Deep Economy - Eating Locally - Taking Notes

Part One of this this review can be found at: http://dylanwheeler.blogspot.com/2013/04/deep-economy-economic-growth-taking.html

Chapter 2 of Bill McKibben's Deep Economy discusses the utmost important sector of any economy known to human beings: food. He highlights the many problems in our globalized food system and offers solutions and examples of how his solutions work.

I'll start by explaining what has become of the food system. Not so long ago, nearly half of America's population worked in agriculture, and that was the minimum needed to sustain our society. People's lives and cultures were centered around farm life, the reason our schools take a two month summer vacation is because parents needed their children to help work the land during the large summer harvest. Since then however, our economy has changed; and now only 1% of our population works our farms.

What happened was the discovery of oil, or rather a new way to use it. Where once a group of farmers would work a large field, now one farmer with an industrial tractor and other machines can work hundreds of acres. This leads to a decline in price, since less labor is involved. This process also requires, since the farmer has less time to work the land with things like compost and fertilizers, more artificial chemicals, pesticides, oil, fuel and the like in order to meet company quotas. It's agribusiness. A middle man has been created, someone between the land and the markets. It leads back to the point of chapter one, efficiency, creating more for less, faster. However, there is a simple law of nature, that you cannot create something from nothing. There's no way to reduce the value of a product, the price, without inferring the cost in some other way. What we see when we pay 33 cents for a can of beans is a low price brought about by the miracles of our economy, but we don't see the non-dollar costs: it's the negative environmental effects from the carbon emissions exhumed during the mechanical harvesting and processing of the food, the manufacturing of the chemical preservatives, and the transportation of the can from across the country; it's the jobs lost by small-scale farmers who cannot compete with the government subsidized agribusiness prices (our taxes pay for the fuel to transport the can, or else the cost would be higher than a product grown locally due to the fuel alone), and it's the poor working conditions the farmers must endure, the low pay and lack of benefits, all to keep that can at 33 cents. It costs a lot more, just not in dollars.

One example the author cites is in lobster farming. Red Lobster isn't the cheapest restaurant in the country, but it surely is affordable compared to what we usually think of as a lobster dinner. The fact that it's even possible to buy lobster at a WalMart should say something. My local WalMart use to have a fish-tank with live lobster, fresh from the Mississippi waters, but it disappeared, most likely to cut cost, since local fishers have to charge more since they pay more of their own costs than large scale fish harvester companies do. What this means is this: off the coast of Mexico, in the Gulf, there are scuba divers who swim down to 150 to 200 foot depths to pluck the lobsters straight from the sandy bottoms. It used to be fifty feet, but they hunted the lobster out to meet more quotas. However, their diving equipment, to cut costs, has not been improved, and is designed for fifty feet waters, not 150. The divers are suffering psychological damages, and risking their lives, clearly a worker's rights violation.

Back to land farming. I'm not too much of an animal sympathizer, but those who are and many who aren't know of the conditions that large scale meat production leads to. Hundreds if not thousands of animals of a certain breed held in pens just big enough hold their bodies, with narrow isles just big enough for the 'farmer', more like an employee, to walk through and give them some feed, drugs like antibiotics and steroids, and who knows what other chemicals. The salmon we get at the supermarket is fed red food dye to turn its insides pink, making it appear naturally raised. On the other side of the pens, there's the waste. Oceans of manure and droppings the workers wade through knee to waste high. The health affects of such a system to the workers should be obvious, not to mention the possible affects animals raised with so many chemicals could have on us, the consumers. All the same applies to plant life growth the same way, with pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

The question that keeps people guessing is how we can produce enough food to feed our population without using such a system. An easy answer is to have more people farm. The author states that such would be simple, because people will naturally enjoy the work, and he cites several examples in which he travels across the country and interviews several small scale farming groups, and their farmers, and they talk about how much they love working the land. I agree somewhat, because the satisfaction you receive from a hard days work outside, making a real product can be astonishing. I also will add that given today's state of economy, people would take the job just to be working. A problem with that however is that in American culture, we think farming is such a simple job, it's laborer work, that it's beneath many of us. The truth is very different.

Plants need things, like we do, like sunlight and water. They also need minerals, which they extract from the ground through their roots. Remember, you can't create something from nothing, so once those plants eat all the nutrients they need, they're gone, and the plants start to become malnourished. The modern solution is to genetically engineer plants to utilize the nutrients differently. I'm all up for genetics and all the sciences that go along with them, but I don't understand why we can't add the nutrients back to the soil. We can, but it requires time, which means labor, which means a higher cost. It's more efficient to invest in the steroid corn. But it'd be far more sustainable, and produce more, better quality food, to create a few more jobs we desperately need and have some farmers spread some compost or natural, manure fertilizer. To do this, the farmers need to have access to animals and other things, like a real farm, as opposed to a hundred thousand acres of one plant. Most economists and agribusinessmen will tell you this is less efficient, but Mr McKibben will disagree in his statement that if all you're worried about is how much food you produce per acre of land, small-scale farming produces more. Look back to the fact that plants need nutrients from the soil. Well, different plants need different food, and it's possible to interlace different plants in the same field in order to utilize the soil better. That's real efficiency. The difference; more farmers have to harvest the product by hand. It costs more in currency, but it costs less in fuel, carbon emissions, health effects, and it creates more jobs.

What does this mean for us right now? It something along the lines of a quote I once read, my apologies as I can't recall the speaker, but she said, "Every time you buy something, you cast a vote for the way you want the world to be." Supporting a better food system will mean we have to spend a little more on food. A hundred years ago, the typical American spent half his income on food. Today it's less than ten percent. We pay for cable, i.e. commercials we mostly ignore. We spend a lot on eating-out, which is nice but could use some moderation. And depending on your income, we spend a lot on household appliances that we really don't need, or replacing things that shouldn't be broken, but we bought them from China for cheep. All this adds up. What this means for food: buy at your local farmers market. I got two weeks worth of fruit for 25$ last time I went, and the food was of better quality and the shopping experience was far more enjoyable.

The next chapter talks more about the rest of the global economy, and localism, plus a bit of culture. In my next blog I'll summarize how to take the farmers market mindset and apply it to create a better economy.