WEEKEND BLOGGER CONFERENCE BLOGGING

Matt and I are currently at the Yearly Kos convention in Chicago along with most of our Living Liberally colleagues. Ironically, being at a blogger convention has gotten in the way of doing any actual blogging.

There have been some terrific speakers and wonderful workshops I’d like to write more about later, but in the meantime, here’s the text of the remarks I made this morning at a panel on sustainable agriculture that I had the honor of organizing and appearing on, along with Dr. Marion Nestle, Tom Philpott of Grist, and Daily Kos’s foremost food activist, Jill Richardson, aka OrangeClouds115:

Eating is a political act whether you know it or not, and our website’s mission is to see to it that more of you know it than not. Eating Liberally grew organically out of Drinking Liberally, which, as many of you know, is a nationwide network of progressive social clubs where liberals can get together to share a pint and promote democracy. We’re thrilled to be part of the Living Liberally crew which is dedicated to creating communities for liberals where we can eat, drink, share great books and movies and just hang out with our fellow progressives.

I’d like to take a moment to thank my mentor Justin Krebs and all my Living Liberally colleagues for their inspiration and support, as well as my fellow kossacks: Claire Silberman, Natasha Chart, and, of course, our moderator, Jill, aka OrangeClouds, who is willing to do whatever it takes to get you guys excited about the farm bill, including using pictures of naked chicks in her diaries.

Thanks also to Marion for being Big Food’s biggest gadfly, to Tom for being the Mac generation’s Johnny Appleseed, and thanks also to Gina Cooper and her tireless team for making this entire event possible and giving me the opportunity to put together this panel on a subject I’m passionate about: climate change.

I know, you thought this panel was going to be all about food, and it is—it’s about greenhouse gases and food, which are shackled together as tightly as the White House is to Fox news.

And unless you get your news from Fox, you know that climate change is, in fact, a real crisis. What you may not know is that the way we produce our food creates more greenhouse gas emissions than the cars we drive. I say “we” even though I don’t drive myself, and my husband Matt—with whom I co-founded Eating Liberally—doesn’t even have a driver’s license. Because we live in New York City, we have the luxury of relying on mass transit and our own two feet, unlike most Americans.

Our motto at Eating Liberally is “free yourself from the fossil fuel food chain,” and you can do that by switching to a “low carbon diet.” Forget about counting carbs—start counting your food miles, and skip the asparagus from Peru. Eat less meat, because industrial livestock production is a total resource hog and a prodigious polluter. So if you really want to fight global warming, you’ll get more mileage from a plant-based diet than a Prius.

One of my favorite peak oil prophets, James Howard Kunstler, likes to say that the American suburb is “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” Kunstler predicts that we’re going to run out of gas and face food shortages that will force us to grow our own food the way we did back in World War II, when our government told us it was our civic duty to plant victory gardens.

After 9/11, the president told us it was our civic duty to shop. Our troops are dying to defend a way of life that—if the rest of the world chose to emulate it--would require the resources of roughly five planet Earths.

I read an AP story a couple of weeks ago about how Americans use twice as much toilet paper as Europeans do, so apparently we can’t even wipe our asses as efficiently.

One of the strangest things about conservatives is how so many of them oppose conservation. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof; Ronald Reagan ripped them down. Dick Cheney once said that people should feel free to use as much electricity as they like, so long as they can pay for it. Ann Coulter is convinced that low flush toilets are a liberal conspiracy to deprive Americans of a sufficiently robust flush.

And let’s not forget Tom Delay, the exterminator who felt compelled to get into politics because he felt that pesticides were over regulated. In his new memoir, he blames Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring pretty much launched the environmental movement, for the loss of “thousands, if not millions of human lives,” presumably by depriving the world of DDT.

So while our commander in chief and his cronies insist that it’s patriotic to buy made-in-China consumer crap, and that it’s our god-given right to waste energy and water and saturate our surroundings with pesticides and all kinds of toxic chemicals, I believe we have a civic duty to our fellow Americans and our global neighbors to preserve our planet and lay the foundation for a future where kids everywhere can eat a decent diet and have a safe place to play.

Our recipe for curbing your carbon footprint consists of the three “C’s”: conservation, consumption, and compassion. Practice conservation, reduce consumption, and show compassion for the planet and all its creatures.

Get a rain barrel to save your water for those non-rainy days, and compost your kitchen scraps instead of sending them to the landfill. Carpool, ride your bike, or use mass transit whenever you can. Don’t buy stuff you don’t need, and when you do need to make a purchase, buy products that are sustainably manufactured, if you can find them and afford them. Get stuff secondhand, and when you’re ready to get rid of something that might be useful to someone else, freecycle it. Remember, garbage is a relatively new invention—before the 20th century, there was no such thing, because every scrap of food or wood or paper or whatever was somehow put to use.

Boycott factory farmed meats and poultry, not just because they’re an institutionalized form of torture that no civilized nation should tolerate, but also because they are one of the most egregious polluters. Avoid processed foods brought to you by industrial agriculture if you can, for your own well-being as well as the earth’s. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof noted, trans fats kill far more Americans than Al Qaeda manages to.

I don’t see that the War on Terror is making us any safer, but I do know that a war on terrible food could make us a hell of a lot healthier. And the planet, too. Help save the family farms, and the family farmers will help save us.