Backyard Garden Survivalist's Tale and Other Food For Thought

[Dover]

This whole NYT Sunday Magazine was dedicated to the Food Issue,
so peruse it for other articles:




Attack of the Tomato Killers
By DOUG FINE

AS A ONETIME suburban latchkey kid who subsisted on Domino’s Pizza and “Brady Bunch” reruns for his first 18 years, I was feeling pretty good in mid-August about this year’s tomatoes. The beans, corn, carrots and squash weren’t looking too shabby, either, but a combination of effective drip irrigation and a light, steady monsoon season here in the New Mexico high desert had the tomatoes so prolific that it looked as if our explicit family goal would be reached: no matter how many we gorged on while harvesting, we’d still have a winter’s worth of pasta sauce to can in the fall, with enough left over to make a respectable showing at the valley harvest festival in October.

I was dangerously close to gloating about my hard-won food independence in a time of economic uncertainty. I grew up as a full-blown American mall consumer. But at age 36, I was reborn as a sustainable producer, a neo-Rugged Individualist Rancher. It took a lot of work in the two years that followed, but it looked to be paying off. I didn’t foresee a produce run to town, 45 minutes away, until perhaps February. Talk about local living.

Then the worst — old-timers say the only — biblical August hailstorm in memory hit. There was no warning. The Old Farmer’s Almanac didn’t predict it. No one could have imagined it. But Aug. 20 was not a day many in my remote valley will forget. For my fiancée and me, it was 45 minutes of carnage that turned our 41 acres into a frozen golf driving range, pockmarked our garbage cans and carved our hilly driveway into a replica of the Grand Canyon, trapping us for several days. One minute I was wearing shorts and sweating under big blue skies. The next I was calling out, “Clouds’re movin’ in,” to my fiancée, using the Mountain Dialect I was working on. Then our world changed.

When it was over, the garden was gone. Done. Vanquished. The beans — just days from harvest — were pulverized, the corn a sorry weed patch like something out of Stephen King. And those prize tomatoes? What remained looked as if they’d been used by angry fans to pelt a performer. Up to my shins in hail as I pathetically harvested the few dozen survivors, I experienced a horrifying vision of my family’s survival prospects had we lived in anything but the Wal-Mart era...>

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12lives-t.html?ref=magazine

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The Food Issue
Farmer in Chief
By MICHAEL POLLAN

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

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. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet...>

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Michael Pollan is one of the best of a long line of eco-food authors.

I highly recomend him.
And Francis Moore Lappe's "Hope for a Small Planet"
( not to be confused with her earlier "Diet for a Small Planet"

I wonder how wonderfully different our planet would be if we had followed the eco path that we started in the early 70's...

[Dover]

2. He was on NPR tonight. See my post, above.

Makes sense to me! I think a lot of people are moving toward the eco-path.
And as Pollan points out in the interview, that includes left AND right leaning types.