Sometimes it pays to read from unfamiliar sources. Last week, my sister clipped from the February Harper’s Magazine: “The Oil We Eat-Following the food chain back to Iraq,” by Richard Manning. Instead of following the money (in true journalistic tradition), Manning follows the energy, along the way quoting from brilliant minds of long ago with stuff completely pertinent to what’s going on now.
James Prescott Joule discovered in the 19th century there is a finite amount of energy (not just oil). You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less. “The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.”
Manning says while energy can’t be created or canceled, it can be concentrated. It’s more about the world of agriculture than oil. “Grain is to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world: the most concentrated form of true wealth on the planet. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants.” The old food chain.
Manning is not espousing vegetarianism (he even enjoys eating wild game). He just points out that we humans have hijacked at least 40 percent of the world’s natural food supply or primary productivity. Rice, corn and wheat store solar energy in uniquely dense transportable bundles of carbohydrates (yes, those demon carbs that have been getting such bad press lately). Historically, these grains thrived on catastrophic floods that scour the earth, destroying competition from annual weeds. Agriculture creates an artificial catastrophe every year (plowing). Farmers use the energy equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre to do this, Manning says. Iowa, which is almost all farmed fields, requires the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.
But plowing steals the earth and the nutrients found in prairie grasslands, which return composted flowers, roots and stems to the land storing energy in rich topsoil. When forests are cleared for farming or grazing, we lose the potential plant mass and all that energy. And what do we replace it with? Petroleum-based chemical fertilizers. More energy down the tube.
“The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food,” Manning says. “There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten.” Cornell’s food and energy expert David Pimentel estimates that if the rest of the world ate the way we do, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in about seven years. Even those who dispute his figures agree to 10 years.
And then there are the nitrogen fertilizers beloved by suburban gardeners and greens keepers and loathed by environmentalists. Seems we’ve doubled the amount of nitrogen in play. It runs off lawns and fields, polluting rivers and streams and the oceans, causing algae blooms that choke the life out of fish and contributing to acid rain. Wind-blown nitrous oxides passing over airborne ammonia from dairies and feedlots create chemical reactions that produce particulate-laden smog and contribute to global warming. Fertilizer in irrigation water flowing from cornfields into the Mississippi River has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.
But remember, America’s industries, agricultural, chemical, plastics, packaging, et al., have a vested interest in the status quo. And those who don’t read much seem bent on debunking the science. What global warming? Who needs clean water? Clean air?
“Agriculture in this country is not about food. It’s about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food,” Manning says. Easy to understand when you realize that almost half of “processed” grain corn becomes sugar, mostly high fructose corn syrup, now the key ingredient in all processed foods. Coincides neatly with the rising pandemic of obesity and its predominance among the poor, who eat the most processed foods, basically because they’re cheap. A Big Mac, fries and super-sized soda cost way less than a box of organic strawberries (grown without methyl bromide, another environmental disaster).
Even vegetarians who claim their habits are kinder to animals may consider how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife habitat (as farming has done in Iowa) is a kindness, Manning says. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. Making a two-pound bag burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline, and that doesn’t include trucking it from the factory to a grocery store or the gas used driving your SUV to Wal-Mart.
Eating a carrot, Manning says, gives you all the carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of 10. “The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten.”
And tuna? Don’t even go there. And it’s not just about the mercury. Tuna is a secondary predator. It not only doesn’t eat plants, it eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a multiplier of a hundred to the equation. It’s about a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.
What to do? Go to your nearest farmers market where produce is about as local as it gets and you use less gas to get there. Forget out-of-season fruit shipped all the way from Chile. Buy a juicy organic peach, a box of berries, a tomato and salad greens, broccoli, whatever takes your fancy. And to save even more energy, keep cooking to the briefest sauté.
Bon Appetit.
Richard Manning’s book “Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization” is published by North Point Press.