The Last Bite

[y66]

Food for thought here

 

Start canning!

[blackshoe]

Heh. Ask a farmer - a real farmer - about "organic farming". Or read the first few chapters of John Ringo's latest novel The Last Centurion. The narrator is a farm boy from Minnesota who had been a soldier when The Plague of 2019 wiped out more than half the world's population. His discussion of what happened to the food supply (among other things) is very interesting. The text is available online.

[onoway]

I am curious as the the meaning of your instruction to ask a "real " farmer about organic farming.?

Also, an interview on the CBC a month or so ago was with someone who had just completed a study on how many people "waste" food. I guess (I couldn't hear the whole interview) that the percentage in North America at least, is pretty close to 100%.

Re the book on the disappearing nutritional value of foods..I wonder if that has any impact on the amount of food people are eating, if somehow unconsciously people are eating more to try to get the same level of nutrition that they used to get from less food?

[jtfanclub]

I think these things are silly. They see the present, and project into a future that doesn't exist.

 

Oil is a good example of this. Gasoline is cheap. Therefore people drive SUVs. The "green" people hate this, because it uses up too much gasoline. Therefore, we should raise the price, to save gasoline.

 

But if we do nothing, the supply-and-demand will get it anyways. At some point, prices will rise high enough that nuclear power and plug-in hybrids will be in demand. We'll find equilibrium.

 

For food, it's even easier, since it's a mostly renewable resource. When salmon gets more expensive, people will stop having a pound of salmon for dinner and start having a half pound of sardines (I think you're right onoway, in that we'd eat less if it was more nutritious). We buy less-nutritional foods because we can afford it. When we can't afford it, we'll go back to eating more nutritional foods.

[PassedOut]

We buy less-nutritional foods because we can afford it. When we can't afford it, we'll go back to eating more nutritional foods.

Assuming, of course, that nutritional food is available to buy.

[Al_U_Card]

I think these things are silly.  They see the present, and project into a future that doesn't exist.

 

Oil is a good example of this.  Gasoline is cheap.  Therefore people drive SUVs.  The "green" people hate this, because it uses up too much gasoline.  Therefore, we should raise the price, to save gasoline.

 

But if we do nothing, the supply-and-demand will get it anyways.  At some point, prices will rise high enough that nuclear power and plug-in hybrids will be in demand.  We'll find equilibrium.

Lack of intelligence strengthened by moral turpitude and advanced greed.

 

Nuclear is nice in ways but again elitist and environmentally questionable.

 

If each building had solar panels on the roof and a wind turbine attached to it (damn, they all have antennae and dishes and whatnots already...and technology responds to need) and a converter to put surplus energy back into the system when being generated above usage requirements, energy would not be such an issue. But this takes the $$$ out of the hands of the monopolists and puts the control into the hands of the users....not what our controlling special interests like to see.

 

There are so many ways to start in the right direction and so many wrong directions...it is no wonder that we have so badly chosen but there is still time to decide how to continue.

[luke warm]

i agree with al that if not for big business we'd already have solutions to most of these problems... but business is a necessary evil, imo... i just think that supply and demand does work, but i also think that there are forces that aren't allowing them to work optimally

[Al_U_Card]

I appreciate the support (as I can use all that I can get...lol) and it seems as if it is more the perspective of business that is askew. Instead of maximizing profits (the short-sighted approach) they should be more concerned with optimizing them. Thus, long term success would be not only ensured but also much easier to defend as it would support itself.

[jtfanclub]

We buy less-nutritional foods because we can afford it.  When we can't afford it, we'll go back to eating more nutritional foods.

Assuming, of course, that nutritional food is available to buy.

Why wouldn't there be?

 

Two obvious examples are tomatoes and fish. Salmon eat sardines. Rich people eat salmon. Poor people eat sardines. If not enough people buy salmon, the hatcheries will switch to sardines. It's not like the sardines are in an endangered environment.

 

When food becomes too expensive, people grow their own. When people grow their own tomatoes, it's the high-vitamin stuff. I suppose you could grow the low-vitamin tomatoes and lettuce, but why would you? It's more expensive, for one thing.

 

Beef is the big one...won't be any nutrious beef on the market very soon. But if food prices rise enough, maybe beef will be wiped out almost entirely. That wouldn't be a bad thing.

[onoway]

We buy less-nutritional foods because we can afford it. When we can't afford it, we'll go back to eating more nutritional foods.

 

I fail to understand this logic. It suggests that people who live on the lower end of the economic scale should be eating more nutritiously than people with more disposable income and for that I see absolutely no evidence. In fact I would lay heavy money the reverse is true.

 

Part of this I think is education, part because of the same psychological connotations that led to the fetish for white bread (brown bread is for people who can't afford white bread), part because manufactured food is so much more accessible now than ever before, and part because carbohydrates and fat are the most "satisfying" for most people. Possibly aside from education, these aren't going to change. If you have $3 to last you for two days which are you going to buy, 2 tiny tins of sardines, 2 much larger cans of fake meat, 2 loaves of white bread, 1 loaf of somewhat more nutritious bread, or a head of lettuce and two tomatoes? Most likely it would be 1 tin of fake meat and 1 loaf of white bread.

 

Think of the manufacturing jobs lost and the businesses closed if all the "junk food" or "semi-food" producers were closed down!

 

The options in stores are far less now than ever before in terms of "real" food..there is a plethora of fake or manufactured food available. I can't see that this will change. People may switch from eating chicken to eating hot dogs...from real cheese to fake...is this a step toward nutrition? Most chain grocery stores don't even carry the cheaper non "muscle"meats, with the possible exception of liver. You might be able to get them from your local butcher...if your local butcher has survived the mountain of constantly revised upgrading requirements which have driven 6 local butcher shops to close their doors in the last two years, although none of them have ever been responsible for any problems, and all were up to code before.

 

Fish is in a league of its own. First it isn't cheap anyway, at least not here. Second many people won't eat it for reasons ranging from mercury contamination to a simple aversion to the idea or taste, or allergy. Third, there are massive problems arising from many of the fish farms as they are presently set up, including contaminating the wild fish stocks, pollution, and the same sort of reliance as the intensive livestock raising on land has on antibiotics and drugs to counteract the effects of highly unnatural living conditions.

 

Farmers are being strongly encouraged to grow grain which cannot reproduce itself, the seed is sterile, so must be bought each year from the supplier. How does this warp the economics of farming, in the long run, and just how much nutrition is there in sterile seed? How many of your garden seeds are hybrid and thus it's not a good idea to save the seed from the plants you are raising?

 

People can still learn to forage, but now roadsides are sprayed with pesticides and/or herbicides, even back roads.

 

Does your town allow you to keep chickens in your back yard, or a goat?

 

Also, many people just don't cook, they are almost afraid to. So they have a much more limited awareness of what options are even available to them. When stressed, people tend to look for the familiar for comfort. The other day, in a very small country store, a huge tractor took up most of the parking lot. The owner ( a young grain farmer) was in the store..they had no fuel (gas) for the car & no money to buy fuel, so he drove his diesel tractor to buy food. He had $10, he said. He bought Kraft dinner, a litre of milk and cigarettes. He doesn't have a cow or chickens and his wife works in town so they don't even have a garden. (?!)

 

On the other hand, someone in Edmonton was forced to pull up all the potato plants that they had lining their driveway because their neighbors complained that they lowered property values.

 

Seems to me the most certain result will be more theft and waste in stores, as people surreptiously open packages and chow down there. Are we getting to the point when people will be going to jail for stealing food?

 

I think it is unlikely that conditions which allowed most people to have a relatively good diet on a relatively low income are going to return any time soon, if at all, short of real social upheaval. People will eat, but for many, it isn't going to be good food.

[helene_t]

But if food prices rise enough, maybe beef will be wiped out almost entirely. That wouldn't be a bad thing.

But many of those who can afford to eat beef would still be able to afford it even facing substantial price rices. While even a modest price rice could be a disaster for poor people who spend a substantial part of there income on food.

 

Another issue is the growing interest for biofuel. This reduces CO2 emission while increasing food prices.

 

Finally, it becomes more difficult to persuade poor contries to protect their forests when poor farmers are desperate for land.