Blog Action Day: Poverty and Slow Food

Welcome to the second annual Blog Action Day. Today I'm joining with bagillions of other bloggers on the planet to bring focus to poverty. I feel like such an insider on my, like, fifth post.

Not Momma Ingalls (my mom) often chides me about the expense of our way of food. Being raised in a family of eight and then raising me on her own, getting the most food for the least money is bred deep in her blood. Sometimes I can see the unit price calculator behind her eyes if I look close.

It was bred in me too, of course. And then one day I was shopping at Target. Not Michael Landon wanted some granola bars. The Target brand was $1.50 cheaper than organic - almost half the price. As I stood in that aisle contemplating my choices, my desire for environmentally friendly food locked in a tug-o-war with my genetic need for frugality, some storage box thingy caught my eye. It was turqoise, it would look so cute in my living room, and it was only $14.99.

"Only $14.99". And here I am having a come-to-Jesus moment over $1.50 for granola bars. Since that day, our food budget has increased. But we're spending less. We eat out less, we stay home more, we buy less processed foods, and yes, we spend some more on meat and dairy. If I could live without ESPN, we'd cut cable. If we were really hurting, we could cut the cell phones and internet - between all these communications bills we could probably feed another family on top of ours.

As a percentage of the household budget, Americans are spending on food half of what we did in 1960, and half of what we are still spending is spent on food outside the home. So when someone says they don't eat local, organic food because they can't afford it, the first question should be what else are they spending money on?

But the dollar bill barriers to the slow food movement are much more complicated than all that. There are truly hungry people in the US and around the world who cannot afford rising grain prices, much less an heirloom tomato.

In the most recent Times Magazine, Michael Pollan writes a fantastic letter to our new president-elect (whoever he may be) about food policy. It sticks its fingers in all kinds of issues, including poverty. The long article is definitely worth a read when you have the time, but this excerpt relates directly to the topic at hand:

Farmer in Chief
By Michael Pollan

It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you’re proposing feed the world?

There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don’t know, because we haven’t tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn’t produce comparable yields. Today’s organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve 80 to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world — with a population expected to peak at 10 billion — survive on these yields?

First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today’s organic levels could increase the world’s food supply by 50 percent.

The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn’t everything — and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we’re growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations.

The final point to consider is that 40 percent of the world’s grain output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world’s corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone — however we choose to grow it.

In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels — performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals — is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely “driving and spraying,” which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living.

To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food — millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don’t. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production — as farmers and probably also as gardeners.

The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.

Here are some more articles from various sources on the subject of organic food and poverty:
Ten Reasons Why GE Foods Will Not Feed the World
Can organic farming feed the world?
Organic farming can 'feed the world'
THE MYTH: Industrial agriculture will feed the world.
GM-Free Organic Agriculture to Feed the World