Sukkot: Organic or Petrochemical?
Via Intermountain Jewish News (2009) -
By Martin Westerman
SUKKOT, the harvest holiday, provides a good time to remind ourselves how much we depend on petroleum products for our industrially-produced food, for the fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, and for the fuel to power irrigation, farm machinery, processing plants, shipping and distribution systems, and the car you drive to the store to buy it.
Sukkot is also a good time to look at the schach draped over our sukkah roofs, and remind ourselves of our available local resources.
See the contrast?
Depending on the distance your conventional food travels, 50% to 90% of the price you pay for it simply covers its petroleum inputs.
To feed each American each year, requires about 400 gallons of oil equivalents (yielding 7,825.6 tons of Greenhouse Gas (GhG) emissions).
You may even bring some home, in the form of pesticide residues on up to 71% of the produce you buy (see the Baker, et al. study at www.omri.org).
Agricultural production also requires about two-thirds of all our fresh water more than any other human activity.
Why, you may wonder, is living this way cheaper than buying locally grown and organic foods? According to the Organic Farmers Research Foundation, factory farms plant one-time hybrid and GMO (genetically modified organism) seeds, and grow them using petro-based inputs that more cheaply substitute for the labor and intense soil and pest management that organic farms use.
Curiously, conventional and organic each get the same yield per acre, but where organic farms create no environmental harm, conventional farms dump pollutants into farm workers, air, soil and water, and the costs for handling pollution-related health and environmental problems are not paid by factory farms; theyre passed on to us.
Also, organic farms are regulated more strictly than factory farms.
So in buying organics, were paying the true cost of growing the food.
As petroleum prices rise, however, so will all the costs of inputs to factory farming, and all the prices of the fruits and vegetables they grow.
Which means, economically, prices for conventional foods will eventually equal, or become more competitive against organics.
How soon will that happen?
It already has.
Meanwhile, at a 20% per year growth rate, prices of organics are steadily coming down. One day, they may be cheaper than conventionals.
Factory farm is an oxymoron. A farm is a biotic system that depends on soil and water. If all the soils organisms are killed, and its nutrients depleted by unrelenting crop production, and if the water is polluted or depleted, the only ways to keep growing crops are through uses of artificially modified seeds, and artificial growing media, such as petro-chemicals.
Michael Pollan notes in The Omnivores Dilemma that Americas chemical-based farm industry grew out of WW II explosives manufacturers looking for peace-time opportunities to market their phosphates, nitrates and poison gases.
Since the 1950s, nearly one-third of the worlds cropland has been abandoned because of soil erosion and degradation, according to World Resources Institute.
Most of the replacement land has come from removing forests, and reducing the worlds biodiversity.
THEN theres the weather.
Your parents or grandparents remember the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and Steinbecks epic The Grapes of Wrath. Millions of tons of topsoil blew away from poorly managed farms in a drought that virtually emptied the Midwest of its population.
America has not improved its soil management policies since the 1930s, but it has loaded the atmosphere with enough GhG to alter the planets weather.
One is reminded of the two Woody Allen ladies at the restaurant: This food is terrible! And such tiny portions!
In times when we did not know so much about science, we prayed for rain, as in the second paragraph of the Shema: If we kept G-ds commandments, G-d would supply rain in its season, abundant harvests, and contentment.
We can use the same formula today: prayer and mitzvot. While prayer gives us focus, the mitzvot now involve supporting our health and survival on the planet:
Buy local and organic, rather than distant and petro-chemical.
If your budget is tight, get tips from eHOW.
Reduce your and your employers carbon/GhG footprints. Start with the Jewish Climate Challenges Carbon Calculator.
Grow your own food blueberries, a fruit tree, strawberries, to re-connect yourself with the earth.
Amory Lovins is often quoted as saying, We didnt leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones.
He is familiar with how to create change. He invented the soft path energy conservation structure by which we live today.
As we re-roll the Torahs and move into the new year, know that new ideas are the seeds of change. They can grow into wonderful new ways of life, if we nurture them with daily attention.
##
See the original post here.
