Letters to the Editor
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Corn-eating cars
I hope Pollan does write that book. If anything is now central to the food / fuel / climate change debate, it's this ear of corn. Bush and various Democrats have endorsed ethanol as the primary present 'solution.'
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grass-fed cows
taste better. "Marbled" beef means "cow headed for a heart attack."
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Grass Fed!
grass-fed cows taste better.
True dat. I had a ribeye steak from a grass fed cow a few weeks ago and it just about knocked me on my ass. Ridiculously good.
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The Developing World
Andrew, you stated "food security in the developing world is the new rallying cry for activists of all persuasions." The effect of higher food prices on the developing world is one of the many things that I know nothing about. My guess as to what your statement means is that activists are worried about rising food prices, probably because it might increase starvation if people can't afford food.
Two questions: (1) Is my guess correct? 2) Couldn't higher food prices also help farmers in the developing world? Wouldn't that be a good thing?
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Get more expensive.
In an ideal world grass fed beef, bug fed chickens, and sodas and juice drinks with sugar in them instead of HFC.
If you think ADM is going to let that happen you probably think Obama is antiwar.
You will pay more for food and drink and still get stuff that isn't good for you.
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Price of High Fructose Corn Syrup will Go Up?
And we use sugar again? So corn price goes down? And sugar goes up? How do sugar tariffs and supports figure into this?
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The color of food
There is nothing much in the posts to Salon that leads me to believe that you urban-dwellers in the (maybe)last quarter of the Anthropocene age understand the source of your food.
When you get the pig's attention, and kneel down to the level of his uplifted snout, and draw on his brow, in your mind, the cross between his ears and those trusting brown eyes, the poison pill of the .22 short bullet will make mush out of that off-white, walnut-sized cerebral cortex that the elders of the community will show you after halving the honeycomb skull crosswise with a hand-saw to make head cheese.
The elders will thread a single-tree harness through his hocks, and elevate his carcass from the limb of a spreading American elm beneath the flat bed of the truck where he died. With their incredibly elaborately sharpened black-carbon-steel knives, they will flay his tan hide away from the snow-white fat, and let his blood the color of cardinal feathers flow away with a garden hose. The spilled guts of his belly will be the most ordinary explosion of pastels. Only the past-burgundy heart and liver will be saved.
There are some of us who remember the stories of a time when our grandfathers could raise a family with two mules and 80 acres of productive land. The wheat was sold for cash at the local railroad elevator, and the onions and potatoes and dried apples were stored over the winter in root cellars, after the hogs and beeves were slaughtered and smoked. The children survived.
The experience of your children may be different. And less colorful.
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Salon Censors!
Don't dare criticize Golden Boy Leanord.
He's "protected" by the higher ups.
Pathetic!
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Not enough room, silverback, and we are too many.
There are some of us who remember the stories of a time when our grandfathers could raise a family with two mules and 80 acres of productive land. The wheat was sold for cash at the local railroad elevator, and the onions and potatoes and dried apples were stored over the winter in root cellars, after the hogs and beeves were slaughtered and smoked. The children survived.
There's only about an acre of arable land per person on earth--rapidly decreasing as arable land is eaten by erosion, desertification, and development, and while population continues to explode.
Try raising enough food for the wife and kids and some for market on an acre, or one exurban backyard. Then maybe you'll understand the why we have modern agribusiness and biotech and why despite it there are more hungry people on earth than ever before in human history.
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Soylent Green is people
ThE frontier opened in 1870, and closed in 1890. By the 1920's there was no topsoil left. The topsoil was never replaced, but modern agriculture used chemical fertilizer to increase the output. Of course modern agriculture three generations ago was somewhat self sustaining, but even then it was taking more out of the land, and more of the water table, than it was allowing to be replenished. All of this was being done while the world population nearly doubled in one hundred years.
Like our financial system, we are living on borrowing time. Is it possible to create an agricultural system which actually grows the soil? Yes, but the economic system forbades it.
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kill all woodchucks
@nkennedy
http://www.ers.usda.gov/StateFacts/US.htm#FC
938 mil acres farmland, 300mil people. if I have correct base numbers and do my sums right, that says we have 3 acres per person in production. but you don't need that much to make a difference. if you turn your lawn into garden and work up to a 1/2 acre garden. you can feed yourself for a quarter year. the cost is it will be a part time job from may to september with a couple weeks of madness in canning season.
note: don't try this in water poor areas and don't forget to kill the woodchucks and deer as they can kill a garden overnight. on the plus side of pest control, you can eat the deer.
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@Silverback66
The small-agriculture lifestyle you're talking about is just as artificial, just as much an artifact of modern civilization, as agribusines delivering shrink-wrapped food product to urban supermarkets. Unless you've personally chipped spearheads out of flint and stalked wild game through a primeval forest, you don't have a whole lot in the way of bragging rights.
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@country mouse: you poor, deluded thing.
I was talking about the earth, not the USA. I know sometimes it may seem like they are the same, but they are not. Honest.
The USA is not as overpopulated as the rest of the world--although it is still overpopulated. Three acres per person is not much cropland, especially when we are exporting a lot of that in a pathetic attempt to meet a fraction of world demand, burning a lot of it in our cars, and then feeding most of the rest of it to animals.