Food and the land. I've been thinking about this subject a great deal lately. Vegetable gardeners and farmers--those of us who have our hands in the dirt every day have to think about it.
But recently, more of us have been thinking about the relationship between the land and our food. I was surprised (shocked is more like it) and also very glad to see that Time Magazine is thinking about it, too--thinking enough about it to make this important topic their cover story this week: "The Real Cost of Cheap Food." Here's a paragraph:
"With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil -- which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills -- our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy -- demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 -- but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs -- and bland taste. Sustainable food has an elitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants -- and as every farmer knows, if you don't take care of your land, it can't take care of you."
Every gardener knows this, too. That's why we pay as much attention to our compost pile as we do to the seeds we plant, and why we cultivate a closer connection with our local manure source--in my case, a pair of longhorn cows who are always willing to deliver.
I've also been thinking about food and the land in terms of a book that I was sent for review: Just Food: Where Locovores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, by James E. McWilliams. I expected to disagree with parts of the book, but as you'll see from my review, I disagreed with a lot more than that. I kept wanting the author to pay attention to the land, and especially to issues of climate change and resource depletion. That he didn't was a substantial disappointment.
And these days, I'm also thinking about food and the land because of the record-setting heat and drought here in Central and South Texas. Crops are dying, livestock is suffering, farmers and CSAs are forced to the brink of bankruptcy, gardeners are despairing. It's hard to know just how much of this two-year weather situation is just a part of the rainfall/temperature cycles we think of as "normal," or whether it's a real change in climate. But if this is a sign of what's to come with global warming (some forecasters foresee increased desertification throughout the Southwest), we're all in trouble. This situation has the potential to seriously affect our food.
Bottom line. We need to realize that our most intimate and enduring connection with the land is not scenic or recreational, it is through our food. Each one of us needs to commit to paying attention to what we eat; how it's grown; who owns and/or controls the seedstocks; who packages, distributes, and sells the food; and how it's advertised and marketed. These are hugely important topics. I hope you'll put these issues at the top of your list of important things to think, read, and talk about.
Reading note. What we really need to do is something Americans have never done well, and that's to quit thinking big. We already eat four times as much meat and dairy as the rest of the world, and there's not a nutritionist on the planet who would argue that 24‑oz. steaks and mounds of buttery mashed potatoes are what any person needs to stay alive. ... The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty — it's based on selective forgetting. But what we eat — how it's raised and how it gets to us — has consequences that can't be ignored any longer--Time Magazine, August 21, 2009