Food Security: From Excess to Enough (Point of View) - Softcover

Martin, Ralph C.

 
9781459744028: Food Security: From Excess to Enough (Point of View)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1459744020 ISBN 13: 9781459744028
Verlag: A J PATRICK BOYER, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Canadians are failing to balance reasonable food consumption with sufficient and sustainable production.

The modern agricultural system is producing more and more food. Too much food. The cost is enormous: excess nutrients are contaminating the air and water; soil is being depleted; species loss is plunging us toward the sixth extinction; and farmers, racking up debt, are increasingly vulnerable to economic and climatic shifts.

At the same time, people are consuming too much food. Two-thirds of health-care costs in Canada can be attributed to chronic diseases associated with unhealthy eating. And then there is the waste — householders, food processors, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers collectively waste 40 percent of the food produced.

A radical rethink is required. We need to move from excess to enough.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ralph C. Martin is a professor of plant agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he also served as the Loblaw Chair in Sustainable Food Production from 2011 to 2016. In 2001, he founded the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada. Ralph livesin Guelph, Ontario.

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Introduction
More than Enough

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all. — Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it.
— Herman Melville

Agriculture’s goal is to provide surplus food. The provision of this surplus relieves those who don’t work the land or raise animals — factory workers, service providers, artists, politicians, lawyers, scholars, and others — of the task of growing food, allowing them to use their time and energy to engage in all of the other activities that contribute to the building of societies. So, clearly, agriculture is vital for functioning of healthy societies. However, today there is a crisis involving agriculture’s ability to provide surplus food. The problem is not that agriculture is currently unable to provide the surplus necessary for healthy societies; rather, the problem is that the agricultural practices commonly used today are resulting in widespread environmental destruction, making their continued use unsustainable. This approach to overproduction has costs, significant ones. Today’s surpluses are swallowing natural capital and tomorrow’s productive capacity.

Ironically, our proclivity to address our fear of scarcity by overproducing is putting us on the path toward scarcity. Only by being appreciative of what Earth provides and respectfully accessing just enough can we achieve balance and sustainability.

When I was a boy, growing up on our farm in Wellington County, Ontario, food was respected. Our family understood, in a very fundamental way, the effort required to grow crops and raise animals for food. A natural result of this was that waste was limited to unavoidable losses. We were connected to the plants and animals on the farm and this relationship fostered feelings of responsibility and caring.

I loved to follow my grandfather during his chores, which seemed more of a joyful ritual than work. Pigs grunted expectantly and squealed with gratitude or greed, or perhaps both, when Grampa called them to the trough. Chickens yielded their eggs with remarkable grace as he gently retrieved the eggs from the nests, a skill I soon learned. Of course, the chickens would find their inevitable destination in the soup pot. In the meantime, they lived well with home-grown feed, clean nest boxes, opportunities to roam near the barn, and safety at night.

My grandfather and I drove to the pasture beyond the train tracks on the small yellow tractor my uncles had somehow extracted from the farm budget. As far as I know, Grampa used it only for this purpose. His team of horses, Pete and Joe, reliably leaned into their harnesses for the real work. When Grampa called the cattle, they appeared from the edges of the pasture and sometimes the shelter of an adjacent strip of trees. As he fed them, he talked to them and noted the state of their health. Usually they followed to see us off us as we drove away. It wasn’t until I was nine or ten that I realized that on most farms, cattle were chased rather than called.

It was from Grampa I learned the wisdom of agriculture and what’s really important. He died when I was seven. The agricultural knowledge I’ve learned since then has been mostly details. Somehow, with very few words, he demonstrated respect for soil, air, water, plants, and animals, and how they connect in a web of relationships.

I don’t recall waste on the farm although there were certainly transformations — the “circular economy” of modern discourse. Nutrients would go from kitchen food scraps to pig feed to manure to soil, to be captured again by plants in Grandma’s garden or Grampa’s fields. Today, as I reflect on Grampa’s farm, I feel sad about the general diminished awareness of how food is produced. Attitudes have changed; and instead of sustainable, self-sufficient food production, there is now industrial agriculture, with one-way flows that lead to excess. Nutrients in fertilizer, from off-farm, support plant growth for export crops, which often results in food loss and waste and concomitant nutrient loss into water bodies. In our rush to produce ever greater amounts of food, we are using up too many resources; our extravagance is unsustainable and will result in our being unable to meet the real needs of today and tomorrow.

Indigenous Peoples teach us to reflect on and learn from the experience of seven past generations and to anticipate our impact on seven future generations. Today, humans extract immense amounts of oil and gas from the earth to satisfy the “needs” of modern civilization. The burning of all of these hydrocarbons has resulted in the release of a huge amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere, causing climate change. We have ignored the knowledge passed on to us by previous generations about how to live with modest environmental impact; as a result, we are jeopardizing the health of the environment, of the plants and animals that we share the planet with, and in so doing we are undermining the ability of the next seven generations to live satisfied and secure lives.

If we were to travel back seven generations, we would find ourselves in the 1840s, when there were only about one billion people on Earth. In this period, there was not yet any industrial-scale drilling for oil; wood, coal, kerosene, and a few other resources provided the fuel for lighting, heating, and the primitive combustion engines that existed at the time. Astoundingly, humans now burn over one hundred million barrels of oil per day (Tertzakian, 2018). That is one big blaze, and it has resulted in an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration to over four hundred parts per million (ppm) — CO2 is one of the major GHGs that contribute to global warming. In preindustrial times, the carbon dioxide concentration was only 280 ppm. A significant portion of the fuels consumed are used to produce, transport, process, package, and prepare food. Pollution from excess nitrogen fertilizer use, derived from fossil-fuel energy, is one of the greatest risks to current ecological stability. The sooner we learn to throttle back, the better will be our chances in the twenty-first century. To sustain ourselves, we need a long, steady flame.

Moving seven generations ahead will land us in the 2190s, when cheap oil and coal will have receded into the mists of history. Our descendants will wonder why we wasted so much fuel on one brief blaze, the biggest in Earth’s history. They will wonder why we put the health of Earth, our only home, in jeopardy by indulging in such an excess of dangerous consumption.

We have the technology to extract and refine oil and gas, and our capacity to do so is increasing — fracking, the injection of high-pressure water into the earth to cause the release of oil and gas, accessing previously unobtainable hydrocarbon reserves, is one such new technology. And of course oil companies want to sell as much oil as possible to avoid the loss of current investments in potentially stranded assets. However, extracting and burning more and more hydrocarbons is causing real environmental damage and, in fact, threatens to cause a global calamity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that we have less than twelve years to cut GHGs by at least half. We must develop ecofriendly, sustainable energy systems that will allow us to leave carbon-dense products in the ground: new...

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Verlag
A J PATRICK BOYER
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1459744020
ISBN 13 
9781459744028
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
224
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