Robert Paterson's Weblog

A warning about Food Systems I wrote in 2003 - Looking on track

We will see the end of wild fish in the sea in our lifetime. We, like Clovis hunters, will only have memories of fishing the ocean. Like Clovis men our ability to use technology and organization will have deprived the world and ourselves of a great bounty. We too will have overexploited the soil itself. But most importantly we will have overexploited fresh water.

In 50 years time it will not be possible to grow food in California. In 50 years time the Orgalla aquifer will have run dry and we will not be able to grow food in the mid west. In 20 years time China and India will have outstripped their water supplies. Maybe our world will be warmer as well and we will have droughts thanks to nature as Clovis man endured the great melt. In 50 years time our population will be about 8 billion just as our food system comes to a halt.

If we are smart we will use some hiccups along the way to start making some changes.

In 10 years borders will be shut to the transshipping of food as food safety scares such as mad cow, foot and mouth, wart etc are used politically to protect local food systems. The whole idea of mono cropping aimed at exports will die off. The farmers in the west will crack before the water runs out.

In 5 years, the outcry against processed food and its role in our obesity epidemic will start to change food habits in the mainstream. This month we have seen Kraft and Nestle begin to make changes. Pop and trans-fats will be seen like tobacco. A demand will rise for food grown in a new way.

Our children will have to reinvent how we get and process food. Vast cities with only 3 days supply of food will no longer be able to rely of an industrial complex to send them cheap food. I have seen this in Ukraine where every family in Kiev has a Dacha plot and ensures its food supply by gardening. In Havana, every family has an urban plot.

As with the end of the large animals or the takeover of the Gardeners by the Herders, all our power lines will shift. Vast agro-industrial enterprises will have no place in a such a a world. The process of cityfication, started in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago will have to unwind.

It will not be the internet per se that will change how and where we live and who has power or not. It will be the end of our current food system. It may be the internet that will enable us to adapt more quickly to whatever we find as the alternative but be assured when power shifts it is not a fun time.

It may be likely that the balance of power will once again shift between the sexes. I suspect that the new food system will be local and will be closer to gardening than farming. Women are already in the vanguard in this field.

So what do we do? We can wait for the collapse. You say that it will not happen. It’s a matter of simple math, when you take more water over time than is recharged, it runs out. When you pollute your water systems as we are on PEI over time with nitrates, you tip at a point in the future and you have no usable ground water. If we do nothing, all this is only a matter of time. Or we can wake up and see that water and food are the key. We will not be able to save the western water shed, not the Orgalla nor India or China but we can save ourselves. All we have to do is to wake up and look at the trends. Then we do as man has always done we get together and find a new way!

via robsoldradioposts.wordpress.com

I am seeing the first step in this right now - just as we woke up in the 1980's and saw that Tobacco was not cool and nor was it safe, so it is becoming more clear that Agri Food is at the heart of many of our health problems today.

Now I can see that the gauntlet is down. It is no longer just a few of us that know that our food system is the foundation of much of thre sickness that confronts us. That "cheap food" is very expensive!

We can see also that the Agri Food folks are losing the debate. Soon they will be seem as Big Tobacco which by the way many are as well.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Food reform will be hard to digest - Fight of our Lives?

And last month, after U.S. President Barack Obama had mused about the need for a farmers' market across the street from the White House, the First Lady cuts the ribbon on a new farmers' market a block away from the executive mansion.

"In this society today, sometimes it's hard to make regular meals, healthy meals, a part of everyone's existence," Michelle Obama said. "For those of us who are battling the time crunch and those of us to whom access to fresh food is an issue in our neighbourhoods, farmers' markets are a really important, valuable resource that we have to support."

New York City is poised to implement a tax on soft drinks, as West Virginia and Arkansas already have done. A notion in the mainstream media beginning last summer of a tax on overweight people – a "fat tax" – quickly evolved from joke status into a serious debate. A health commentator on CNN, Rudy Ruiz, declared "the food industry is making us sick."

We could be at an historic turning point in North America: a dramatic change in diet that transforms agribusiness and holds potential for improving our quality of life at little cost.

For Americans, even radical reforms in the hotly debated proposals for change in health care hold little promise in themselves of improving health and longevity rates and lowering the nation's health-care bill compared with a widespread change in diet.

Yet, the minimal U.S. health care reforms most likely of gaining passage, by forcing insurers to take all comers, will make insurers a powerful new force championing an American diet that keeps people from getting sick. Americans made sick by poor diets will soon jeopardize insurance industry profits.

And it's true, the food industry does make us sick. It does so as a matter of government policy, in both Canada and the United States.

When U.S. corn farmers were coping with chronic gluts in the 1960s and 1970s, Earl Butz, agriculture secretary in the Nixon administration, unveiled a sweeping program of farm subsidies, changes to school lunches and alterations in the food processing industry by which corn became a mainstay of the American diet. Canada heavily subsidizes farmers, as well.

The U.S. corn glut was absorbed. But the collateral damage has only in recent years become a pressing issue. The ubiquity of corn, which U.S. farmers are skilled at producing in massive quantity, reduced the cost of food. Which makes possible a $5 (U.S.) tab for a Big Mac, fries and a soft drink. The average restaurant charges that much or more for a fresh salad alone.

But cheap food is expensive.

The medical costs of obesity have nearly doubled in the past decade. A study funded by the U.S. CDC Foundation published last month in Health Affairs finds the cost of obesity-related treatment has skyrocketed to an annual average of $147 billion.

Another estimated annual $116 billion is spent treating diabetes. And hundreds of billions more is spent annually on treatment of cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer believed to be related to the Western diet.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins, who describe the obesity trend as "a public health crisis," project that by 2015 – just six years away – three-quarters of Americans will be overweight or obese. Already, a shocking 26 per cent of U.S. children entering kindergarten are overweight or obese, according to the Center for Children's Health Innovation.

Most farm-state politicians are sure to fight for the status quo. So will the processed-food industry. An impassioned Muhtar Kent, CEO of Coca-Cola Co., took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal recently to complain that "our industry has become an easy target in this debate."

Yes, and that's because Coke and other soft drinks account for a staggering 15 per cent of the average adolescent's daily caloric intake. And it's the fattening high-fructose corn syrup used as a soft-drink sweetener that looms large among culprits in the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes.

via thestar.com

The first moves in the fight of our lives - to regain control over what we eat and to take power back from a few big firms in Agribusiness - are being taken.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Julia Child - My heroine