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The Oil We Eat
(from Harper's)
author: Richard Manning
The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime,
forgotten because it was done neatly.
--Balzac
The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not
really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president
will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll follow the energy.
We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don't get something
from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on.
The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex.
As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so
much energy. 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 of it. The
conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law
of thermodynamics.
Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat
plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it
is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the
form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals.
Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no
alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen.
The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting
off oxygen, but they are as sure.
Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in
a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's
"primary productivity." There have been two efforts to figure out
how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the
other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude
that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of
Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number
may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed
before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the
food, the rich among us a lot more than others.
Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated.
This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security
memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning
committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United
States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth.
"We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of
its population," Kennan wrote. "In this situation, we cannot fail to
be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to
devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national
security.
To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming;
and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate
national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today
the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction."
"The day is not far off," Kennan concluded, "when we are going
to have to deal in straight power concepts."
If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere.
Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry.
Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity
results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three
plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated
these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they
are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable
bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined
oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the
most concentrated form of true wealth--sun energy--to be found on the planet.
As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of
wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human
experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a
broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this
approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and
long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly
indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden
and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries.
Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the
answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages
and their pre-agricultural counterparts--the presence not just of grain but of
granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and
more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was
not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It
benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.
Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution of wealth within
the plant world. Plants can spend their solar income in several ways. The
dominant and prudent strategy is to allocate most of it to building roots,
stem, bark--a conservative portfolio of investments
that allows the plant to better gather energy and survive the downturn years.
Further, by living in diverse stands (a given chunk of native prairie contains
maybe 200 species of plants), these perennials provide services for one
another, such as retaining water, protecting one another from wind, and fixing
free nitrogen from the air to use as fertilizer.
Diversity allows a system to "sponsor its own fertility," to use
visionary agronomist Wes Jackson's phrase. This is the plant world's norm.
There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a
single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of
carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves.
Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea
for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic
eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create
opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed
bearers.
It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it
always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this is
because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true.
They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out
competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose
independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age
ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes
to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of
catastrophe.
Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their
niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank
slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances,
succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals
would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic
matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that
niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it
requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern
American farm. Iowa's fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every
year.
Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find
what Iowans call a "postage stamp" remnant of some, it most likely
will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to
the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had
been stolen from beneath you. Settlers' accounts of the prairie conquest
mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass
roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.
When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as
an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems,
which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter.
The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A
farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat.
Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks
and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted, a trail of dollars
billowing from the burglar's satchel.
I've already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the globe's primary
productivity every year. You might have assumed we and our livestock eat our
way through that volume, but this is not the case. Part of that total--almost a third of
it--is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or
when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep
mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering
erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland
prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most
technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it's mostly a form of
grass and grass roots that humans can't eat. So we replace the prairie with
our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to
livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And
never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great
Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today.
Our ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when
it ran out move
on.
Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again with
new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary
productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many
thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil
energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded
land--in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years' worth of ancient
fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as the earth
beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized.
Six thousand years before sodbusters broke up Iowa, their Caucasian blood
ancestors broke up the Hungarian plain, an area just northwest of the Caucasus
Mountains. Archaeologists call this tribe the LBK, short for linearbandkeramik,
the German word that describes the distinctive
pottery remnants that mark their occupation of Europe. Anthropologists call
them the wheat-beef people, a name that better connects those ancients along
the Danube to my fellow Montanans on the Upper Missouri River. These
proto-Europeans had a full set of domesticated plants and animals, but wheat
and beef dominated. All the domesticates came from an area along what is now
the Iraq-Syria-Turkey border at the edges of the Zagros Mountains. This is the
center of domestication for the Western world's main crops and live stock,
ground zero of catastrophic agriculture.
Two other types of catastrophic agriculture evolved at roughly the same time,
one centered on rice in what is now China and India and one centered on corn
and potatoes in Central and South America. Rice, though, is tropical and its
expansion depends on water, so it developed only in
floodplains, estuaries, and swamps. Corn agriculture was every bit as
voracious as wheat; the Aztecs could be as brutal and imperialistic as Romans
or Brits, but the corn cultures collapsed with the onslaught of Spanish
conquest. Corn itself simply joined the wheat-beef people's
coalition. Wheat was the empire builder; its bare botanical facts dictated the
motion and violence that we know as imperialism.
The wheat-beef people swept across the western European plains in less than
300 years, a conquest some archaeologists refer to as a
"blitzkrieg." A different race of humans, the
Cro-Magnons--hunter-gatherers, not farmers--lived on those plains at the time.
Their cave art at places such as Lascaux testifies to their sophistication and
profound connection to wildlife. They probably did most of their hunting and
gathering in
uplands and river bottoms, places the wheat farmers didn't need, suggesting
the possibility of coexistence. That's not what happened, however. Both
genetic and linguistic evidence say that the farmers killed the hunters.
The Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of Cro-Magnons,
the only trace.
Hunter-gatherer archaeological sites of the period contain spear points that
originally belonged to the farmers, and we can guess they weren't trade goods.
One group of anthropologists concludes, "The evidence from the western
extension of the LBK leaves little room for any other conclusion but that LBK-Mesolithic
interactions were at best chilly and at worst hostile." The world's
surviving Blackfeet, Assiniboine Sioux, Inca, and Maori probably have the best
idea of the nature of these interactions.
Wheat is temperate and prefers plowed-up grasslands. The globe has a limited
stock of temperate grasslands, just as it has a limited stock of all other
biomes. On average, about 10 percent of all other biomes remain in something
like their native state today. Only 1 percent of
temperate grasslands remains undestroyed. Wheat takes what it needs.
The supply of temperate grasslands lies in what are today the United States,
Canada, the South American pampas, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa,
Europe, and the Asiatic extension of the European plain into the sub-Siberian
steppes. This area largely describes the First World,
the developed world. Temperate grasslands make up not only the habitat of
wheat and beef but also the globe's islands of Caucasians, of European
surnames and languages. In 2000 the countries of the temperate grasslands, the
neo-Europes, accounted for about 80 percent of all wheat exports in the world,
and about 86 percent of all com. That is to say, the neo-Europes drive the
world's agriculture. The dominance does not stop with grain. These countries,
plus the mothership--Europe accounted for three fourths of all agricultural
exports of all crops in the world in 1999.
Plato wrote of his country's farmlands: What now remains of the formerly rich
land is like the skeleton of a sick man. ...Formerly, many of the mountains
were arable, The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills
that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce
only food for bees.
Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are
now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it
absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the
hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the
abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our
description of the land is true.
Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country's
soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of
civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century,
though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the
Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It
balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500,
Britain suffered a major "corrective" famine about every ten years;
there were seventy-five in France during the same period.
The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of
new food to Europe.
The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves.
Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts
at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were
a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the
neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as
well as a lower infant-mortality rate--all indicators of the better nutrition
afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.
The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen when
the planet's supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer.
In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable
lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain
yields tripled.
The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution,
though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it
applied exclusively to grain--wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered
with the architecture of these three grains so that they
could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers,
especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased
"efficiency" of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the
possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the
worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.
For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide,
moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world's most
severe poverty. The experience in population control in the developing world
is by now clear: It is not that people make more
people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year
period beginning about 1960, the world's population doubled, adding virtually
the entire increase of 3 billion to the world's poorest classes, the most
fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain
contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the
population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.
Discussion of these, the most poor, however, is largely irrelevant to the
American situation. We say we have poor people here, but almost no one in this
country lives on less than one dollar a day, the global benchmark for poverty.
It marks off a class of about 1.3 billion people, the hard
core of the larger group of 2 billion chronically malnourished people-- that
is, one third of humanity. We may forget about them, as most Americans do.
More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders
of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the
new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water
that rain and rivers had meant for other lands,
farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not
farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping
fossil energy, stripping past assets.
The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil,
not food. 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. In 1940 the average farm in
the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of
fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely
at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because
at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our
oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping,
and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil
back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested
in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include
the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the
oil in Iraq.
David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has
estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats,
humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over
seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off
on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.
Fertilizer makes a pretty fine bomb right off the shelf, a chemistry lesson
Timothy McVeigh taught at Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
1995--not a small matter, in that the green revolution has made nitrogen
fertilizers ubiquitous in some of the more violent and desperate corners of
the world. Still, there is more to contemplate in nitrogen's less sensational
chemistry.
The chemophobia of modem times excludes fear of the simple elements of
chemistry's periodic table. We circulate petitions, hold hearings, launch
websites, and buy and sell legislators in regard to polysyllabic organic
compounds--polychlorinated biphenyls, polyvinyls, DDT, 2-4d, that sort of
thing--not simple carbon or nitrogen. Not that agriculture's use of the more
ornate chemistry is benign--an infant born in a rural, wheat-producing county
in the United States has about twice the chance of suffering birth defects as
one born in a rural place that doesn't produce wheat, an effect researchers
blame on chlorophenoxy herbicides.
Focusing on pesticide pollution, though, misses the worst of the pollutants.
Forget the polysyllabic organics. It is nitrogen-the wellspring of fertility
relied upon by every Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban
groundskeeper--that we should fear most.
Those who model our planet as an organism do so on the basis that the earth
appears to breathe--it thrives by converting a short list of basic elements
from one compound into the next, just as our own bodies cycle oxygen into
carbon dioxide and plants cycle carbon dioxide into oxygen. In fact, two of
the planet's most fundamental humors are oxygen and carbon dioxide. Another is
nitrogen.
Nitrogen can be released from its "fixed" state as a solid in the
soil by natural processes that allow it to circulate freely in the atmosphere.
This also can be done artificially. Indeed, humans now contribute more
nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the planet itself does. That is, humans
have doubled the amount of nitrogen in play.
This has led to an imbalance. It is easier to create nitrogen fertilizer than
it is to apply it evenly to fields. When farmers dump nitrogen on a crop, much
is wasted. It runs into the water and soil, where it either reacts chemically
with its surroundings to form new compounds or flows off to fertilize
something else, somewhere else.
That chemical reaction, called acidification, is noxious and contributes
significantly to acid rain. One of the compounds produced by acidification is
nitrous oxide, which aggravates the greenhouse effect. Green growing things
normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on
farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre,
like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net contributor to global warming.
Fertilization is equally worrisome.
Rainfall and irrigation water inevitably washes the nitrogen from fields to
creeks and streams, which flows into rivers, which floods into the ocean. This
explains why the Mississippi River, which drains the nation's Corn Belt, is an
environmental catastrophe. The nitrogen fertilizes artificially large blooms
of algae that in growing suck all the oxygen from the water, a condition
biologists call anoxia, which means "oxygen-depleted." Here there's
no need to calculate long-term effects, because life in such places has no
long term: everything dies immediately.
The Mississippi River's heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in
the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.
America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw
material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes.
Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You
can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These four crops cover 82
percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food;
it's about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become
food.
About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled "processed," meaning
it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45
percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the
keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft
drinks, the food of America's poor and working classes. It is not a
coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with
the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland
developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is
it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed
food.
It began with the industrialization of Victorian England. The empire was then
flush with sugar from plantations in the colonies. Meantime the cities were
flush with factory workers. There was no good way to feed them. And thus was
born the afternoon tea break, the tea consisting primarily of warm water and
sugar. If the workers were well off, they could also afford bread with heavily
sugared jam--sugar-powered industrialization. There was a 500 percent increase
in per capita sugar consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1890, around the
time when the life expectancy of a male factory worker was seventeen years. By
the end of the century the average Brit was getting about one sixth of his
total nutrition from sugar, exactly the same percentage Americans get
today--double what nutritionists recommend.
There is another energy matter to consider here, though. 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.
A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of
gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the
United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie
of food energy it produces.
That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the
factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to
thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is
cheap. It appears, however, that the corn cycle is about to come full circle.
If a bipartisan coalition of farm-state lawmakers has their way--and it
appears they will--we will soon buy gasoline containing twice as much fuel
alcohol as it does now. Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for
processed corn in the United States, just behind corn sweeteners. According to
one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making
ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is
closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we
invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a "clean
fuel." This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and
it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution,
and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. Nor does this
claim cover clean conscience; some still might be unsettled knowing that our
SUVs' demands for fuel compete with the poor's demand for grain.
Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a
simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that
carrot's energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken,
reduces the energy by a factor of ten. 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. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies
to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be
a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only
doesn't eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding
a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a
thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian's case can break down on
some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder
to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of
wildlife's habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. In rural
Michigan, for example, the potato farmers have a peculiar tactic for dealing
with the predations of whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with small-bore
rifles, in hopes the deer will limp off to the woods and die where they won't
stink up the potato fields.
Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument
by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every
calorie of food energy produced. The question, then, is: Does eating processed
food such as soy burger or soy milk cancel the energy benefits
of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace?
Maybe. If I've done my due diligence, I will have found out that the
particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of
course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches here in
Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under
closely controlled circumstances--no farming, no plows, no corn, no nitrogen.
Assets have not been stripped. I can't eat the grass directly. This can go on.
There are little niches like this in the system. Each person's individual
charge is to find such niches.
Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the short end of this
argument, especially in the United States. Take the case of beef.
Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb. Some
cattle cultures--those of South America and Mexico, for example--have
perfected wonderful cuisines based on grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in
the United States, and it is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the
grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of
all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn
and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult
lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their
bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant
stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement
invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a
farm's fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far removed from farm
fields, so it is simply not "efficient" to haul it to cornfields. It
is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It
takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way;
sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.
Still, these livestock do something we can't. They convert grain's
carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per
capita protein production in the United States is about double what an average
adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the human body but
is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a factory-farm system
that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a
black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie's productivity is lost for
grain, grain's productivity is lost in livestock, livestock's protein is lost
to human fat--all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two
thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.
This explains why the energy expert David Pimentel is so worried that the rest
of the world will adopt America's methods. He should be, because the rest of
the world is. Mexico now feeds 45 percent of its grain
to livestock, up from 5 percent in 1960. Egypt went from 3 percent to 31
percent in the same period, and China, with a sixth of the world's population,
has gone from 8 percent to 26 percent. All of these places have poor people
who could use the grain, but they can't afford it.
I live among elk and have learned to respect them. One moonlit night during
the dead of last winter, I looked out my bedroom window to see about twenty of
them grazing a plot of grass the size of a living room.
Just that small patch among acres of other species of native prairie grass.
Why that species and only that species of grass that night in the worst of
winter when the threat to their survival was the greatest?
What magic nutrient did this species alone contain? What does a wild animal
know that we don't? I think we need this knowledge.
Food is politics.
That being the case, I voted twice in 2002. The day after Election Day, in a
truly dismal mood, I climbed the mountain behind my house and found a small
herd of elk grazing native grasses in the morning sunlight. My respect for
these creatures over the years has become great enough that on that morning I
did not hesitate but went straight to my job, which was to rack a shell and
drop one cow elk, my household's annual protein supply.
I voted with my weapon of choice--an act
not all that uncommon in this world, largely, I think, as a result of the way
we grow food. I can see why it is catching on. Such a vote has a certain
satisfying heft and finality about it.
My
particular bit of violence, though, is more satisfying, I think, than the rest
of the globe's ordinary political mayhem. I used a rifle to opt out of an
insane system. I killed, but then so did you when you bought that package of
burger, even when you bought that package of tofu burger. I killed, then the
rest of those elk went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the
coyotes, mountain lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact
natural system, all of it went on.
~~~~~~~~
By Richard Manning
Richard Manning is the author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has
Hijacked Civilization, published by
North Point Press.
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