce its meat consumption to accommodate higher-yielding agriculture within its own geographic borders before it turns to the developing world—who has difficulty feeding its own people— for help.
- Is this even feasible in food-insecure nations? As stated in the article, “The idea that one country would go to another country…and lease some land, and expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if there’s a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.”
Excerpts:
Tags: Africa
Posted in food and agriculture | No Comments »
Good Guide—Learn what product labels don’t always tell you about the things you buy
Friday, November 20th, 2009
There’s a new guide to shopping that looks interesting. It’s called Good Guide, and it helps people learn more about what’s in their products that might not be healthy–to you, the environment, or society.
It’s easy to click on many different product types—from food to personal products to air fresheners to toys. For example, ever wonder about different kinds of mac and cheese?
Here’s more information about them:
What chemicals are in your baby shampoo?
Was sweatshop labor used to make your t-shirt?
What products are the best, and what products should you avoid?
Increasingly, you want to know about the impacts of the products you buy. On your health. On the environment. On society. But unless you’ve got a Ph.D, it is almost impossible to find out the impacts of the products you buy. Until now…
GoodGuide provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.
With GoodGuide, you can:
- Find safe, healthy and green products that protect you and your family
- Search or browse over 70,000 food, toys, personal care, & household products to see what’s really beneath the label
- Use expert advice and recommendations on products to quickly learn the impacts of what you buy
- Find better products and make purchasing decisions based on what’s important to you
- Create a personalized favorites list with the products that are right for you and your family
Related post: Do our daily routines put our health at risk?
Posted in behavior, environmentalism, food and agriculture, organic, shopping guides, solutions | No Comments »
Is eating personal?
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
That’s the question posed by James McWilliams in an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post.
I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. “Plus,” he added, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”
I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?
Read the rest of the article. It’s not an entirely new argument, but it adds insight to the current debate on meat-based diets.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kitsa_sakurako/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture | 1 Comment »
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