I went to a really interesting lecture on Thursday night. It was kind of perfect timing, because I have a sore knee that is bugging me – bugging me enough to need two nights off in a row. I might have been grumpy about this, but having a cool lecture to go to smoothed things over nicely.
Aside: is ‘kind of perfect’ an oxy moron? No, I suppose not. Just a poor choice of words.
When I read the lecture title, I guessed that the talk would be on either the food for fuel debate, or possibly something to do with world hunger. I was very wrong.
He started of talking about the debate between whether (wo)man is separate from nature through his/her ability to control it through science and technology, versus (wo)man being unseparatable of nature. The rest of the talk focused on modern mechanized farming vs. smaller localized farming. He talked about the environmental impacts, energy inputs and economics.
The lecturer was a history prof, so he has some interesting things to say about the history of farming in North America. Actually the entire talk was focused on North America, which as I mentioned before, I was a bit surprised by.
The details on small farming practices vs. large farming practices were not new to me. None the less, it was really interesting, and a good refreshing. I was most familiar with the environmental issues involved with large farming practices (there’s loads, really: petroleum inputs, from gas to pesticides and fertilizers, erosion, water use, and extra energy to ship the foods to far off markets, just to name a few).
He touched on a few examples of unsustainable farming that were interesting. For the most part, the examples were farms that require huge energy and/or water inputs. The example I remember most clearly is an area in the desert in Arizona that grows cotton, which requires massive amounts of water. I enjoyed when the prof explained the difficulty and amount of energy involved with moving water by saying if you weren’t sure if it was easy, just carry a 4 L bucket of water with you for an hour a day.
The lecture also had a lot of parallels with the book Fast Food Nation
by Eric Schlosser. It’s a really good book, if a little disturbing. Fast Food Nation talks about many other aspects of the fast food industry in the States. Both the book and the prof touch on the really gross things that happen in slaughterhouses. While I’d already heard about it (I won’t go into details), it was still a little disturbing to hear again. He described it in a way that made my vision narrow. This section of the talk was also about how in general, North Americans are very removed from the production of our food. He got us to think about this by asking how many people have ever milked a cow (I have, but I was 6, and it was mostly just a photo op.), canned vegetables (I have not). What is he talking about, I know where food comes from: the Superstore. No? It made me want to grow tomatoes on my deck!
All this made me thing about the game that I got from Christmas, Bohnanza (bohn is German for bean). It’s really fun. It’s a card game where you plant different bean crops and convert them for money. The next time we play, I’m going to see if I can eat any of the beans myself, or sell them to my neighbour for some manure. ;) Ps. my favorite bean in the game is green bean. Green bean is a cute little cartoon that had just barfed. Funny.
Finally, he touched on the current economic situation (large farms involve huge loans) and rising fuel prices, and how may drive us back to more localized, smaller farming practices. It could be a bad thing is we don’t adapt, or maybe it will lead farming practices down a more sustainable path.
Ps. This post seems a little like dropped bowl of pasta…..long, scattered, a waste….and cheesy.
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