Our Decrepit Food Factories
The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”
Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?
To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.
For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable - if its workings offend the rules of nature - the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.
The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS - 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain - called “community-acquired MRSA” - is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.
Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics - in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick - would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.” Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven’t looked yet.
Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.
As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can’t study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory “watchdogs” - the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. - are in any rush to see happen.
he second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing - going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees, in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.
You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures - 80 percent of the world’s crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California’s Central Valley - that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where there’s absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren’t in bloom? So every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central Valley - more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees in all.
They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February, for what has been called the world’s greatest “pollination event.” (Be there!) Bees that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with “pollen patties” - which often include ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)
In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers - and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California’s almond orchards have become “one big brothel” - a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder - a virus that was found in some of the bees from Australia. (The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as early as 2002.)
“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”
We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up - when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines - the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”
From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Good article. The other piece that should be added is what happens to food after it is picked/slaughtered and before it gets shipped, perhaps hundreds of miles. Distance means more preservatives, more fuel spent, less money that stays in your local economy.
But even before it’s shipped, it goes through some sort of processing facility. Large-scale mechanization always seeks to find economies of scale — the larger the better — root out redundancies as being “expensive” (rather than as backups/assurances/etc.). So when a large automanufacturer has a recall, it could be many tens of thousands of vehicles affected with a bad widget.
When a large-scale food producer has a recall — it might mean tens of thousands of people potentially with botulism, e. coli, salmonella, etc. and undoubtedly many, many tons of thrown out food.
Economies of scale (whether bees, cars or food) might answer some abstract/actuary’s analysis in a perfect and platonic world. But are they always sustainable? Desirable? Sensible? How many in academia are working for Monsanto, etc. and can’t even utter clean science at this point?
Nature, itself, only “economizes” to a point. If there’s one thing that we might take note of, before it’s too late, it’s that diversity & redundancy play a tremendous role in things. Two lungs and two kidneys, not one of each. Much more gray matter than most people use. Duplicative genes which appear to have no purpose. An actuary might call it waste, but nature doesn’t work that way. Thank goodness the natural pulse wasn’t designed by tyrants, accountants or their politicians.
One could also ask whether it is “sustainable” to pack most of our population into large urban areas where all sorts of problems are created. Some have suggested the cattle and hogs be put back on pasture and stop crowding them up for the benefits of efficiency. Perhaps we would have much less crime, sickness, depression, etc., if we also encouraged people to move back to the small towns and rural areas for their own welfare. Just don`t hold your breath waiting for any of this to happen.
Got to give up the meat. It is unsustainable–if you put them in pastures you pollute rivers and kill wildlife.
If there is a god how could he she or it have provided a better advertising campaign than making them the colours of the rainbow, while meat is the colours of something else closer to the ground.
Its really disgusting how humans treat members of other species. Sadly, humans deserve global warming. other species dont, but maybe its the only way to wipe the slate clean.
If there is any species that deserves extinction, we know which one it is.
Having farmed in California and other western states, it is apparent to me that California, with its superior climate, will always be doing the “heavy lifting” when it comes to deomestic food production.
Unless global laws are enacted and enforced to control population growth and to prevent the conversion of prime farmland to other uses, large scale agriculture will continue to get larger as world population continues to grow.
The rabid, for-profit mentality that thinks of nature as a THING to USE has led to a virtual enslaving of the elemental forces. Add this to deforestation, the bleaching of coral reefs, and the blasting of mountains in Virginia to get coal. A HOLOCAUST is being perpetuated on the natural world, a web of life so magnificent and vast that our mortal intelligence can scarcely grasp its complexity. However, EVERY one of the strands, noted or otherwise, has over time been fashioned to play a counter-balancing role. The roulette game of profit orchestrated against this vast web is tantamount to a prescription for mass suicide. Eventually all slaves revolt. When nature makes HER revolution, the world will shudder. Literally.
“One could also ask whether it is “sustainable” to pack most of our population into large urban areas where all sorts of problems are created.”
Yes, it is.
Since few of us can be farmers ourselves, the really-existing alterrnatives are either city living, or suburban/exurban living. City living, can be largely or completely car-free, and can be more easily integtated with local agriculture through walkable-neighborhood public markets, and food co-ops, and community supported agriculture (CSA) farms. Local economics are supported through sidewalk level, family-owned stores. Employment is usually a short walk, bicycle, or public-trsnsit ride away. Few of these thing are easily accessable (without a lot of driving) in suburban areas or small towns - most of which got Wal-Martized a long time ago. So, city living provides by far the smallest carbon footprint for the average person.
And, I don’t understand where this stereotyped view of cities as dismal depressing places - and small towns and rural areas as happy, wholesome places comes from. I find nothing more depressing than sprawling, faceless, culture-less, suburbia, or insular small towns.
And andersdl, from June through October, I can find a variety of locally grown vegatables here in Pennsylvania even in some of the big supermarkets. For seven months or so, the climate herre is even better, in that we get something unheard-of in California - regular rain through the summer. Yet, outside of PA, most eastern states notably the southeast states which have longer growing seasons, - seem to have totally abandoned vegatable farming - try to find local produce in places like Richmond or Atlanta.
In 1987 the UN developed a report called “Our Common Future” which contained a definition of “sustainable development.”
Here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Common_Future
“development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
PJD: Historically, up to and including the Industrial Revolution in Europe, many people went to cities because of internal migration. The rules of primogeniture rendered all but the first born males landless. The crux of the problem historically is that many people live in dirty, ugly, dangerous, increasingly monitored, congested cities — penned in like cattle — because they’re propertyless.
Steinbeck in “Grapes of Wrath” hit on a more modern version of this (engandered status of the family farm being still more modern), the banks simply evicted “tenant farmers” (early 20th century serfs) wholesale. Where to go? Tenant farming elsewhere, or to find work in the city.
The trend seems to be penning/domesticating everyone into large cities, only giant agricorps should own land, people should not generally be freed to their own devices, should not be allowed to accumulate real estate to pass onto their children, etc.
So I guess it all hinges on how domesticated you are. I’ve always preferred open space, wilderness, trees/mountains, owning more of my own time. I’m currently sitting in a windowless cubicle in Minneapolis — it’s little more than a jail cell, and I certainly plan to make a break for it, first chance I get.
There are different temperaments also. Some people need a lot of input/stimulation from others, bigger government, more rules, enjoy crowds & peoplewatching, etc. Maybe their identity is externalized in some way. But some don’t. I guess the crux of this issue is that people should be living where they are by choice, not forced to do so by financial necessity, essential landlessness/powerlessness, etc. The other strike against massive cities, of course, is any sort of pandemic/epidemic.
PJD
“And, I don’t understand where this stereotyped view of cities as dismal depressing places…”
I’ve been on several roadtrips across North America, and I’ve seen some very beautiful small towns. I remember one guy in Oregon basically telling me not to advertise the fact it was so nice/scenic in his town (which I won’t name) — they didn’t want to be overrun.
A large number of American cities, so-called Rust Belt, are indeed, dirty and ugly places. I bumped into a guy from Detroit last summer, on my way to Maine, who told me his horror stories. He’s not there by choice.
So the question is whether these people are there by choice. In the past, much larger numbers of people were indeed small farmers. Was it rising population that forbade that, or increasingly fascistic economic rules? The Amish, Hutterites and others scale by parallel when a colony reaches too large a size. The western model is to scale by singular size.
Patriarchy and capitalism are two suicidal concepts which
have produced Global Warming, destruction of nature/animal-life on the planet — and probable death of our own species.
As side issues they have delivered: War, fascism and destruction of ideals of democracy thru corruption of government and our system of justice.
Nature is a free system, not subject to man-made delusions
of control and elitist fairy-tales like “Manifest Destiny.”
The 2,000 year old fairy tale of Eve and the Apple more clearly shows Eve standing against animal sacrifice and animal-eating in the Garden of Eden.
If you want to save the planet give up the violence of animal-eating —
And, let’s get together to nationalize our natural resources and take them back from the few families profiting from their exploitation.
Let’s get ELECTRIC CARS on our roads –
We could do this in a three to five year period by
subsidizing both the manufacture and purchase.
See: “Who Killed The Electric Car?”
“Some people need a lot of input/stimulation from others, bigger government, more rules…”
Living in the city - I feel MORE freedom - more diverse experiences and culture access - theatre, alternative film, good food, access to diverse pregressive political viewpoints and activism, than anywhere else. Most importantly of all, city sidewalks and city plazas and parks are public spaces, where your first amendment rights are preserved - just try to hold an antiwar demonstration, or even a small picket, in, say, a suburban shopping mall or strip, and you will see what I mean. In such places your first amendment rights are practically nonexistent.
As far as small towns, you should ask a gay person, or perhaps a black or brown person (Jena, LA anyone?) how great they are…
Yes, Detroit is an awful place. Why? Because all racist white people who were frightened when a black family moved into their neighborhood - so they fled to suburbia in their greenhouse-gas spewing cars and became absentee slumlords. As far as Minneapolis, any place whose main attraction is a huge shopping mall is not a place I’d want to live.
When I moved to Pittburgh from a life in the faceless DC suburbs - it was the ephiphany of my life. Everything is REAL here - in some neighhborhoods, one can still spend an entire day without seeing a single piece of coprorate-chain crap.
And I love the outdoors too. I enjoy hiking and flying hang gliders, and formerly cave exploration in West Virgina. I still like to spend a week or in the cave club field house in Smoke Hole. But, if I had to live full time in, say, Franklin, WV, I’d go crazy - or more likely, I’d be run out of town for being an un-american terrorist-lovin’ commie-pinko. And, god forbid what would happen to my gay brother and his partner if they were seen on Main Street.
OVERPOPULATION is more the problem —
however, YES, cities do win out over the stagnation of suburbs for freedom of every kind.
PJD:
My idea of a dream day would be a cottage with an ocean view on Prince Edward Island or Nova Scotia, my homebrew bubbling away, my homemade pizza in the oven, a garden like my brother in-law (lives on a farm) has, and either reading books, watching the birds, or writing a novel or three.
Each has is own dream, I suppose. I’ve yet to find a large city I’d really care to live in. But I enjoy visiting some of them — don’t get me wrong there.
The guy from Detroit didn’t mention race to me, but he did talk about crack houses, boarded up houses, urban blight, disappearing jobs and a lot of violent crime.
PJD,
I live in Minneapolis, and it is the MSM that wants you to believe that the only thing to do here is to go to that stupid huge mall. Not true. We have a lot of culture (museums, concerts, performances), fine restaurants, diversity and a great progressive movement. In fact the greatest attraction is an area called Uptown.
Whenever my family or friends visit from within the country or abroad, I make a point of not taking them to any mall, for there is a lot more to see and do.
We have the highest amount of bicycle commuters (some of them even in the winter, most of us during the warmer months) and a great park, bike paths and lakes system.
So yeah, because I agree with your argument, I think the Twin Cities is actually a nice place to live, you should come and find out by yourself. No need to visit any mall.
Cheers.
PJD: I totally agree about the potential for low-carbon living in the city. I have always been a city mouse, love being able to walk or ride the city bus to libraries, farmers’ markets, etc.
You’re mistaken though (happily) about the lack of vegetable farming outside of Pennsylvania. There’s a lot going on here in RI, a lively and growing movement of CSAs, urban community gardens, farmers’ markets, pick-your-own, programs linking local growers with public school lunchrooms, and restaurants boasting of their local produce, meat, cheese, wine, and seafood. It’s below the radar of the MSM, mostly, but (as with so much in life) that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I believe the other Northeast states have similar stuff going on.
GREAT comments. All of them so far. And Michael Pollan is an icon of the organic/sustainable/local movement. He is quite a resource and inspiration for many of us.
I would like to add that I am a small time farmer and an accountant by trade. There is no dicotomy betwwen the two. Accountants are not evil by nature. Who they choose to work for is really the defining issue.
That being said, I believe that balance is the key issue. Mother Nature has perfected a perfectly balanced system through biodiversity. Everything has a purpose and contributes to the whole. Whenever things get out of balance for any reason, Mother Nature makes a course correction to reestablish that balance. Anything that stands in the way of that balance, or artificially disturbs it, will eventually self distruct precisely because it does not contribute to the whole.
This is where humans screwed up. For the most part, many non-indigenous populations throughout the world do recognize or respect that they are part of the whole. Many have put themselves above or apart from Mother Nature. This concept by itself is absolutely unsustainable on a planet based on balance.
So, it is my belief that no action, practice, or mode of living is in itself bad, wrong, immoral, or evil. It’s not a question of whether eating meat, living in a city, farming, or having babies is right or wrong or is perceived to be the leading cause of whatever ails the planet. Mother Nature will sort all that out in the long run.
The only thing we have any true control over is how we conduct our own individual lives, what we individually value, and how we organize our individual communities in such a way that recognizes our part in the balanced whole.
In the meantime, I will get to know my neighbor, buy locally, and contribute to the balance within my community and my surroundings.
Peace
Mr. Bramscher,
Your last post just reminded me of another benefit of city living - access to lots of different microbrew beers - including a few good local ones. We have a several bars with more than 50 taps - including one with at least 25 Belgian ales on tap. But only in the city limits. You won’t see that in suburbia or small-town America…
and princip…, I’m sure there is lots of real city life in the twin cities. Unfortunately, I’ve only passed through St. Paul a couple times on the Amtrak Empire Builder. The flat terrain must make it a good bicycling city when the weather cooperates…
Evolution didn’t create the superbug, Intelligent Design did. Therefore MRSA is God’s retribution upon all meat-gobbling monkeymen!
*teehee*
Global shipping and factory farms, two of imperial capitalism’s crown jewels, combine to provide the super-immune bacterias mainstream access to huge numbers of human beings. The localism movement defends against such super-immune bacteria by limiting use of antibiotics, separating the animals, and limiting shipping ranges. Localism naturally defends against many problems, including the bee problem, by the same mechanism - limiting the size of channels.
Channels require filters to keep dangerous things from passing through, whether super-immune bacteria, bee pathogens, nuclear bombs, exploitive ideas, addictive commodities, and other destructive output of imperial capitalism. Unfortunately, hijack-prone governments fail to filter these large channels, so the localism movement is the better approach. Geographic barriers help us limit unconscious proliferation of the bad. We consciously push the good through the barriers.
princip… and Paul-I live just N of Iowa border and feel fortunate. I agree about Uptown. Lucia’s and Famous Dave’s (especially the music)are wonderful places to visit now and then.
PJD,
I’ve been to the Rogue brewery in Newport, Oregon. The Snake River brewery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The Bar Harbor and Atlantic breweries in Maine, and many in between. All smaller towns. The second oldest family-owned brewery in the US, for instance, is in a smaller town (Schells in New Ulm, MN). In any case, about $100-400 in equipment and some space and you can brew your own. I’ve got a gallon of hard cider in the works right now.
Each of us should be able to pick the place that suits his/her inclination. Those who need the city should be able to afford to live there and earn equity (even if it’s just a condo), rather than remain as landless renters, with nothing to pass to their children. Those who need the countryside, a pastoral backdrop, nature, wilderness, small plot of land to garden, the serenity, quietitude, etc. should be able to afford that as well, even if it’s just a 5 acre micro-farm. The relative I mentioned has a vegetable garden about 30′ x 75′ which grows far more than he’s able to eat — so they share.
I’m not a big fan of the grid, and save large sums of money whenever I do things myself. It’s cheaper for me to usually repair something myself than hire a contractor, to cook instead of eating out, etc. The grid has been widening the gap between rich and poor and reducing people to debt-riddled paupers. My logic may be way offbase, but I’d say the more you can do off the grid, if you consider yourself a resourceful person, the better off you are. This life of dependent cattledom is not for me.
Obtaining land in the country right now is very difficult, since the real estate going-rate has been a function of absentee markets — speculators, agricorps, etc. whose ability to pay far outstrips what people are earning in many local economies.
Are we supposed to embrace a depopulation of rural America or something?
Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. How can they when the FDA hasn’t looked into it and the factory farmers won’t let anyone else near their farms? I’ve read more than once that Bush has made govt agencies hollow shells, and this is what we get. This should be treated like another scandal.
Rebel Farmer put her finger on the solution - as usual - with her point about biodiversity. We don’t need a 600,000 acre almond factory farm. Family farms with a diversity of crops, an almond orchard, and beehives that get to keep some of their honey for their own needs is the obvious solution to these problems.
We are being poisoned by contaminated junk from China, diseased factory farmed food with low nutritional content from our own country. And Americans go for it to save a little money while our economy and environment get trashed. That’s known as penny wise and pound foolish.
Magnificant posts by all.
Paul Bramscher great insights, I wish you good fortune in breaking out of the corporate straight-jacket. Me? I was being poisoned with all manner of Fortune 500 toxins and Orwellian Skullduggery. My health went downhill where I could scarcely walk. Productivity for the corporate empire was trumped from the great ivory tower: or else. No days off, no sick call, no health care, no retirement, no work rules or else. I helped lead a labor revolt and was never forgiven. I am now on the outside, in relative poverty, and happy as a clam trying to nurse myself back to health.
What an unhappy, unhealthy lifestyle is the American nightmare of life! (If you are not a millionaire.)
Anything is a vast improvement over eating the shidt that passes for food in that virtual prison for the soul.
Can the 1950’s America ever be regained? Even the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s were a comparative paradise compared to this worker’s helll set in a police state.
Americans are way overdue to throw off the bonds of this defective, irresponsible government.
National Boycott
National Strike: Total congressional and Executive recall to end it.
Nationwide Election Paper ballot reform (no computers)
Vegan diet
Arm yoursleves
Think 1776.
I’m not sure waht exactly you mean by “the grid”.
If you are talking about building local economic relations - it is excatly in a real city neighborhood - where the greatest amount of this mom-and-pop economic localism still survives!
These are the traditional urban neighborhoods - often build around a particular ethnic group, the challenge being for them to continue to thrive with a more diverse ethnic and racial makup over time. Here in Pittsburgh they include places Like Squirrel Hill, Bloomfield, Lawrenceville or East Liberty - the latter often being subject to racist dismissal by too many whites because it is a predominantly black neighborhood with black-culture oriented small businesses. Thus it seem to be the first neighborhood to face the threat of white corporate yuppification.
Maybe Minneapois has no such places like these. I hope to be to be corrected regarding this.
As far as a depopulation of rural America, I have trouble believing any of these back-to-the country types are as independent as they imply. Most at a minimum, rely very heavily on a car, so their orgaic garden and compost pile and wood stove or solar panels do little to reduce their carbon footprint - which is much larger than city dweller - and in most cases, larger than a suburbanite.
PAUL BRAMSCHER: You bring a level of dignity to this forum. You seem like such an elegant gentleman to me (call it my intuition!), and I just want to thank you for your contributions to CD. They are often balanced, thoughtful and so far as I can remember, always polite. Enjoy your home brew and an eventual view over the still waters. I elected to live in the country and give up the culture of city life so that I could have good health by virtue of a lifestyle that’s simple and connected to “the elements.” I believe that the rivers that run UNDER the northern part of the state of Florida that provide for so many majestic springs carry healing powers. These waters are prehistoric! In my area people in their 80’s still mow their lawns and ride bicycles. Two told me they use NO medicines. That’s what I aim for!
PJD: Check out an older sci-fi classic by Clifford Simak, entitled “City”.
By grid, I’m thinking of several things. A guy I work with is constantly nagged by his city’s ordinances and permits, as he tried to upgrade his dilapidated home. Lots of rules, many excessive, some are even contradictory to manufacturer’s guidelines. I have inlaws in northern Minnesota who enjoy far less hassle from their small town govt. By grid, I’m also referring to astounding laws in many places which forbid even hanging laundry out to dry. Homeowner’s associations with mandatory fees, stop lights telling you when to go/stop, bumper-to-bumper traffic, the smell of exhaust, the noise of diesel, the high cost of living in Minneapolis forces many people to commute, rules against things like keeping livestock, etc. If you don’t mind all these rules, are perhaps young and single, have no interest in gardening, or having a reasonably sized garage with a workshop for handy projects, etc. then these things may be non-issues. But I’m married and settled, with kids. (I don’t need to see or be seen any more…)
I had initially hoped I might generate enough equity/savings to retire quite early, but prices practically everywhere seem rigged against this. I’m unsure it’s possible now. Prices have to come down far more before I’ll be willing to do what the last generation enjoyed (buying a cabin).
Siouxrose,
Thanks for the compliments. I enjoy the spiritual tone of your posts as well. I had an extraordinary time a couple years ago, sitting in a camping chair at a provincial campground on Prince Edward Island, staring out at the sea, and finishing the book entitled “Lost Horizon” by Hilton (the Shangri-La)… I’d highly recommend it!
This disucssion has deviated far from the initial article, and I claim some responsibility. Anyway, there was something magical about the Shangri-La, and my guess is that the healing properties were food, climate, or a combination of the two…
PAUL: I would love to see Commondreams sponsor a weekend event where we could all meet in a healing atmosphere and bring our collective kinetic, spiritual and cognitive energies together. Maybe we could make what some minds take for magic happen! The world could do a whole lot worse… keep on dining out! Nature loves your joyful company!
Urbanization is a cultural design not a natural phenomena and historically it has not been sustainable. It is actually pretty unhealthy by design.
There are a lot of other commercial practices that lower the quality of food that haven’t been mentioned. Such as unripe fruit that is harvested and stored for sometimes over a year and then gased with a chemical that causes it to ripen. It is all about profit and convenience. I cannot stand to see that artifically colored oversized fish from aqua cultures let alone eat one.
Michael Pollen should be commended and everyone should read his book.
Siouxrose: Always enjoy your posts. And I love your idea of CD folks getting together. I imagine that would be pretty diffecult as we are spred out all over the world. I have gotten to know many here (Paul Magill, KEM, Kathyodat, and others) that I communicate with thru e-mail. I’ve even made personal contact with some that live close by. It is really wonderful because my community of friends has expended so much. CD is a lot like a discussion group at the library. Ideas shared. Getting to know one another. It’s really a great place and we all seem to contribute to the “whole” in our own unique way.
Thanks everyone.
PAUL and PJD__Enjoyed reading both of your comments on rural versus city life. Until I was middle aged, I seriously considered leaving the family farm for the good life in the city. However as I matured, the benefits of rural life far outweigh the congested urban atmosphere to me. As country folk now have satellite TV and wireless computer service, the farm life is no longer boring as it once was, and it is unfortunate that so many people have either been forced to go to the cities out of necessity or the expectation of a better life.
Paul, I agree that everyone should have the choice of their living standards and locations if possible. I have a daughter that is perfectly happy with her family in a large metropolis, and a son who lives in a large city and cannot wait until his family gets to the place where he will be able to come back to the rural area he grew up in.
Like Rebel Farmer said, there are plenty of good comments in this page, and not only is it true that there’s nothing inherently wrong or bad about being an accountant, it’s necessary when in business in an economy that requires exchanging money or other items as means of obtaining what we want. Even primitive living peoples who exchange stones as we do money do their own accounting; item x deserving y amount of stones z.
Farmers need to be able to do some accounting for themselves; ideally all they can. It’s also good for any self-employed people. Know it, and you have far less risk of getting screwed; unless you’re awfully clumsy in your own accounting.
“PJD December 17th, 2007 4:44 pm
Mr. Bramscher,
Your last post just reminded me of another benefit of city living - access to lots of different microbrew beers - including a few good local ones. We have a several bars with more than 50 taps - including one with at least 25 Belgian ales on tap. But only in the city limits. You won’t see that in suburbia or small-town America…”
IMPORTED bears? Yuck. Better go to the countries of origin and drink the REAL brew from those countries. I can’t personally say this for Belgian beers, but can about German beers and Guiness, and not because I’ve ever been overseas. I learned it from people visting from these countries; when I worked in Ottawa, Ontario, Ca, and in Jacksonville, Fla. They would not touch the imported beers from their countries; they’d only drink it back home, and not due to favouring U.S. cheap brew while in the U.S., or the even better-than-U.S. commercial brews of Ca, which I won’t touch, unless it’s free. Even then, I won’t go out of my way to get any.
I only consume microbrews brewed in North America; when in the U.S., then usually U.S. microbrews, and while in Canada, … the same here. And it leads to learning of some really excellent brews; like the best stout I’ve come across yet, brewed in Quebec City and wholly organic, coming in a 660ml bottle, and 7% or 7.5%, which makes it all the greater. There are two other excellent microbrewed stouts made in Quebec that I’m aware of, but they’re 5%’ers, and this other one simply is great; although all three are excellent and microbrewed stouts, the WOW-pleasing kind.
But it is interesting to walk into a pub like those you described. I worked for a summer in Toronto back in 1987 or 1988 and coming back from a visit to some exposition place there, I stopped in at the Amsterdam (no, it didn’t sell any pot or hash, though), where I learned about its “sister” pub, which I think was on Dunn Street, so I went and checked that place out; particularly because of being told it had 400 (yes, [400]) different brews on the menu, and brewed four of its own.
Talk about a selection menu; it’ll take an hour just to go over it. Well, I headed to the place’s own microbrews right away, though.
In any case, when foreigners won’t drink the brews imported from their own countries when they visit other countries, and the latter offer nothing particularly good (outside of some good microbrews), then you know that when you think you’re drinking brews consumed by people in those countries, well, you’re not.
Those imported in transparent enough containers have preservatives added, and Guiness comes in both dark brown bottle and totally non-trasparent cans, so I don’t know that it has preservatives added; but there’s something about it that makes it not at all what people get in Ireland.
Not that I ever cared for Guiness over here though, for it’s always been very tasteless, bland to me.
However, one thing I did find while working in the U.S. was that Quebec microbrews I was familiar with up here were the same down in Mass., so I assume also in other sales points in the U.S. Unibroue was one, and the other I tried down there was likely Boreal, though am only certain of the Unibroue 9%’ers (not stout, but ales in this case).
Following is the English section of the website for the top Quebec stout for those interested in reading about it a little.
http://www.labarberie.com/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=140
For richness in antioxidants, the top is porter, then stout, followed by dark ales; and lager is not really beer, I’ve learned over recent years.
Re. Belgian beer, and if I’m not confusing myself with respect to country in this, either all or one of their top beers is brewed in a rather wholly distinct manner, very unique; in very shallow vats, or whatever they’re called, and with microbes in the air, instead, I believe, of yeasts being used for fermentation. I read this over the past couple of years, and maybe it’s possible that you, in the U.S., could brew your own authentic Belgian style beer, but seem to recall that there’s a problem, like due to lacking the necessary airborne microbes. Anyway, that information is also available on the Web.
Another reason I don’t buy imports of anything as much as I can avoid doing so, and speaking of when I’m gainfully employed, which I haven’t been for too long now due to globalisation and the massive wave of imported foreign “temps” to replace U.S. computer professionals; well, it’s to live by the principle of supporting local economy first, and accepting from more distant sources only when not available from local sources, or the local is not of adequate quality. Quality of course is a criterion for these choices.
And the U.S. as well as Canada need to get back to family and therefore many more local farms; they need to be encouraged, and Big Agri BS needs to be DONE AWAY with. Big Corp., regardless of the business, should be done away with, imo; only it’s not going to be possible, so hoping otherwise is utopic waste of time. They “own” our govts.
In the early 20th century, G.K. Chesterton, who was a bit too anti-women’s rights imo, said something I believe should have been made into law; that every male born should be guaranteed, by the state, three acres of land for eventual use, for when the child becomes old enough to make productive use of the land, very much with income and feeding self and/or family in mind. I only would not prejudice against women, and we’d need to up the three to five, and sometimes more, acres today; depending on cost of living in an area being considered. In some places, 5 acres may be enough, while other areas might mean needing 7, 8, or 10 acres for adequate income.
That’d be great and very just, but farmers and ranchers with a lot of land surely would put up all the resistance they could muster up. They have no need for half of the land they have in their “official” possession, but are damn obsessive about being major pigs, too.
I could well earn income with five acres.
And when demand is low for such land in an area with plenty of land exists, then people fortunate enough to be able to acquire more of the land while keep much if not most of it forested for conservation purposes would then be doing something beneficial; for the land being under titleship would make it easier to protect these forests and/or wilderness areas.
Like others said, farming meat animals is not a problem when properly done; while I’ll add that all living organisms are of the ANIMAL KINGDOM, and if other mammals are to be permitted to hunt, kill and consume other animals, then it’s hypocrisy to claim that humans must be denied the same right. It’s downright moronic, so much that it’s infantile and surprising that people who should be thinking like adults would come up with the nonsense flames against humans eating other animals. WE ARE ALL ANIMALS, DUMMIES!
The problem is abuse of animals, fish, etc., for meat, and of the environment, with large animal farms producing far too much manure and urine for what the environment can support, and with respect to synthetic chemicals being used for fertilisers and pesticides. There’s also the problem of clearing too much land for cultivation of crops, whether they be for animal or human feed; as well as tilling being done too deeply, for doing that drastically depletes the quality, health of the soil, according to experts in organic and/or sustainable farming techniques, who I will believe far more than all of the users of synthetic chemicals and appliers of deep tilling.
Industrial fish farming, however, should be wholly abolished; stop f*cking with the oceans’ species. When methods we employ destroy the Nature’s wild species, then we have a major f*cking problem going on, and it needs to be stopped. Well, that ain’t gonna happen in pig-capitalism world.
There’s plenty of documentation online on organic, sustainable and environmentally friendly farming techniques or methodologies. I worked as a farmhand on a crop farm for a couple of seasons in the 1980s, gardened my own food and organically back then, had several relatives who were farmers, life-long for many of them, and spent several months searching for and reading up on these three differently named farming techniques; organic, sustainable, and environmentally friendly. All very interesting stuff, although I’d never want to pay for organic certification; would instead tell people who wanted assurance to simply visit the farm and look around for themselves, at no expense to me (if I had a farm).
The latter, however, is only do-able when selling locally; but that’s where I’d like all of my produce to be sold, if only I had a farm.
I’ve lived in rural, urban and city, and en masse of each; and therefore know to be able to live in any of these contexts. So I also know what’s fun in all three situations, while knowing the benefits of rural, and am capable of keeping myself well enough occupied with my interests in Nature; if only I had adequate income to be able to really do something other than vegetate.
There are ways to well benefit from all three contexts, and there are ways of benefiting from living among more primitively living peoples in jungles, which’d surely be a great and very interesting experience for this Nature, wilderness lover; only I’d need a friendly local person to help guide me around, like in some areas of South America, to teach me to not go to … x place, because you will be chased down and fatally bitten by very fast Fer De Lance, very venomous snake, f.e. Or if in the upper altitudes, then you can safely forget about those snakes being anywhere around.
I could probably spend most of my life on the oceans. I love Nature in many of its forms or contexts, and don’t mind a rough sea ride, while also having learned how to avoid getting sea sick during my deep sea fishing trips; look to, stay focused on the horizon (if the waves aren’t so high as to prevent you from being able to see the horizon anyway).
That is, I’m versatile, and that’s probably much related to being very autonomous in character, and being capable of being alone for long periods of time. I have enough going on upstairs to be able to keep myself well enough occupied; although when out in the wild, then it’s convenient to have a good guide book or two to help with learning what the environment consists of. Edible plants, f.e., would be of interest, but I’d definitely need a book, for I don’t know the wilds enough for this on my own.
I was introduced to wild garlic around 1993, but don’t recall what these plants look like; although do recall that these were short and didn’t grow among other weeds. They were, I believe, near the base of pines, or the clear sort of forest floor that we find among large pines. I think they were pines though.
A few years ago, I was introduced to a wild and edible plant treated as a vegetable in some African countries, but don’t recall the name of this plant, which grows enough on the farm at the base of the mountain here, but not atop where we reside, being nowhere in sight up here. Was it aloe? Maybe; seeming to recall the juice of the plant could also be employed for disinfectant, but maybe getting this confused with another useful plant that grows in the local wild. I need to ask the local expert I know the next time we cross paths; not a full expert, but much more than I am.
Of course I know wild blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, but there are others I’m not familiar with. We have a wild Hawthorne tree in the backyard here, it sprouted up and grew a lot over the past 15 years or so, not recalling it back in the 1980s, and it has tiny apples. Those got me interested so I did some Internet searches and found that while the leaf shape is not wholly identical, the rest of the whole description fits with the Hawthorne tree, and those little apples are edible; useful for making jellies, and I suppose pies and compotes (like aka apple sauce).
Nature has a lot and sometimes much all around us, yet we are ignorant of what’s really there.
Big Agri and other Big Corp bs destroys MUCH of our environment, and even too many moderate size farmers clear too much of the land they have title ownership to. Others practice too much monoculture where there was none before, in which case the mono. is BAD news. If Nature is naturally monoculture in a particular area, then harvesting from there and replanting with the same species should be no problem; but that’s far from adequately been done.
Reforestation, however, has learned about this latter matter and has ceased replanting a-la mono. when the environment was not that before.
It’s very bad for Nature, unless it’s the way Nature evolved. Plants have their own natural insecticides, pesticides, but not against all pests. In a non-mono. culture woodland, the various plants’ ‘cides help protect the other fellow-woodland plants from pests that’d be harmful, if there wasn’t protection provided by the neighbouring plants. They work out to complement each other for an overall balanced and shared protection against pests, including viruses.
I think it’s Rebel Farmer who brought up Nature’s BALANCE, and he’s right. It’s a very important and simple thing to understand; although it sure does seem as if a lot of people are too opaque for this.
Oh well, we just went and destroyed Iraq like forever, toxically poisoning it with depleted uranium, and doing enough the same in Afghanistan; besides all of the rest of our slaughtering and destruction there.
What a world.
P.S. I referred to wild garlic as if it’s a weed, and it’s not; just having meant that it doesn’t grow among “weeds”. And what we call weeds are misnamed; they’re often not weeds, unless we don’t mean the term in the usually negative sense. A lot of people don’t know their asses from their elbows about plants and call some weeds, meaning harmful or nuisance, when they really are not. Moronic world we live in. What do we expect when we’ve been dumbed down, brainwashed, etc., for the profit of Big Corp.!
Sorry, I don’t like beer…..yuck! But I am interseted in maybe growing hops for those that do.
Alcohol is a waste of time for the masses. It is one of the technologies that they use to keep us down and dumb. It had it’s place in the past but it is not needed now with reffrigeration.
What is wrong with this picture?
Yellowstone National Park 2005-03 (Stopping Traffic)
http://www.theragens.com/photos/albums/Travel/Yellowstone/Yellowstone_2005-03.htm
Six thousand million people, all alive at the same time, in this world, is unsustainable. All the other ‘unsustainables’ flow from this.
Pattern-chaser
“Who cares, wins”
Mike Corbeil,
Good post. I consider Unibroue to be possibly the finest brewery in all of North America. I had some on tap on a trip to Quebec and Maine, though did not get a chance to see the brewery itself.
You touch on some interesting threads, one undercurrent is curiosity. Curiosity about the world around us is always assertive and active, never apathetic or disconnected. I’ve heard it said that the human sensory apparatus is wired to ignore a lot of stimuli, to work mainly with “significant points”, whether sound or visual, lest we go crazy with trivial input. When I walk my Big-10 campus to and from my office, I’ll actually stop and look at that uncommon black squirrel, the eddies on the Mississippi river, the riverbanks, etc. When I glance at the people around me, I typically see zombies on sidewalks, moving about in an environment totally oblivious to everything around them. Lots of cellphones and iPods suggest that there’s lots of people who don’t really want to be where they are. They’re separated from those they really want to talk to, and are not interested in the sounds around them.
I wonder if the big city, which offers a lot of “noise” (whether mechanical, crowds, artificial, etc.) causes that “ignoring apparatus” to kick in.
I don’t mean to paint the country as all rosy either. In Northern Minnesota there is a subculture in some places of: cut it down, shoot it, fish it, or run an ATV over it. I guess I’m hoping to find that rural area which combines a more refined/steward relationship toward nature on the one hand, and appreciation of the wild beauty of the other. Perhaps one has to build this himself, and find some sort of means to overcome the economic hurdles laid out to prevent it.
Mike,
Actually the bar owner I’m talking about gets his kegs straight from the Belgian abbeys - he has even has one of the abbeys brew a special beer just for his bar.
Paul B,
I think we must be talking about two different things. The urban neighborhoods I am talking about do, in fact, have yards for gardening and in many cases garages too. I grew vegatables every year at the Bloomfield house. Regrettably, I no longer live there in the but in a suburb, because my job moved out there and I wanted to do the right thing from an environmental perspective - live within 5 miles from work (a short electric scooter ride) The suburb where I live is actually noiser than the city neighborhood due to the greater volume of car traffic on the four-lane drag about a 1/2 mile away - and the din of lawnmowers in the spring.
In fact most of these things you are talking about are suburban ills - I’ve never heard of a homeowners association or not being able to hang clothes out in the city - but I sure do in the suburb I live in now. And don’t get me started about lawns and the odd stares when I’m seen using my push-reeel mower!
as far as freedom, with the opressive, uniform, rignt wing politics and racism out here, and the mocking, derision (and even thrown objects) at my electric scooter out here - something that never happened in the city, I feel distinctly less free out here. I don’t even dare even orgainze any antiwar pickets out here - something taht goes on at 5 different locations every Saturday in the city.
Mico-brews are not so easy to find in extreme S MN. Luckily larger MN brewers have some fine suds. A couple of my favorites are Summit pale ale and Schell’s Firebrick.
“Lots of cellphones and iPods suggest that there’s lots of people who don’t really want to be where they are.”
More likely, the reason is that they are indoctrinated, via their TV sets, to need these stereotypical things. I particular, the cellphone has led to an odd “need to immediately communicate” where before, one simply waited until you were face to face, or got to a regualar phone. Their scariest use is the way they are used for parents to maintain Orwellesque control over their kids independence.
Their use is prevalent wherever I go, not just in cities.
It is all part of the capitalist scheme - introduce a gadget that complicates life, first as a convienience or even a fad, then engineer the society and infrastructure so it becomes a necessity or percieved necesity - and ultimately, a very profitable dis-convieninece. It started with the automobile, then the TV, then all these communication and entertainment gadgets. Now, people waste much more of their time in a car than they ever did in a trolley or inter-urban, TV’s are forced onto us even in restaurants (just like Orwell predicted). Now, as someone who refuses to own a cell phone, I find myself faced with a “expectation of instant communication”, but pay phones have become nearly nonexistant or ripoff-expensive.
A compliment to this forum: it is one of the most sophisticated I have yet found on CD. Rebel farmer, Paul Bramscher, etc. you are the living proof that not all Americans are thoughtless consumers as some people here (in Europe, Austria, to be precise) would make us believe….
I think we all agree about the madness of factory farming and industrial agriculture (culture is a misnomer here) and that the ecological boomerang will come back and hit us sooner or later…. Resistant bacteria strains are just one warning sign..We eat meat but only once a week and all dairy and meat products are organic from local farmers.Our nightmare is, that the US will force the EU to import hormone treated beef and Monsanto seeds…..
Since a lot has been said about beer here, may I ask what a “microbrew” might be? Here in my country and neighbouring Bavaria - as far as I know - are the oldest breweries of the world (one almost a thousand years old, established by monks of course. In my humble opinion they produce the best beers, my favourite is “weissbier” (beer made from wheat not hops so it tastes less bitter and is served very cold with a slice of lemon, delicious in the summer
http://www.brauerei-weihenstephan.de/index.php?page=home_2_1&
I have once tried US-style beer but honestly, I wouldn´t call it real beer. Even famous breweries here make “Export beer” for the US market which most beer-lovers here would not touch… (sorry, no offense intended)
I am afraid that now our winegrowers are endangered by “wood-chips” and artificials enzymes (to add taste)coming from America will they attack our beer purity law next?
Unsustainable =
“What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown”.
Minitru
If you lived in Turkey you could live in a 12 by 12 cubical built by an American multi-national corporation and approved by Dick Cheney’s daughter. Work in the factory and our wages should be able to sustain your cubical. I don’t think beer is allowed.
Having read quite a bit about the bee situation this year, I’m always surprised at the example of almonds being given. Just who is eating all of those almonds? I know I get the occasional dollop in my packaged cereal, but otherwise it isn’t part of my diet.
The other discussions here are interesting. Does anyone else here see the irony of talking about leaving a small footprint by living in the city while also talking about beer that is imported all the way from Belgium? We all have our vises that make us less than perfect environmentalists. And like it or not, an area of 322 square miles is never going to be able to set aside enough gardening space to feed over eight million people. Unfortunately, even living in a rural area doesn’t mean that your food will come from anywhere near where you live these days.
minitru,
My favorite German beers are Weihenstephan, Erdinger, and Ayinger Hefeweizen, all available on the shelves here. (I’ve been to the Hofbrauhaus in Bavaria, but that was 20 years ago). Microbrews are small hand-crafted beers, made by independent brewers all over the US and some larger towns in Canada. The quality varies wildly, but some of them approach the quality of German beers. This may sound sacrilege, but keep in mind that one of the largest ethnic groups to settle the US were Germans.
I believe that Unibroue in Quebec exceeds many European beers for quality. It is not possible to generalize on the quality of American beer, since there are hundreds/thousands of microbrews in this country: http://www.ratebeer.com.
What is possible to say is that the American mass-market beer is like the mass-market in music, movies, food, politics, news, etc. Junk food for the mind or body, insipid, irritating, weak, uninspired, and the like. Or just plain wrong in some fundamental way. It’s too bad that this is the image that gets exported. It’s a falsely monolithic mischaracterization.
In turn, I see Europe as a place where many of our bad habits actually came from. It was an intrinsically unsustainable economy that drove the Vikings out to pillage, and hundreds of thousands of peasants to settle the Americas.
But I worry that it may nonethless reflect mainstream culture as a whole (beer, food, politics, news, cultural discourse, the whole shebang). Too many people don’t realize what they’re missing and, hence, standards/expectations remain low. I’ve yet to find an American hefeweizen which can touch a good Bavarian, so I’ll probably be making my own in the next 6-12 months. There are a few homebrewing shops in my city, and it’s possible to obtain top quality ingredients.
As Michael Pollan says: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Think about that in the context of
Meat Eating and Global Warming
www.ivu.org/members/globalwarming.html
and
Eco-Eating: Eating as if the Earth Matters
www.brook.com/veg
Do you know anyone with a chronic Mrsa or Vrsa/Vrse or c-Mrsa infection? If not you will.
Mike Corbeil - Actually, being in sustainable ag/ecology research myself, a weed is best defined as “a plant out of place” meaning even something like volunteer corn can be a weed in a soybean field. Wild garlic is great in the wild, but in an ag field it may be harvested with the crop of interest and result in flavor alteration and lower the payments farmers get for their hard work.
As far as all this food talk goes, sometimes we forget how spoiled we are. One of the things that would be a HUGE leap toward sustainability is to stop demanding products that are out of season in our area. And what happened to home canning? My family still does it, guess its just a tradition. Just yesterday a package came to my apartment addressed to the person who lived here before me. It was a christmas present… pears in a box from the other side of the country…
PJD wrote: “Since few of us can be farmers ourselves…”
I think the future will be more like the past. 150 years ago, there were fifteen families working the land for every one in the city. I expect something similar in the future.
Another, perhaps unfair way of looking at it is that you’re either a producer, or a consumer of the basic necessities of life. Today, probably 99.9% of residents of modern industrialized countries are exclusively consumers of basic necessities. This cannot continue!
In the future, most people will have to produce at least a portion of their food and energy. That’s not to say everyone will exclusively farm, but our current agriculture system is floating on a sea of cheap energy that is not going to be around much longer.
So unless you intend to compete for increasingly rare support jobs, it might be good to get some practice in on producing at least some of your own food and energy.
This looks like a much needed article. I skipped to the MRSA para, due to an interest in the subj and found things I’ve yet to read anywhere else. Thank you Common Dreams and Michael Pollan.
Jan Steinman, I hope you’re right. I’ve read the grass chapters from The Omnivore’s Delimma and the one in between. Perhaps folks are getting serious about a transition.
I worry everytime I buy food. Where does it come from? Under what conditions do people working on large plantations have to work? And it’s impossible to figure out.
Ever since I read the book Bitter Fruit I haven’t felt the same about food at the supermarket.
I used to grow a lot of my own vegetables, but that was before I moved back to the city. Where I live in a city in New Jersey there are few community gardens. I’ve tried growing herbs and greens like arugula in a window of my apartment and that seems to work ok.
The one thing I do really like about living where I live is there are many mom and pop type businesses here, and the neighborhood is on a human-pedestrian scale, unlike most places in Jersey. I hope the businesses will remain here for a long time, but I’m afraid they are going to face a corporate onslaught sooner or later.
BTW… It would be excellent to have a chance one day to meet some of you folks also on CD. It’s been inspiring to read so many of your posts.
PJD -
I had a similar experience living out in rural-suburbs, where I formerly owned a house. I moved there so I would be 7 minutes from my job. The town had a population of 2500 and was surrounded by cornfields, but it was almost as noisy as living on MacDougal Street in Manhattan. Every weekend the din from law mowers, weed wackers, ATVS, chain saws, leaf blowers, etc, was unimaginable. Sometimes it would start in the early morning and continue all day till dusk.
I moved back to a city and now have the quietest place I have ever lived in. I have access to trains and buses. I can walk to a supermarket, bakery, coffee shops, and actually have friends within walking distance of my apartment.