Eating Our Way to Peace

The reign of modern industrial agriculture is on the wane. In the February 2004 edition of Harper's Magazine, Richard Manning establishes this fact in the powerful and comprehensive article, "The Oil We Eat: Following The Food Chain Back to Iraq". The upshot is that, since 1960, "the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end." Since then, he says, we have "tinkered with the architecture" of our primary grains, wheat, corn and rice "so they could be hypercharged with irrigatiion water and chemical fertilizers.... With the possible exception of domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet."

In a paranoid, security-obsessed nuclear world with a superpower whose president promotes all out, neverending war, these are bold words. As it turns out, these various realities are all symptoms of a single equation of human madness, rather than separate issues. You see, the food we eat is fueled by oil. Hence the war in Iraq is every bit as much about what's on our plates as it is about the gas in our tanks.

In fact the fuel in our stomachs and the fuel in our cars is ironically increasingly linked as politicians "go green" by selling the public on ethanol-based fuel supplements and "alternatives". The problem is that everything is limited and, unless systems are made more efficient, when we take from one source to feed another, we simply transfer the problem. In line with its historical imperialism, agriculture's shift in gears from food crops to car crops comes at the expense of poor people. In Mexico, so much land is being diverted from corn for humans to corn for livestock and gas that the poorest Mexicans are finding it impossible to afford their sacred, traditional plant.

Manning attacks the term "efficiency" in his article with just cause. It is the very "efficiencies" of our petroleum-based industrial economies of scale that lead to the increased systemic inefficiencies that are accelerating their own (and our own) demise. This is because of a myopic understanding of what it means to be efficient, preceded by a myopic understanding of life itself. If we consider a small aspect of a massively interconnected system of life, we may find apparent solutions that are efficient in addressing isolated problems. But when those solutions are applied to the living world, they have the ironic effect of being counter-efficient. When viewed with holistic vision, "efficiency" is in fact its opposite, the only separation between the opposites being the ever-waning barrier of time. This pseudo-efficiency magnifies problems by mitigating immediate and evident failures, replacing them with catastrophes in the longer term.

Starting 6,000 years ago, originating with the "wheat-beef" people on the Hungarian plains, agriculture has been the first wave of imperialism. Since then, land has been "cleared" (removed of virtually every other species including humans) for monocultures which consolidates the wealth into the hands of a very few while dispossessing everyone else of land, food, money and purpose. Since that turning point in 1960 when we reached the end of unfarmed, arable land, "the world's population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world's poorest classes...". Our energy system is so convoluted that such a massive injustice twists into a good thing for our survival since, he notes, "David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years."

Manning uses an example: a two-pound bag of cereal burns two litres of gasoline in its production alone. This excludes the gasoline expended in transporting it from the farm to the grocery store shelf and the gasoline spent getting it from the store to our cupboards at home. Ouch!

Manning concludes by challenging all of us, including we vegetarians who, commonly unaware of the hidden oil costs implicit in food production and transportation, may falsely believe ourselves to be eating more sustainably, to think in ways that transcend the carnivore-herbivore polemic. Recounting his killing of a wild elk to supply his family's annual protein requirements he says: "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." Our challenge, then, if we are to excise some part of the resource wars raging around the globe, is to eat as little processed food as possible. As it turns out, it's a healthier way to live anyway.

May we find ourselves out of this insanity we have created. May we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun...