Think about it. When most of us imagine what a sustainable food economy might look like, chances are we picture a variation on something that already exists-such as organic farming, or a network of local farms and farmers markets, or urban pea patches-only on a much larger scale. The future of food, in other words, will be built from ideas and models that are familiar, relatively simple, and easily distilled into a buying decision: Look for the right label, and you're done.
But that's not the reality. Many of the familiar models don't work well on the scale required to feed billions of people. Or they focus too narrowly on one issue (salad greens that are organic but picked by exploited workers). Or they work only in limited circumstances. (A $4 heirloom tomato is hardly going to save the world.)
Roberts goes on to argue that studies have show that eating meatless and dairyless one day a week can save more energy than eating locally all the time. And he also argues that buying produce at larger chains might mean actually less fuel than those locally grown foods due to the bulk at which they travel. But to me the most important question is how do we define sustainability.
Certainly, we can broaden concepts like food miles into more practical, ecologically honest terms. To that end, the British retail chain Tesco is testing a new labeling system that discloses a product's life-cycle carbon emissions in a per-serving figure. But even that focuses too much on a specific outcome, says Fred Kirschenmann, former director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Real sustainability, he argues, is defined not by a food system's capacity to ensure happy workers or organic lima beans, but by whether the food system can sustain itself-that is, keep going, indefinitely, in a world of finite resources. A truly sustainable food system is inherently resilient-more capable of self-correction and self-revitalization than its industrial rival.
But shouldn't sustainability also have to do with whether the production itself is sustainable to the Planet's welfare? Can we sustain the continued pollution and questionable quality of the food we're giving our kids? Jill Richardson covered an important issue regarding large agricultural impacts on our environment noting in Who's Responsible for the Dead Zone in the Gulf that...
In January of 2008, USGS identified commercial fertilizers and animal manure from farmland in 9* states as the cause of over 70 percent of the Dead Zone pollution. Evidence is mounting that the mandated push to increase corn production - one of the most fertilizer intensive crops - for ethanol exacerbates water quality problems within the states and in the Gulf. This year, the USGS identifies and ranks watersheds in the Basin by the amount of pollution that gets to the Gulf.
That's not sustainability and the fact that the push for ethonal is exacerbating an already tenuous situation shows that it's not the best alternative for fuel. But it always comes down to, then what is? We all know there is not a single answer to all these issues and I am just "delving" into it as a TYPE. But there are just so many questions for the average person like me that it's overwhelming.
Lisa Gosselin response to Spoiled sums it up for me in that it's much more complicated than the idea that organic and local is so last year...
Yet if people have a better understanding and appreciation of food because they grew it themselves, or met the farmer who grew it, that's a good thing. If they think twice about spraying pesticides on their lawn because they just bought organic strawberries, that's a good thing. If they realize that to eat farmed salmon today may mean their children will never know the taste of wild salmon, that's a good thing.
In fact all the responses are spot on to me because it goes to the heart of the matter, that Jim Harkness points out Organic and local as designer labels may be an elitist passing fancy, but as principles for building a fair and sustainable food system they are essential. It has to be the very foundation and accountability must be part of that.
Look at the headline I grabbed from one of today's Treehugger posts, 98% of Green Labeled Products are Actually Greenwashed. As Jim Harkness also states, Yes, in a consumer society even good ideas get appropriated and commodified. ("The revolution is just a T-shirt away!"). But if there is no accountability, which is something we must push for, these labels are exploited at the very cost of not only the sustainability movement but at the health of our families.
The remainder (the 98%) commit "greenwashing" sins, that is they mislead consumers about the environmental benefits of a product or the practices of a company, said TerraChoice, which runs the Canadian government's eco-labeling program and counts companies as diverse as Canon and Husky Energy among its customers... Other sins in the report include lack of proof, vagueness, irrelevance and outright lying. Products that make environmental claims and are sold in big box stores in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia were surveyed.
I know you are not shocked, I'm not. But it's things like this that drive someone like me, who is just getting informed, crazy. How can we rely on big business to tell the truth? And with our Government lagging so far behind, it's as if we're expected to run a marathon from the moon.
BREAKING: EPA Declares Greenhouse Gases Threat to Human Health
Though the EPA hasn't yet put up the formal announcement on their website, word is coming in from a variety of sources that agency head Lisa Jackson has announced that the EPA will be moving forward with plans to declare that carbon dioxide as well as five other greenhouse gases are a threat to human health. This will allow the EPA to begin acting on the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that stated the Clean Air Act can be used to curb climate change emissions
Breaking news? Yes.
And then this headline, 50 Most Hazardous Waste Sites in US Get Stimulus Funds for Cleanup.
The EPA announced that 50 of the most polluted, most hazardous waste sites in the country will be cleaned up, thanks to $582 million in stimulus funds. Each of the sites is heavily contaminated with mining waste, out-of-control landfills, and chemical spillage-just to name a few. As you might recall, Superfund cleanup was one of the green projects included the stimulus--here's how it's going to help.
Of course most of these sites have been abandoned due to lack of proper funding. In my naivete I'd like to think that these should be priorities for any administration. And to think that we're continuing to keep such pollutants in full use in order to keep unsustainable options going, but what's the answer? It' makes my head spin.
After watching a painful HBO piece entitled "Death on a Factory Farm" I was sickened by the inhumane treatment of the animals for which we depend on. So many Americans are disconnected from their food and the origins of the things on their tables it seems criminal. If any of this is to become "mainstream" we have to make these connections for people and push not just organic and local but humane and sustainable. We as a culture cannot continue like this, so disconnected from the very earth that we depend on.
So I've started learning more and I've decided what I'm going back to school for, a certificate in Environmental Restoration and hopefully to learn about the real issues facing our environment. I've got a lot of learning to do and I hope to become educated to the point that I Might actually help form some answers. These issues are huge, from being able to feed billions of people without choking what's left of our planets resources, we have to step up and learn more. And it really helps that I'm finding my direction and finding those connections so I can bring such issues to my community and show how they impact us all, from the food on our tables to the lawns we keep in front of our houses. All these issues will have to be addressed (Geez, lawns in a desert? Welcome to California in a drought, no one wants to give up their fairways in the front yards).
But we can educate our neighbors and attempt to wade through all of this. I know, I know, I answered not one damn question and I will probably pose many more in the future as I continue to delve deeper. |
