We talk a lot about food here in PC Morocco. Perhaps this is because we spend a lot of time devising ways to cook our favorite comfort foods in an unfamiliar environment. Or maybe it’s because so many of us see the environmental degredation around us and worry that this will become bad enough to hurt food production in our area. Or maybe it’s because of the plethora of people out there trying to raise awareness about the precarious situation of our global food system. We read a lot in our spare time. Or all those things.
There are little to no reserves stored for future famines. Some food is produced at artificially lowered prices and used to fuel the system of mass food production that so much of the developed world lives on. That has global ramifications once you start selling that un-naturally cheap food abroad. It undercuts the local food sellers and hamstrings local food production systems. Those systems falter under that pressure, becoming dependent on the same cheap food that undercut the system in the first place. This last year, 2009, there was a bumper crop of corn and wheat in the United States. One of the highest on record, I believe. **Please forgive the lack of references… it’s very hard to research ones references when one does not have the internet or a library at one’s disposal.** Yet many, many people still starve, or suffer from malnutrition for lack of good food. There are many complicated reasons for this. MANY. There are equal numbers of proposed solutions to this problem. One thing that some claim would fix the problem is if people stopped eating meat. Be a world of vegetarians. Why? Well, it’s about the efficiency of energy transfer.
This is ecology. This is also chemistry. It’s pretty simple: life needs energy to sustain it. Plants get it (most ingeniously!) from the sun, direct. They take the sun’s energy and store it-this is the most efficient method. Animals don’t do the photosynthesis thing (we’re not that cool), so many do the next best thing: they eat the plants and steal all that stored energy, unlocking the storage units in the plant (sugars, mostly) and use it for their own purpose-this is the second most efficient method. Other animals don’t eat plants, they eat other animals, stealing that stored energy and using it for their own purposes-this is not as efficient as the previous two. So you, as an organism, can get your energy from the sun (direct, primary), from plants (indirect, secondary), or from other animals (double indirect, tertiary).
Humans are omnivores, so we get to eat just about whatever we want (but not sunlight, again, just not that cool). Pretty nice situation for us, actually. We have it set up so that we have all kinds of plants gathering energy for us (corn, wheat, carrots, potatoes, oranges…) and all kinds of animals eating those plants and converting it into tasty energy packed meat (chickens, pigs, cows…). Being omnivores, we enjoy the variety, and it keeps us healthy to boot. We are set up to run off of a variety of foods. But that means that some of our foods are efficient secondary energy (cereals, veggies, fruits) and some are less efficient tertiary energy (meats, dairy, eggs). We use a lot of the secondary food (corn, grass, etc.) to feed the tertiary food (cows, ducks, etc.). It takes a lot more energy to feed a cow until it reaches slaughter weight than it does to just eat that energy ourselves in the form of veggies and bread. So, when you eat beef, for example, you have just used all that energy it took to feed that cow, plus all the energy it took to grow the cow’s food, plus all the energy you used to get that beef from the cow to your stomach. When you eat a piece of bread, you used only the energy it took to grow the wheat, plus what it took to get the wheat to your stomach in the form of bread. Thus, beef takes up a lot more energy than bread does.
The idea then, is that if we all stopped using all that secondary food to feed our food animals, we could instead send it to those starving people and feed them. It’s not a bad idea. The math works out. So then we would stop using up land to grow secondary food for our tertiary food animals, and instead just grow that secondary food for people. To put it another way, on a lot of the land that we currently use to grow animal-feed we could be growing high quality people-feed. In light of the “starving children of Africa” (and everywhere else), this is probably something we should try to do. Hence the idea that we should be all be vegetarians. This is probably not a welcome thought to many. Many others, though, say it’s our moral responsibility.
Wait! There’s a catch. Not all land is equal. There’s a lot of land on this planet that is simply unfit for cultivation. If you plant wheat, or veggies in arid, dry land, you have a high risk of causing a lot of environmental degredation. This happens mainly through using up what little water there is in such a dry place, or through breaking up the soil. Breaking up the soil creates opportunities for erosion, especially in dry climates. Erosion means that that soil will sooner or later no longer be there at all. A better way to use such arid land for our food purposes is through well-managed grazing of food animals. Over-grazing is another good way to cause environmental degredation, but well-managed grazing can actually augument the health of an environment. So, we could use the good land for secondary food production, and the not-so-good land for tertiary food production. Maybe we don’t have to be vegetarians after all?
Well… there’s another catch, though. Grazing animals, as opposed to the current method of feeding our food animals our secondary food, means that they take longer to reach slaughter weight. Which means you can produce fewer of them per year. We, of the priviledged developed nations crowd, have gotten used to having vast quantities of meat (inefficient tertiary food) at our disposal. By manipulating the price of certain plant foods, we have made it a lot cheaper to raise up all of those tasty meat animals than it probably should be. So we get our meat, and we get it cheap. And we like it. It is tasty, and nutritious, after all. And it’s a sign of prestige to us, too. Having meat on the table has always been an indicator of wealth, because it takes so much more energy (inefficient tertiary food!) and energy will always cost money, or time, or wealth of some sort. So, if we change our system to use less land to feed the food animals, we would have less, more expensive meat. So, maybe we don’t have to be vegetarians, but that doesn’t mean we can still get our cheap meat… We might have to become a little more omnivorous than we currently are. A little bit more veggies, a little bit less meat.
**Note: there are many reasons to become a vegetarian. I didn’t touch on them all, I know. This is less about the merits of vegetarianism than it is about our general food system. Peace.
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