Well, OK, it’s true: Ben and Jerry’s should quit poisoning people too.
And it is good to see the concern among those who post about carbon footprint and food miles and energy accounting. By the looks of it, however, a lot of us are still sniping at each other over things that a bit of attention to the research and practice could potentially settle.
Some basic practical observations that ought to guide this:
- Non-local food is inherently energy expensive, polluting
- Non-local food is also usually at least a bit toxic, at the low end because of treatments related to storage and travel
- Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics, hormone treatments, and chemical fertilizers are all energy expensive, toxic (with varying lethality to humans) and destructive of habitat, including human habitat
- Monocultures (lots of the same crop together) generate disease and pests
- Feedlots (lots of the same animals together) generate disease and often human infesting viral and microbial parasites
- Monocultures and feedlots require input from external sources for support. These are almost but not always chemical and toxic; they are always energy expensive and destructive of habitat.
- Consumers cannot cross-check non-local food or farming practices
- In the US, at least, government regulation is failing more dramatically as voters lose electoral control and options
- Unenforced regulations will continue to be broadly violated when profitable
That means that any authentic solution will involve local food, organic or near-organic, starting more or less at the front door in urban and suburban as well as rural areas.
Animals are not intrinsically polluting as long as their increase and production are cycled back into a system with plants and fungi. This is true regardless of which predator or parasite or plant eats the animal. The economics are easier if some humans eat some animal products sometimes, but where humans prefer to not do that, other means of recycling the animals’ faeces and bodies can be found. It is just a bit more work and means that a wider spread need be used per human (but either way is less energy-expensive, less destructive of habitat, more healthy than current feed-lot practice).
People tend to imagine that this is “impractical” because it eventually does involve some withdrawal of some persons from what is called “the global economy.” But that economy is itself impractical. It is the cause of the problems we are trying to address here, so withdrawing from it is both key and basic. And that withdrawal can be done a bit at a time; in fact, it is generally by far the easier thing to do so if one starts early.
Is it still early? That I do not know.
