Your rant is great, Steve; send it to the Times. Op Ed quality.
Months ago we got into a short riff on FRIAM about whether a complexitist can
plan. If what we believe, after all, is that the factors that determine events
are too small and too far away to be known, how on earth can we make a plan.
Part of the problem you lay out so well is that we have no way of knowing
whether the sacrifices we might make in the name of saving the planet will have
positive consequences. In fact, you can probably get a debate on this site
about whether the idea of causality, itself, makes any sense in this context.
Faced with these truths, even more inconvenient than those that Gore spoke of,
there seem to be two possible responses --Dionysian fatalism or Apollonian
plodding ahead. But these are VALUES not rational plans of action. So it all
comes down to values???
Which is to say, STeve, i share your angst.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Smith
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 3/29/2009 2:26:27 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] Locovores was: (no subject)
So... I don't know how interested this group is in this conversation in
general, but I am and there has been enough back and forth that I think maybe
it is worth continuing and elaborating.
Disclaimer: This is really just a rambling rant, unevenly spiced with sincerity
and sarcasm. No harm is intended to anyone or anything, except maybe my own
hypocricy. I really am as confused on this subject as I sound!
Pamela's recent strong statements added poignancy to the discussion for me:
This entire thread is to say that the self-righteous way Californians force
upon us precepts about eating locally (yes, you, Alice) is surely well meant,
but a sacrifice they don't personally have to make.
and
Okay, I answered Nick privately with a non-PC answer, so I may as well 'fess up
to the whole group. I am perfectly willing to pay whatever it costs to fly in
sweet green produce from better climates. Sorry to be such a spoiled brat.
Does anyone have good ideas or models for the way our whole system has
oscillated around transportation, industrialized food production, consumerism,
etc. ? How do we get a grip on the false economies and arbitrary assumptions we
make about our deeply ingrained sense of how all this works?
I am very much (in principle) in favor of localized production/consumption of
just about everything. I am very much (in practice) very much prone to ignore
my principles and buy, consume, eat things from wherever with hardly any
awareness or concern for how silly I would feel if I really knew what went into
producing it and getting it to me. For example, I might very well go buy a stem
of "vine ripened tomatoes" (from a hydroponic hothouse half way across the
continent) from the supermarket in late summer while my next door neighbor is
having a hard time getting rid of all the tomatoes they grow.
I also am a bit of a "spoiled brat" about such things. I *like* being able to
buy just about anything, anywhere, anytime regardless of what season it is,
etc. I *am* aware enough of what fresh fruits and vegetables are *supposed* to
look and taste like to recognize the difference between produce picked unripe
and packed/shipped/painted/waxed for appearance vs truly fresh. About all this
is good for is reminding me when I'm actually eating something *totally* out of
season and *clearly* trucked from half a continent away, not just a few hundred
miles. I still eat citrus all winter long. I still eat avocados when they are
"good enough" in quality and not "totally outrageous" in price.
What offends me (about myself) most is that it is not like I am not aware of
these issues like I might have been decades ago. It is not like I don't believe
that global climate change is a problem and that it is specifically aggravated
by things like our "transportation economy" and our "industrial agriculture"
and lots else.
Much of what we do, we do for variations on "because we can" and "false
economies". When the price of diesel spiked over $4/gallon this summer, we saw
a "slow" response in reduced OTR trucking, but the Capital Investment in the
Trucks and other infrastructure and the momentum of the industry kept the
"sweet green produce" flowing from places like the lush irrigated (with water
from the Colorado Plateau in many cases) to places like NYC, Boston, Chicago
which admittedly could never produce any small fraction of the produce they
consume (or waste in many cases). By the time the price of produce could go up
and the availability could go down, diesel was back down to $2.50 and even
though this was a net increase, it felt like a relief (to those paying the
price directly), but the rest of us really managed to hardly suffer from that.
And lets not forget how the major explosives plants built for WWII were
converted directly to fertilizer production immediately after the war (there is
a reason Tim McViegh was able to blow up a building with a truckload of
fuel-oil and commercial fertilizer... try that with horse manure!). We had an
industry looking for a customer, and the customer was *us* in the form of
higher volumes and higher quality agricultural products than ever!
And not only do we ship grapes from Chile and Lettuce from CA to NY, we also
ship "coals to newcastle". During Northern NM's Apple harvest, our own apples
go begging while we ship them in from WA state in nitrogen packed, refrigerated
trucks to major food chains. Local supermarkets will not (or hardly) consider
selling local produce, for many reasons, not related to the actual *value* of
the produce. It is for reasons of supply chain, automated inventory,
consistency, etc. And *we* collaborate by insisting (as I mentioned earlier
with Hot House Tomatoes) on uniformity and predictability in our product over
all else. If we buy a bushel from Dixon we probably let 3/4 of it rot.
If you watch any industrial agriculture in action, you will see they are all
about either reducing labor (mechanizing) or reducing labor costs (using very
low-paid immigrant labor) or both. They (still) treat their soil as a
hydroponic medium, pouring chemical fertilizer in like the soil had none of
it's own (oops, maybe it doesn't anymore) and herbicides and insecticides like
we didn't know they were poisons (wait, it says so right on the container). We
all know that those poisons won't be in the food when we eat it (don't we?).
And of course, we are sure the poisons will magically disappear into the
environment (I mean magically transform themselves into innocuous substances)
without causing us or anyone else any harm.
So, while the agri-industry is maximizing it's efficiency, there is also direct
waste at the source. Huge machines gobbling up entire rows of tomato plants,
separating the stems and leaves from the fruit (while only barely ripening) and
hauled to a sorting/cleaning factory where they will be packaged for delivery.
You can see the tomatoes falling off of the trucks, being smashed into the
ground as if they are worthless (acceptable losses) ground soldiers. In the
factory, you see the survivors (99%) of the harvest being handled very
carefully until they are discovered to be blemished in some way, these are
culled immediately (they would never make it all the way to your refrigerator
shelf unblemished if they already are showing signs of wear). Occasionally you
will see an entire boxcar or Reefer truckload of produce lost to spoilage
(mechanical failure, delay, etc.) Then once the carton of produce hits the
Supermarket, the produce man culls as he fills his bins with perfect little
tomatoes, again culling anything with a blemish. He knows we will not buy a
blemished tomato and that one blemished tomato makes the rest look less
desirable. And then I walk into the produce department, and being the
conscientious shopper that I am, I am careful not to pick up the promising
tomatoes and squeeze them for ripeness. But some of the folks around me seem to
need to do this. I look carefully for thumbprints and nail-marks from previous
patrons, and try to pick only those which have heretofore only been touched by
the produce mans hands (harvesting and washing/sorting/packaging often being
hands-free). After I select my 5 or 6 still-not-ripe, but-at-least-red fruits,
gently putting them in my basket, not being sure if I still have a few tomatoes
at home or not, I check out. With luck the checker and the bagger (when there
is one) won't savage my little fruits any more and I will not cause them any
more injury on the way home and into the basket where I let them (hopefully)
continue to ripen.
Half of the time, I get home to realize that I still had more from the last
trip than I thought, or equally sad, I realize the ones I have left have
started to soften, if not rot. Since I have a new batch, I might discard the
softening ones... conscientiously into the compost bin of course. Or maybe they
are not too soft, so I decide to make fresh spaghetti sauce with them. Cutting
them up, discarding the ugly butts and ugly stem-ends into the compost of
course, I have plenty after all. I add a medley of other fresh (last week,
trucked in cool nitrogen all the way from CA or Mexico or ???) herbs and
veggies into the sauce, discarding anything blemished or vaguely unsavory
looking into my compost. I serve it up for dinner and we all dig in with gusto,
so proud and happy to be eating fresh, homecooked food. Of course, since we no
longer have our own garden (it is really just not worth it, too much trouble,
insects, gophers, drought, etc.) we are not as hungry as we would be if we'd
been working outside all day. So we leave half of it as leftovers to eat
another day. We like leftovers. Our refrigerator is filled with half-consumed,
all-organic (or not), fresh-produce, home-cooked goodness. We eat at least half
of our leftovers. The other half, we conscientiously put into our compost. We
are very good people.
The bottom line is that less than 1/2 of the produce on any industrial farm
ever makes it to the table probably, much less eaten. And with all my
"concientious" behaviour, about all I succeed in doing is keeping the half I
waste out of the landfill, or maybe reduce the produce department's waste
(because I don't have to squeeze 6 items before I find one I am willing to take
home) by a fraction.
So... after all this ranting. I agree with Pamela that it would be a huge
sacrifice (all the way unto dying of scurvy) if everyone tried to "eat local"
overnight. Not only would we not get "fresh(ish) sweet greens" year round, we
might not get them at all! Especially if we live in an arid desert or a
megalopolis.
On the other hand, what if we *did* try to grow a few things ourselves
(window/patio herb/veggie garden). What if we did buy from our local farmers
markets when they are available. What if we did ask our local grocers to buy as
local as possible, and reward them by buying our produce from them even when
Wild Goats and Holy Food and Alfiealphas and Trader Joes and WalMartSupercenter
can offer us huge piles of perfectly round, perfectly shaded, unblemished,
bright green things that look exactly like they do on TV at half the price.
What if we went ahead and took the blemished tomato that someone else squeezed
a little too much because it was just going into a spaghetti sauce anyway. What
if we went ahead and used the blemished parts in our sauce... and then, what if
we invited friends over to help us eat the whole batch, or made sure we didn't
let half of our leftovers go bad. It won't save the planet. But it might get us
one step closer. And we might appreciate our food more. And we might not feel
as entitled to the uber-perfection-and convenience-unto-absurdity that we have
all been seduced into.
I still like my grapefruit in mid-winter, but it really, really, really doesn't
taste as good as the ones we picked off the trees in Phoenix when we went to
visit our relatives on Christmas. It is not just that theirs were fresh, but I
hadn't seen one for months and here they were "growing on trees"! We brought
Pinon and Chile Ristras and Posole and Pinto's and canned Green Chile. And
*they* thought *that* was a treat. We thought those were boring staples.
I wonder if I will get my full garden fired up again this year? It is really
just too much work. And it is cheaper to buy from the store, even if I only pay
myself immigrant wages for my labor. And the results are always blemished.
Insect, bird and rodent damage. Dirty. Flat and discolored on one side if I
forget to roll the melons. And there is always too much... I can't give it away
when it comes in well. And the supermarket always has plenty. And it is
perfect. And I don't have to take the blemished ones. And if I don't like the
quality at one supermarket, there are several more.
I wonder if I should garden at all this year? I wonder if I should bother with
the local farmers markets? With the small grocers with small produce
departments. I think maybe they will open a Wal-mart Supercenter nearby. It is
my responsibility to support the mega-commercial agri-industry. What would I do
if they go away? I can't grow all my own food. My local farmers can't grow
enough for all of us. It is probably un-american to be growing my own food,
buying/eating. locally anyway. What was I thinking?
A Reformed Locovore,
- Steve
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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