Food and climate change

[Alphaville]

Organic does not necessarily mean more nutritious (meta-analyses have been inconclusive or found no connection between organic label and nutritional content). If you are concerned about pesticide levels, it will vary a lot by type of crop.

no, it’s the type of corn. more pigmentation = more antioxidants. ofc one could get antioxidants from “vitamin pill” but that sort of beats the point of “eating real foods”.

Organic also doesn’t mean better for the environment. Commercial scale organic requires more inputs and less yields. Also requires a government certification process which is not free.

doesn’t *always*. but does often. organic soils tend to be richer in nutrients, more bioactive, friendlier to the downstream. and freedom isnt free

blue corn is also (to my knowledge) an heirloom crop by definition and native to my region. biodiversity in grain contributes to food security.

Also as Jacob has pointed out, due to how money shoots around the economy, the profits to an organic farm might just go to the farmer buying a second house or boat or whatever.

anything is possible, but the values embodied in the each business enterprise make it more likely that it’s the walmart manager who’s going to be doing that disney trip thing, and not the eccentric blue corn farmer who might decide to protect a small forest and restore a waterway instead.

so, anyway, we rail against globalization and environmental depredation and human exploitation and meaningless work while we vote for it with our dollars, and then we relativize the immorality of the choice.

i’m not saying this to point fingers at others—i myself do this *all the time*. so, if anything, i’m pointing at my own guilt.

e.g.i get most of my flours from big bad walmart (king arthur bread $3.58 with free shipping). king arthur is employee-owned, walmart pays their workers little. my purchase joins both. i love a good absurdity.

but this is not really about reconciling these ends. i’m not asking for a solution—i’m just pointing at the problem, and the inherent impossibility of solving everything.

i’m comfortable with ambiguity and unsolvables and contradictions though. “belief” is not my thing. i’ rather be naturally stupefied than come up with a false certainty. this is why i’m a bit of liberal (in the original sense): i don’t believe in grand solutions, i think information is disseminated across the market and not held by a single entity. my information applies to me?

so, individual practical decision in the marketplace: $3/lb for groundcorn is too rich for my blood, and maseca is meh, so i’ll pass for now and wait for a better offer

creative diy alternative: perhaps i can nixtamalize my own cheap quality ground corn with lime at home. skillz!

-

eta: https://www.afar.com/magazine/how-heirl ... exico-city

[ertyu]

what's the deal with heirloom crops, can you guys explain to the non-native speakers what makes a crop heirloom

[Alphaville]

what's the deal with heirloom crops, can you guys explain to the non-native speakers what makes a crop heirloom

-old timey/preindustrial
-not bred for pesticide/fertilizer/preservation/shape
-usually wayyyyyyyyyyy tastier and nutritious (pigments!)
-carrier of genetic variability ensures survivability
-no intellectual property in the genome preserves farmer independence

low variability and monoclonal populations tend to get wiped out by plagues, as it’s quietly happening with cavendish bananas and oil palms right now. roundup ready corn makes you a bayer employee (formerly monsanto).

[UK-with-kids]

Also not F1 hybrids so you can save seed.

[jacob]

Roughly speaking:

Heirlooms) The evolutionary outcome of traditional agriculture. Wide variety of seeds which are mostly open pollination and that the gardener/farmer can save for next season and sow ad infinitum while eating the produce.

Hybrids) The result of industrial agriculture. Plants based on seeds that have been manually/deliberately cross-pollinated for maximum yield and possibly insect/insecticide resistance. Limited variety of seeds which are all commercial and often but not always sterile---resowing often leads to poor results. The farmer becomes dependent on the seed supplier.

GMO) Similar to hybrids with the same goals but more advanced and even more limited variety.

It would be impossible to feed the entire world with heirlooms. For example, hybrid wheat yields 4--10x more than heirloom. The cultivation of hybrids starting in the first half of the 20th century was essentially what allowed the world to push its population beyond the 2 billion mark. We're now trapped.

[white belt]

It would be impossible to feed the entire world with heirlooms. For example, hybrid wheat yields 4--10x more than heirloom. The cultivation of hybrids starting in the first half of the 20th century was essentially what allowed the world to push its population beyond the 2 billion mark. We're now trapped.

@OP This highlights why going down the rabbit hole on one particular expense may not be very productive until you are already living with expenses approaching 1 JAFI. We’re talking about complex systems with nth order effects, so spending more to be “green” might cuz more harm than just spending less in the first place.

[white belt]

1. don’t have the space, which saves a lot of energy actually. but i’m still trying: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11269
2. that’s a bit far for me these days, and vehicles, travel, gear, licenses, etc, do not guarantee success. i get the hobby, but unsure about the economic value.

1. I’m working on my micro greens/seed starter shelf prototype at the moment. I’ll post it in the Apartment Homestead thread once I grow my first batch. I should be able to build up to about 4 sqft of grow space per shelf (could scale up to 12-16 sqft in entire system) with worm bin on bottom. Shelf ground footprint is 1.5ft x 3ft.

2. Hunting/fishing are hyper local so your best bet is checking out local resources and talking to people in your area. Both can certainly be done economically and yield meat that’s cheaper than factory farmed alternatives, but it depends on your area and if you can fit it in your web of goals. I’m also going through this process so I’ll share my lessons learned on these forums as I go.

[Alphaville]

@OP This highlights why going down the rabbit hole on one particular expense may not be very productive

i’m not going down a particular expense rabbit hole and reject the characterization. i’m not offended or anything though, i just want to reiterate, i’m trying to visualize, or at least sketch out, the whole rhizome. which is, yes, very difficult and highly uncertain because it’s a chaos.

until you are already living with expenses approaching 1 JAFI.

which means right now choose to eat/shop/invest in cargill/walmart/bayer-monsanto

We’re talking about complex systems with nth order effects,

yes. therefore i see them as non-reducible to a single descriptor.

so spending more to be “green” might cuz more harm than just spending less in the first place.

“might” is not “will” though, yes?

uncertain outcomes means uncertain outcomes, not certainty of worst possible outcomes.

i see reducing expenses in 2 possible ways

1) eat/shop walmart/cargill/bayer-monsanto so you can save/invest in walmart/cargill/bayer-monsanto so that you can eat/shop walmart/cargill bayer-monsanto without having to work

or

2) same as above, but now you have acquired land and skills to grow your own food away from walmart/cargill/bayer-monsanto which means... heirloom crops, which... can’t feed everyone.

so the n-th order effects can lead you back to the original problem

[Alphaville]

2. Hunting/fishing are hyper local so your best bet is checking out local resources and talking to people in your area. Both can certainly be done economically and yield meat that’s cheaper than factory farmed alternatives, but it depends on your area and if you can fit it in your web of goals. I’m also going through this process so I’ll share my lessons learned on these forums as I go.

i had hunting opportunities in my cabin, someone always had a deer or elk tag, and everyone got to share the spoils. also spent many cold morning hunting wabbit but in the end i was cold and hungry so had negative returns. i’ve also butchered domestic animals, which is gory but tasty, and the easiest path.

but i’m a city dog at the moment, and the price of going hunting adds up to more than the potential harvest, because it takes away from my particular web of goals. i need a fully urban car-free alternative to this, and will ruminate on it (but no methane, lol).

[Hristo Botev]

FWIW, as a fellow city dog, though one who very frequently fantasizes about not being a city dog, I've been enjoying reading this topic as you're wrestling with what are really important questions I've not yet begun to really ask myself.

From an interview with one of my personal faves, Wendell Berry (I bolded the excerpt that made me think of you and this topic):

That power is evident in Berry’s work in the modern food movement. Mark Bittman has called him the “soul” of the movement; Pollan calls him its “spiritual father.”

While Americans may now have come to some consensus about the dire consequences of our carbon footprint and the problems with eating beef, those ideas are rooted in Berry’s work.

“People who eat have a moral responsibility to the sources of their food,” Berry says now. “People from the city should do an honest, full accounting of the food that they eat. The first thing they’ll discover is that they can’t do it. They don’t know the ecological cost or the cost to the people who did the work of production, what it costs the rural communities.”

His daughter, Mary, agrees. Urban dwellers are “dependent on [farming] whether they know it or not,” she says. “We’ve got a land-based economy, whether we know it or not, whether we’re living like we are or not.” We’re getting to the point, she says, where “urban places prospering on the decline of rural places won’t work.”

It’s hard to know what the world would look like if everybody lived by Berry’s principles. But is his insistence on a grassroots approach enough to make the drastic reversals we need to save the planet?

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/ ... ael-pollan

[Alphaville]

It would be impossible to feed the entire world with heirlooms. For example, hybrid wheat yields 4--10x more than heirloom. The cultivation of hybrids starting in the first half of the 20th century was essentially what allowed the world to push its population beyond the 2 billion mark. We're now trapped.

even if we can’t feed everyone, heirlooms are the genetic bank from which new hybrids can develop, and also the “emergency fund” in case of hybrid crop / market failure. genetic engineering can’t do it all; we still need the relative wilderness of heirloom crops where we can witness the actual phenotypes rather than hypothesize about them.

also, we can feed a lot more people of we stop feeding all the moos: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/0 ... estock-eat (a bit old, that one, so things are probably worse now)

FWIW, as a fellow city dog, though one who very frequently fantasizes about not being a city dog, I've been enjoying reading this topic as you're wrestling with what are really important questions I've not yet begun to really ask myself.

From an interview with one of my personal faves, Wendell Berry (I bolded the excerpt that made me think of you and this topic):

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/ ... ael-pollan

hah, thanks for that. yeah, cities absolutely depend on farmers. already in antiquity the greatness of rome depended on egyptian grain. and back in the present, i’ve seen the soil erosion and the drought and the effects of cattle-mania first-hand. not a good scene. and i tried healing the land also, but failed (but also learned).

and that’s another reason to maybe not look for the cheapest possible food? because when we do that, we squeeze the farmer, then the farmer has to squeeze the land.

when the customer is a tyrant, the worker suffers, and we’re 2 sides of the same coin.

so maybe $3/lb is not bad price for blue corn. ( i also started looking at more local producers, their stuff goes for $6/lb . see: https://www.loschileros.com/corn-chips-a-popcorn.html )

anyway, i think more magical food druids means fewer plantation slaves. not guaranteed— but maybe.

when this stupid pandemic ends i think i’m going to start developing closer ties with local food growers. it’s easy to find them actually. i could buy direct or work for them or barter or something.

[white belt]

I am also in the same boat exploring options for city living. I wonder if there is a Goldilocks population density where one can live car free and still have some outdoor space to grow productive food? My current zip code is about 2.5k people per sq mile within a city of ~200k and there is opportunity to have a good sized backyard with productive space. It also has a lot of the amenities of a bigger city, but I would say it would be a bit tricky, though not impossible to live car-free here. Numerous nearby opportunities for hunting and fishing. I haven’t dug a ton into zoning laws, but I have driven by a house within city limits with a chicken coop in the yard.

At one time I lived car-free in a much larger city of 1.5 million with a neighborhood population density of 19k per sq mile. It would be very difficult to have a productive garden at any sort of scale because there just isn’t open space available. Additionally, zoning laws forbid owning of any farm animals in city limits even if one did have a small plot.

I don’t want to derail this thread because I know it is focused on just food, but I think there have been quite a few threads talking about city vs suburb vs rural living.

Edit: I like the balance that Rob Greenfield struck with his tiny house in San Diego and his yearlong project in Orlando. By living in someone’s backyard (illegal in many jurisdictions), he was able to have multiple bio intensive gardens while still accessing the cultural and community benefits of city living.

[ertyu]

This is possible in a ~ 50k Bulgarian city, and quite inexpensively, but your entertainment, dining, etc. options will be limited.

[J_]

A thread which combines many ere-aspects. Thanks @bostonimproper for your clear chart.

To me (after studying/trying a lot about food and health and learning from mistakes) it is one of the best choises one can do: eating plant based food from scratch with very little (or for me no) exceptions.

You are using products which have the least negative impact on our planet.

You avoid all those luxury-illnesses from eating wrong/unhealthy food produced by unwise/lobbied/unhemmed food industry and retailers. Not really curbed by governmental organisations.

So together with the other requirements of moving and resting enough, by eating this way you arrive at the best possible health. And has the best weapon to beat vira: a body with a full working immune-system.

And as you are in a good bodily/mental condition you are also helping to diminish the overgrowing (and at the moment overburdened) health industry, for you hardly need it in your life.

[tonyedgecombe]

I am also in the same boat exploring options for city living. I wonder if there is a Goldilocks population density where one can live car free and still have some outdoor space to grow productive food?

We've been looking at moving within the UK and one of my key criteria is shops/cafes/library/doctors/dentist/transport/etc are all within a mile of home (so no need for a car). From what I can see (in the UK) this excludes having a garden larger than a postage stamp unless you spend a lot of money.

[chenda]

We need more allotments. Maybe that's an ERE business idea for someone.

We've been looking at moving within the UK and one of my key criteria is shops/cafes/library/doctors/dentist/transport/etc are all within a mile of home (so no need for a car). From what I can see (in the UK) this excludes having a garden larger than a postage stamp unless you spend a lot of money.

Its possible I think I some regions but you would probably have to move well outside the south east to a less affluent area.

[tonyedgecombe]

Its possible I think I some regions but you would probably have to move well outside the south east to a less affluent area.

Do they have libraries up north?

Being serious it's family ties that will keep us fairly close to where we are. Hopefully we will find somewhere with available allotments.

[Hristo Botev]

Our little (little by square miles, but it’s pretty densely populated) city in the US Southeast is fairly progressive regarding things like backyard chickens, composting, backyard shed/tiny-house living arrangements, and the like, even with old streetcar commuter ~.3 acre-size home lots. But you’ve got to search pretty hard and be willing to do a lot of work to find a place on one of those ~.3 acre-size lots that makes any economic sense (now, that wasn't quite the case when we bought in 10 years ago). I'm sure there have been gobs of studies/articles/etc. on this sort of thing, but I tend to think/feel (i.e., I've not done any research and am simply talking out of my arse) the "ideal" living arrangement from a CC, eco-footprint standpoint is something like an old streetcar commuter town layout, like the one I live in: a town center/square surrounded by retail and some business, with a good stock of apartments and condos, a "Main Street" for those who feel the need to show off how much money they have, and then with the majority of the single family detached homes sitting on about .25/.3 acre plots with 2 or 3-br homes less than 2-3 miles from the town center, with flat backyards that can be used for all sorts of self-reliant activities, and with front porches close to the street/sidewalk to encourage community.

The problem of course is that when people get these sorts of communities working well, they get real expensive real fast. So, to pull from the Granola Shotgun article I posted on my journal yesterday (https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolas ... 2lp452zifc), your best bet is to try and find a town laid out before WWII (and the car), but that is still affordable; and if you can find some friends to do likewise, or better yet, make some friends with the neighbors already there, you can create your own little eco-friendly village.

[Alphaville]

my issue with “looking for a backyard” to “grow food” is triple

1. you can’t grow enough food to feed yourself anyway
2. a standalone house eats more energy than an apartment/condo/townhouse
3. sprawl requires cars to get around

sure condos etc have their problems, but if 3/4 emissions are from energy+transportation and 1/4 from food, clearly getting around on foot and reducing air travel can make the most impact, then food is only second.

there’s also the issue of land use: the more “backyards” grow, the more farmland is paved over and the more forests get clearcut for farming or farming goes transoceanic. this is separate from needing a car.

green spaces, allotments, community gardens etc are necessarily psychologically, for health, and a good bank for skills but they can’t replace dedicated agriculture.

so it seems to me (i am not certain, this is just an approximation) that for non-farmers, packing ourselves efficienty in pleasant urban environments and sparing forests is a good thing. so then we can develop good mutually supportive relationships with the food growers around us.

i still want to grow *some* food in trays, compost in my balcony, have a gardening allotment, etc, but only as a saving + mitigation + interesting project.

[Hristo Botev]

I don't think anyone is really talking about growing ALL of their food in their backyard. When Rob Greenfield did it he was just doing it to show it was possible (and just for a year). The idea, back to Berry, is to replace some part of your diet with stuff you grow yourself, as from a Web of Goals perspective it's: cheaper, likely healthier, mostly better for the environment, facilitates community among neighbors via sharing (your squash for my strawberries, etc.), and, perhaps most importantly, it helps to make the connection between what you eat and where it's coming from--i.e., you'll have a lot more respect for the folks and the land and the supply chain logistics that brought you that 25 lb bag of rice or beans when you know how much work you had to do to grow 75% of your tomatoes.

ETA: @Alphaville, regarding the "sprawl," that's why I tend to think the pre-automobile streetcar suburb layout makes sense. You don't need a car to get around; but you still get sufficient backyard space, even at just something like a small fraction of an acre, to produce some of your own food. Our first house was on a .2 acre plot, and we had 2 4x8' raised beds and a compost bin and a rain barrel for garden water, and we easily could have had several more raised beds and containers, plus chickens, plus fruit trees, plus some sort of backyard shed/tiny house thing where we could have accommodated a renter (we had a back alleyway that the renter could have used for a separate entrance). That's not sprawl. We also had large front porches and the homes were separated only by a few feet (we had a movie filmed at the house because the star needed to be able to jump from one rooftop to the next). The drawback? We didn't really like our neighbors, which is why we left. That's the problem with proximity.