Everyone who knows me knows I do a lot of thinking about food and nutrition. A subset of those people have heard me beat the drum about how the Ethanol movement is an absolutely assinine, a claim that cannot be controversial to anyone with five minutes to spend thinking and a first-grade command of arithmetic.
Well, now food, agriculture, and nutrition have moved out of the airy and effete realm of health and into the Real American, ‘Aw Shucks’/Horse Sense domain that even a Republican doesn’t have to be embarassed to discuss. Terry Gross of Fresh Aire fame recently did a great interview with Michael Pollen, who’s written a number of books in this area, including a very smart and controversial editorial in The Times that shows just how food production is tied up in more familiar topics:
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
So if you’re interested in these topics, the interview is fourty minutes well spent, and the editorial is awesome, if long. Pollen’s work in general is eye opening and smart, the stuff educated Citizens should know.