Eating Liberally

As I zoomed across I-80 this weekend in a single shot from New York to Chicago and back, my mind drifted back and forth across the countless miles of corn and my gas meter, as all that 4 dollar gas dripped away. The big question in my mind was how the heck we were going keep shipping all this corn all the way to New York and California, not to mention shipping banana in refrigerated cars all the way from South America. The answer is not bringing the food to Manhattan but bringing the farms.

Vertical Farms are the way of the future, or so says Dr. Dickson Despommier who has been working on vertical farming technology for 10 years now. Take 35 acres of farmland, stack then into a precisely regulated farming skyscraper, and you have yourself a Vertical Farm. In fact an acre of vertical farmland is predicted to have 4-6 times greater output than a boring old acre of flat land. This is a big deal with a population slated to increase 3 billion, 80% of whom will be living in urbanized areas, by 2050. With ever increasing transport and fuel costs for farming our farming practices must evolve vertically if we are going to stop millions from starving and full nations worth of natural ecosystems laid waste by flat and fat farms.

Many designs have been published for these towering greenhouses, which can protect plants from irregular weather, pests and pesticides, recycle water, transform methane to energy, and provide a source for urban food and jobs, while leaving our battered world to recuperate a little. Still the notion as a few ominous sci-fi elements with the website describing them as a prerequisite for moon colonization and asking, “Don't our harvestable plants deserve the same level of comfort and protection that [people] now enjoy?” This may be the great green hope for agriculture but it is also implies a huge condensing of our food source and the complete stewardship of people creating a new ecosystem. Futuristic and yet surprisingly obvious, this is the thinking that will reshape both urban and rural landscapes, and could make some real change, leaving carbon offsets and the inefficiency of ethanol in the dust.

How many people out there like a good old fashioned Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich. I know I do and I think quite a bit of our population would agree with me. However, like many PB&J loving Americans, I haven't eaten one of those delicious brown'n'purple delights in a while.

Well, a new organization say that that's got to change. The PB&J Campaign is on a mission to save our environment one Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich at a time.

Every time you eat a plant-based lunch, like PB&J, you reduce your carbon footprint by 2.5 pounds of carbon emissions. If you want some comparison thats almost half the about of carbon emissions you would cut by driving a hybrid for a day.

The PB&J campaign also points out that eating a plant-based meal conserves about 133 gallons of water, meaning that "five PB&Js or other plant-based lunches per month would save more water than switching to a low-flow showerhead." You'd also be saving approximately 24 square feet of land that could be deforested, overgrazed or subject to pesticide and fertilizer.

So how does this all work?

Well, according the PB&J campaign, when you eat an animal-based lunch, anything that contains meat or dairy, you are being extremely energy inefficient. In effect, all food comes from plants because even if the food isn't a plant itself, it took plants to give the animals energy to grow and make meat or produce dairy. And as anyone who takes a basic course on Environmental science knows, energy is always lost to heat as you move up the food chain. So, when you eat equal proportions of meat and plant, you are getting about 10x more energy with the plant.

There are also many destructive factors that go into meat and dairy production such as the fossil fuels needed to power machinery, irrigation and transportation, and the vast amount of plants that need to be grown (taking up lots of farmland) to produce small amounts of meat.

When you eat a PB&J sandwich you are reducing the vast amount of resources put into meat and dairy production, which means cutting carbon emissions, and water and land usage.

So as they say, "Eat a PB&J, Save the world today!" Sounds delicious.

Lou Dobbs has got his presumably made-in-the-USA knickers in a twist over Al Gore’s “truly absurd proposal” for Americans to ditch the fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy in the next decade. Dobbs, inexplicably deluded that stepped-up domestic drilling would offer some kind of immediate relief from high gas prices, is furious at the folks who oppose lifting the offshore ban:

So I guess I’d be going off on an abstract tangent, here, to note that while drilling in ANWR or offshore won’t make a dime of difference to our current energy crisis, there’s something Americans could do to save 30 cents a gallon now, starting today. According to Thursday’s New York Times, the Energy Department has determined that “fuel efficiency deteriorates radically at speeds above 60 miles per hour. Every 5 miles over that threshold is estimated to cost drivers…essentially an additional 30 cents per gallon in fuel costs.”

So, the fastest way to “ease the pain and the burden” would be to simply slow down. But many Americans vehemently reject the very notion, regardless of the potential savings:

Why ease up on the gas pedal when we could wring every last drop of oil out of our soil and seas instead? Three-quarters of Americans reportedly share Dobb’s support for offshore drilling despite the fact that it would do little or nothing--even in the long term-- to offset rising fuel costs, as the New York Times noted recently:

Did you get that? The best case scenario in ANWR would lower prices by $1.44 a barrel in, like, two decades. And, as Senator Diane Feinstein noted in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times, promoting offshore drilling as any kind of meaningful solution to our energy crisis is a total sham, too.

We’re so screwed that there’s no way we can drill ourselves out of this mess. What will it take for people to accept the fact that the era of livin’ large is over? The signs are everywhere, from Wal-Mart’s procuring its produce more locally to cut fuel costs to pilots accusing U.S. Airways of sending them up with an insufficient fuel supply in a desperate bid to lighten their load.

And yet, as angry and frustrated as folks are with the high cost of gas, they’re apparently not ready to do something so drastic as conserve by reducing their speed, which puts them right in step with our President, who wouldn’t dream of asking them to. That, he insisted at a press conference the other day, would be “presumptuous…They're smart enough to figure out whether they're going to drive less or not."

But aren’t these the same people who are too slow-witted to stop driving so fast? And what about the millions of Americans who haven’t got the option of scaling back on their driving because we’ve never bothered to invest in the infrastructure to support alternative forms of transportation like mass transit, biking, and walking? We haven’t committed serious resources to developing renewable sources of energy, either, and all because we’ve been too busy bowing at the altar of the automobile.

Is Gore’s admittedly ambitious challenge “truly absurd,” as Dobbs huffed? What’s truly absurd is the idea that anyone would look to a former Texas oilman to do anything other than shill for the drillers.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: Two of America’s most entrenched traditions--our meat-centric meals and car-crazy culture—are undermining our health and degrading our environment (and, with the rising cost of fuel, breaking our budgets) on an unprecedented scale. It seems that our way of life has essentially become a recipe for disease and pollution.

So why do so many other countries aspire to live the way we do? Meat consumption is on the rise the world over, and more cars are on the road in China and India everyday. The demand for more grain to feed livestock and produce biofuels is surely worsening the global food crisis. Are human beings just hardwired to crave animal flesh and horsepower?

Dr. Nestle: Kat—I think you may be asking the wrong question, this time. The real question is: Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t hungry people who have to work really hard to get food and to get from one place to another want to live the way we do? Some of us give up meat because we have a choice. But I can’t see that we have any right to expect people who don’t have that choice to make sacrifices. I don’t see too many of us giving up our cars, however (I don’t have one so can be somewhat smug about this point but I also live in a zipcode where owning one is a liability). It’s pretty hard to worry about climate change when you wonder where the next meal is coming from or how you are going to get to work.

I’m not sure it’s hardwired, but it’s practically a law of nutrition that meat intake rises with income. So does intake of sugar, soft drinks, and processed foods, not to mention cigarettes and alcohol (where these are socially acceptable). All you have to do to see this phenomenon in action is to take a look at Peter Menzel and Faith d’Aluisio’s glorious book, Hungry Planet,in which families all over the world pose in front of everything they ate for an entire week. The instant they have a little money, their diets become more diverse, processed, convenient, and meat-laden. We are, after all, omnivores at the top of the food chain. If we want others to give up meat and cars, we have to do that first.

Forget about science fiction; WALL-E is séance fiction—it channels the soul of our land-loving founding father, Thomas Jefferson. Now that a handful of loose wingnuts is denouncing WALL-E as a piece of pro-planet propaganda, I’d like to note, for the record, that Jefferson would have absolutely loved WALL-E.

Normally, I wouldn’t presume to speak for the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, but given Jefferson’s reverence for our most precious resource, i.e., the soil, he surely would have appreciated the underlying message of Pixar’s latest animated opus—that it’s our civic duty to be good stewards of the land.

Yeah, yeah, I know that WALL-E’s creator, Andrew Stanton, is insisting that WALL-E is first and foremost a love story, but the whole plot hinges on another relationship: the one between us and the dirt beneath our feet. Jefferson was an early advocate of maintaining soil fertility through such practices as crop rotation, and would doubtless be horrified by the pollution and depletion of our topsoil that’s become standard operating procedure since the advent of industrial agriculture.

(Of course, he’d also be appalled that the Fourth of July has turned into a giant meat-fest; Jefferson was an unabashed lover of fruits and veggies who maintained that produce should dominate our diet and meat should be used sparingly, as a “seasoning” or “condiment.”)

Set in the year 2815, 700 years after the Earth’s been trashed by mindless consumers and a monolithic corporation named Buy n Large, WALL-E depicts a nation whose excesses have launched it into perpetual astro-exile on a fleet of super-duper Buy n Large-sponsored spaceships. Its morbidly obese, infantalized citizens, too fat to stand upright, zip around aimlessly on their hovercraft-style loungers sipping sodas, playing video games, and awaiting the day the Earth will have detoxed enough to be “recolonized.”

Some folks are eager to dismiss this cautionary tale of a corpulent corporatocracy as a far-fetched scenario aimed at advancing some eco-extremist agenda, but it’s an eerie echo of the warnings from Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer-Prize winning UCLA professor of geography and author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a precursor to Collapse that Diamond wrote for Harper’s back in 2003, he challenged the conventional wisdom that we have to weigh environmental concerns against economic considerations, citing the popular misconception that:

In WALL-E’s world, mankind has failed to recognize this inexorable link, forcing a mass exodus into outer space and leaving behind a barren landscape littered with post-consumer crap and unable to support any vegetation.

Watching WALL-E trundle through this lifeless landscape on his daily rounds, compacting garbage and salvaging such manmade marvels as a spork and a Rubik’s cube, you realize that it’s not about saving the earth. The planet will, in all likelihood, be able to withstand whatever drastic alterations to its ecosystem we’ve unwittingly unleashed. It’s ourselves we have to save.

Will we figure this out in time to avert the kind of catastrophic future portrayed in WALL-E? As Diamond notes in Collapse:

If only we had a clue about what to discard and what to replace. After leaving a matinee of WALL-E last weekend, I stopped into the Chelsea Home Depot, which, in a rare concession to place, is housed in an elegant turn-of-the-century cast-iron building. On my way to the garden department to buy mulch for my windowboxes, I passed a display of cheap kitchen faucets with a sign reading, “Why Fix It When You Can Replace It?”

No wonder we’re the trashiest people on the planet. If the Great Pacific Garbage Patch grows any bigger, we’ll have to colonize it and declare it the 51st state. The signs that our habitat’s under siege are everywhere, but our “Drive All You Want, We’ll Drill More” culture motors on, oblivious. With the cost of a barrel of oil setting new records each day, more and more Americans reportedly support the idea of offshore drilling, despite the fact that it can’t possibly solve the underlying problem that demand is increasingly going to outstrip supply as China and India follow in our tire tracks.

Sadly, WALL-E’s anti-consumer, anti-corporate message is undermined by the regrettable array of cheap, mass-produced WALL-E tchotchkes destined for the garbage heap. It’s a shame that Pixar couldn’t pass on the obligatory merchandise tie-ins, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of the film’s S.O.S: Save Our Soil. It’s a message that this nation of babies, big and small, needs to heed. Colony collapse disorder—it’s not just for bees!

Last December, the White House simply refused to open an e-mail from the Environmental Protection Agency because it contained the unwelcome conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health and therefore need to be regulated. The EPA finding was a response "to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment," the New York Times reported last Wednesday.

Faced with the proverbial inconvenient truth, the White House not only refused to open the e-mail, they ordered Jason Burnett, the EPA official who sent the document, to "recall it," according to the Washington Post.

Burnett, who has, not coincidentally, since resigned, told the Post:

"In early December, I sent an e-mail with the formal finding that action must be taken to address the risk of climate change...The White House made it clear they did not want to address the ramifications of that finding and have decided to leave the challenge to the next administration. Some [at the White House] thought that EPA had mistakenly concluded that climate change endangers the public. It was no mistake."

I'd accuse the administration of foot-dragging, but that implies some kind of forward movement, however glacial (now, there's a word that's headed for extinction, thanks to climate change.) The dinosaurs who've been dictating our energy policy in this country are as encased in asphalt as the fossils at the La Brea Tarpits, and just as unlikely to budge.

Jon Stewart highlighted this new low point from the Petro-Pusher-In-Chief on the Daily Show last Wednesday with a segment called "Be Patient - This Gets Amazing":

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KAT: NYC's real food fanatics are gearing up for a gala event this Sunday down at Lower Manhattan's legendary Seaport. Guest blogger Leslie Hatfield from the Eat Well Guide's Green Fork blog tells why:

“Old New York…was once New Amsterdam…”

Back then, a widely diverse population of city dwellers bought their food at the market, not at the Quizno’s.

If you are in New York on Sunday, come join thousands of other foodies, farmers and activists at the New Amsterdam Market. This is the third New Amsterdam gathering so far–the last event got hit by a snow storm but 5,000 people still showed up, so this weekend’s market is expected to be major. We’re excited about the implications of a market in the Seaport area, as is Robert LaValva, the Director of the New Amsterdam Market Association:

“The participants we have gathered for New Amsterdam Market on June 29th represent a shift in thinking. With its four century legacy as a market district, the Seaport and its empty public market halls offer New Yorkers an unprecedented opportunity to anchor the food system now emerging from this change.”

And the lineup of vendors looks amazing. I’m especially intrigued by Wild Foods (cattail hearts?!), and I hear there will even be sustainably-produced popsicles. Don’t forget your re-usable bags–you’re going to want to bring some food home.

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Most folks are assuming that the catastrophic floods in Iowa are a natural disaster, caused simply by too much rainfall. But, leaving aside the question of whether climate change is partly to blame for all that rain, a growing number of environmental experts suspects that the flooding may have been caused in part by agricultural practices that have severely impaired the landscape’s ability to absorb excess rainwater.

As the Washington Post reported last Thursday, “Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed,” and added that “Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated…That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water.”

So now that we’re looking at some four million acres of washed out crops, the New York Times reports that Senator Charles Grassley (R, Iowa) is calling on the USDA “to release tens of thousands of farmers from contracts under which they had promised to set aside huge tracts as natural habitat,” so that they can plant more corn.

This sounds like a really bad idea if the loss of water-absorbing habitat is what made the floods so severe in the first place. But what do I know? I’m not an Iowa farmer. Happily, though, I know someone who is—Denise O’Brien, the organic farmer who ran for Secretary of Agriculture in Iowa in 2006 and nearly won, with 49% of the vote. So I asked Denise for her thoughts on what role industrial agriculture might have played in this disaster.

As luck would have it, Denise just had a letter to the editor published in Sunday’s Des Moines Register addressing this very subject, so she forwarded it to me and I’m reprinting it here, in the hopes that more people will consider the possibility that these floods were as much an act of man as an act of God:

You know how those amps in the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap had a dial that went all the way to eleven? Twenty-four years later, we've become a nation of Nigel Tufnels, twiddling with the earth's thermostat and pushing it past its natural limits. This time, it's not so funny.

We're so busy worrying about $4-a-gallon gas--or the prospect of $140-a-barrel oil--that we've lost sight of a much more fundamental number: the amount of carbon dioxide, aka CO2, that's building up in our atmosphere. Right now, we're at about 385 parts per million, or ppm.

If we keep letting the C02 build up, we're heading for a Titanic catastrophe--except that there won't be any 'iceberg, right ahead!' There won't be any icebergs left at all.

Yeah, yeah, you've heard it all before, all this clucking from the Chicken Little/Cassandra contingent. Except that you haven't. There's something new. Our foremost experts on global warming, faced with mounting evidence that our climate is changing much faster than anticipated, have recently concluded that the European Union's goal of capping our CO2 levels at 550 ppm is insufficient, assuming we want to preserve life as we know it.

James Hansen, NASA's chief climatologist, put it in his stark but scholarly way:

Hansen's been trying to get us to pay attention to this stuff for decades, along with a few other folks I can think of. Neil Young's been warning us for THIRTY EIGHT YEARS, going back to "After The Goldrush," when he sang, "look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies." Now, he's amended it to "look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century."

And Marvin Gaye, were he only alive, could do a remake of his 1971 hit, "Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology)" without changing a word:

How much, indeed? In 1989, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first book about global warming for us non-wonks. McKibben warned us that we were changing the planet irrevocably and would have to make some fundamental changes in the way we live if we want life as we know it to continue.

OK, so here we are, a couple decades later, and I am pleading with you all, will you for once please just LISTEN to this guy? He wants to have a word with you. Or rather, a number. The number is 350. As in, 350 parts per million. That is the number that James Hansen and his climate change colleagues have established as the CO2 level we need to aim for if we hope to avoid six irreversible tipping points, including a massive rise in sea levels and huge changes in rainfall patterns (hello, Cedar Rapids.)

So McKibben's launching a new campaign, 350.org, with the help of a wonderful, wordless video from the folks at Free Range Studios, who gave us The Story of Stuff and The Meatrix. 350.org: Because The World Needs To Know is a universal call to arms--or to legs, actually, as in, go ride a bike! Can we pedal our way to a CO2 level of 350 ppm? I don't know, but one thing's for sure: James Hansen's checked the coordinates, and this is one destination we can't get to by car.