Sustainable cooking

Farm Skyscrapers: Food goes vertical

Bringing farms into the city.

Could Sky scrapers full of crops and animals be a solution to our future food production problems?

Imagine a building 20 stories tall, which combines pigs production a farm with chicken production, fertilizer plant, hydroponics production, water purification system, and an energy plant.

In 2004 the land used for agricultural and food production was about the size of Brazil, or 5% of the total surface of the earth, as much as 38 percent of the land mass. With increasing populations, land is going to be at a limiting factor, setting greenhouse gas reducing forests against vital food production for people.

A Professor at Columbia University, Dr. Dickson Despommier has come up with one solution, urban skyscraper farms. The technology includes a self sustaining ecosystem which could purify water and human waste, create its own energy, and provide local produced food for a city. All this done organically.

The advantages of the vertical farm are many, but some of the highlights are year round crops, no herbicides, pesticides or fertilizers, and the elimination of environmentally disastrous run off.  If used on a large scale it could allow reforestation of land that has been taken for agriculture. Loss of forest is a major contributer to global warming.

Although it may be possible to include raising some animals on the farm, Dr Despommier isn't so sure about going all the way to cattle, citing concerns about humane treatment of cattle. Due to the present deplorable system of feed lots he hasn't ruled the possibility out.

Are bee's the environmental canary!in te coal mine?

Honey Bee's primitive genetic code makes it more susceptible to disease, parasites and climate change.

Does this simple structure make it the bellwether  for what is to come in the global food chain? The recent bee die offs seem to be from a variety of different problems, not any single issue as has been true of past die offs. This suggests a species on the brink of collapse.

80 million years ago bees developed a symbiotic relationship with the new flowering plants. The plants provided food for the bees, and the bees provided sex for the plants. The flowering plants had developed 45 million years previous, but it took 25 million years for them to get a solid footing. This relationship has gone on relatively unchanged since.

Due to this lack of need to change, bees genetic structure has remained primitive, leaving it defenseless to changes in environmental factors, as well as biological factors. For example they have a much simpler genetic structure than mosquito's for example. Bees as a species don't adapt well to change, relying on mobility, not adaptability, to survive. If a place doesn't suit them, they start a hive somewhere else, running instead of adapting.

Scientists look for ancient Honey bee's in the northern climates signaling the presence of flowering plants as, indicators of past climate change, so it naturally follows that they could be good indicators of present climate changes as well.

  Although it looks likely that bee populations are going to weather through the most recent onslaught, it still makes me wonder if the recent bee population die offs are for telling what global warming may bring.

Modern menu's - set up against health

Menu's of today traditionally use the protein (meat, poultry, fish) as the selling point for any menu item. This creates the feeling that these items are the most important choice in your diet, but if you look at any healthy, environmentally friendly diet this is a mistake. The proteins should be treated like a desert, or special side dish, not as the main thing we eat. The energy to create proteins is environmentally intensive (in cows for example its approximately 7 to 1 ratio of feed to form meat, and compared to total production calories it is as much as 78 to 1). Now I enjoy a good steak as much as anyone, so I am not set against eating meats or fatty food, but I think these should go back to being special or celebratory items, not the mainstays.This is  the way it naturally works whenever resources become scarce and our species is threatened. Unfortunately we have created a non sustainable food production complex which is energy intensive and will collapse when the energy becomes scarce. When this happens many of our fields will be unable to produce crops lacking the energy intensive nitrates that we create. Our feed lots will be unable to sustain the cattle populations that we support today due to lack of ability to grow grains, and our food production systems could fail. I also realize that market forces are eventually take care of tis situation, for when energy begins to cost what it truly does to society, instead of the short sighted price structure that we have now, then meats and proteins will become prohibitively expensive for the daily table. The problem is that many of our fields will be laid to waste, drained of all ability to grow products. I believe if we can get back to a more natural way of eating then we can extend our food supply our many years into the future without the potentially destructive impact of future energy shortages.

    I also agree that it is not this alone that makes an unhealthy diet in America, for in Europe they also create menu's like this, but combined with the huge portion sizes that we seem to expect, it is easy to see why its detrimental to us.

  Our answer is that we create a menu with foundations of grains and vegetables as the base of the menu, and treat the proteins as a special side dish, much as fried food has become in many modern menu's. These foundations are primarily healthy vegetarian choices, which would be suficient for a meal on their own. They would also be less expensive than a traditional meal, which would meet the societal needs of sustainability. The other feature of this diet is that it could switch back to the preparation of whole grains, which at the beginning of the last century was where we got most of our starch calories from. These whole grains are a much more nutritious and balanced source calories, which include essential vitamins and minerals not found in meats. They are also delicious when made properly (I know I was skeptical when I first started doing experiments with them, but I am now converted).

Shameless promotion department: The Bread Workshops new dinner menu blends these ideas with such foundations as a wild mushroom stew, vegetarian chili made with roasted whole wheat berries, a kamut Mediterranean salad.

Farm workers shortage could lead to less sustainable crops

The shortage of farm workers this year may lead to fewer sustainable products.
The agriculture department responded to the shortage of migrant farm workers by suggesting that the farmers mechanize their harvesting. This could create an undo burden on organic, and sustainable growing. 

Imagine a farmer who has nourished and cared for a tomato crop through a whole season. They are now ripe and ready to pick. The machines are designed to pick the tomatoes green, if you use it on ripe tomatoes they will be crushed. Now he/she is unable to get enough workers to pick them. Any loss is a critical loss, but coming at the end of a growing season the loss is at its highest cost, and now some of the tomatoes will rot on the vine due to an insufficient numbers of workers.

Machines also need clear paths to harvest fruits or vegetables. This means the field must be set up for the machine, not for the plant. It also means the crop must grow straight. Biodiversity in the field becomes difficult and plants must be genetically manipulated by either by cross pollination, or gene splicing. Corn has long been genetically engineered with this in mind. A plants attempt to maximize surface area, therefor photosynthesis, by reaching for the sun and spreading out to where there is open land. Most specialty produce can not be engineered to fit tis mold. Squash and melons will never achieve straightness.

    Since many specialty crops can't be harvested by machines,  the burden of fewer of migrant workers falls on small, local sustainable farms. Large corporate farms, which produce mainstream crops will prosper, while small local diversified farmers will suffer the most.
One of the many stories of this can be found on marketplace (though they don't speak specifically to the sustainable issues).
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/02/17/PM200602178.html

Food origins of the environmental movement

Through the past thirty seven years many environmental issues have arisen, but one of the original sparks, possibly the most influential, in the movement was about food production.
  Imagine what would have been had not DDT degraded our national symbols very reproduction. Even though baby eagles are potentially one of the least cute of all babies, the lack of them helped unite a country behind intervening in our food production. The 1972 banning of the first  modern pesticides which developed during and right after WWII, was in use for thirty years before the EPA was forced into a three year study by popular outrage. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson originally called attention to this and many other issues, Including industrial waste, but the one issue that seemed to galvanize the country like DDT.
    I was a young boy when the book came out, my mother was already involved in nature teaching (now known as environmental education). The thing I remember most was when my mother started making sure we washed our fruits and vegetables before eating them. After hearing the explanation that the pesticides used for growing fruits and vegetables stay in your system are the same pesticides that are responsible for dwindling population of bald eagles, I was a vigorous  washer. The DDT example was very effectively used to further my knowledge of what an ecosystem was and how they worked. The DDT went onto the crops, insects landing on the crops, or rain water would bring the DDT to streams (insects by being eaten by fish). The inhabitants of the streams would eat other inhabitants that had the DDT in their bodies. Each time one creature ate another contaminated creature the content of the DDT would become intensified, leading up to fish, the top predator in the water world, would end up with very high densities of DDT. The creatures that ate the fish would also have high densities of DDT, however since DDT was developed not to kill animals directly there were no obvious effects. The bald eagle, as well as other raptors that ate freshwater fish, was designed to be light for flight, so the density of DDT from the fish likely effected it and birds of prey, more than other top predator (though that is just my projection). This resulted in the unforeseen consequence that their egg shells became extremely thin and broke easily. This resulted in an extremely low birth rate for eagles.

  If Rachel was still here today she would see a world where the environmental issues of pesticides, food production and agricultural land use are over shadowed  by the ominous on set of global warming. She would also realize that the issues she talked about all those years ago pale in significance to what our food production is doing to the environment today, with a huge potential to decimate the very water ways that were the focus of her studies. 

Anasazi Beans

Okay, so far all I've done are doom and gloom concepts which got me depressed, so I am now going to write about something great: Anasazi Beans!
  The Anasazi bean got its name from one of the first North American civilizations. No one is quite sure what happened to the people, at one time they had a vibrant trade community, with highways through the deserts that can still be seen today in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.  The society disappeared possibly due to climate change which might have caused droughts or famine, though this is still not really known. What is amazing is though the people are gone the bean survived. In many of the Anasazi ruins the same type of bean was found, hence the name Anasazi bean, sometimes growing wild.  This amazing bean apparently hooked the Ancient tribe into spreading through out the southwest, then even after the people were gone, hung on till other societies such as the Hopi found how wonderful it was helped it gain a larger presence. It has begun to get a good foot hold into our society as well.
  It is a pretty bean, red and white with brownish overtones, though much of this disappears when cooked. It can easily replace pinto beans (which it resembles when cooked) in any recipe and has a deeper richer flavor tan the pinto. As an environmental  plant it is drought resistant  and is a great rotational crop to fix nitrates into the soils. This enables less fertilizer in other rotational crops  helping reduce nitrate run off (when the nitrogen is fixed in the soil by a legume it doesn't run off into the watershed that way fertilizers do).
    It is also a highly nutritious legume, high in iron, calcium and  thiamine. producing less gas than pinto beans in digestion, it is an amazing bean.

Shameless Advirtising Section:
We at the Bread Workshop make a buffalo and vegetarian chili using organic anasazi beans, which combines south west tradition and true southwestern products which are truly sustainable (my buffalo advantage rant will have to come at a later date).

Ecosystems

Ecosystems create the base for the essential environmental knowledge, creating the boundaries for any study. It is traditionally considered an ecological system of resources and inhabitants (including microbial)in a given habitat  (my simplified understanding). I believe that this is a good basis to study sustainability in our cities, In other words the urban habitat.In urban ecosystems some of the essential resources are represented by the exchange of money. Since money, as we have seen again and again, influences ecosystems throughout the world  (ex. monetary logging interests vs the spotted owl), part of the modern ecosystem is the economic system as well as the environmental systems.  It is  particularly relevant In an urban ecosystem, where one of the most important resources of one of the largest  inhabitants is monetary income. The ability to pay for food is an essential part of any societal ecosystem, so any products brought in that are not able to be utilized, will have little influence on the ecosystem. This becomes relevant when we start looking a the sustainable food movement. Much of the sustainable food is presently priced in such a way that only the affluent can purchase it. In markets this is beginning to change but in restaurants it is still predominantly true. The sustainable food movement can't work unless a majority of the inhabitants, in urban settings this means people, can make use of the resource. In other words if we can't figure out how to make sustainable food more affordable to urban communities, either by increasing the peoples wages, or decreasing the costs of food, then the sustainable food movement will never be effective enough to change our global environment. As exemplified in the oceans entry. It is essential that we start looking at this issue soon, or global warming will be followed by many more problems which will effect all of us negatively, not just regionally as global warming does. Many problems are already beginning to raise their heads, such as antibiotic resistant bacteria being bread in our cattle yards, or down stream waste problems like nitrates, and heavy metals (for more information on this read "Ominvore's Dilema" by Micheal Pollan). The effects of these are beginning to show there hand, but the results of waiting for all the hard scientific data to prove the effects exist may be catastrophic. The proof may come in the form of antibiotic resistant Ecoli, vast species extinctions due to land use in mono-crops and mono-meat production, brown fields that will only support life if we pump in resources to them.

  One answer to this dilemma is is government interventions. If sustainable food production had the same subsidies that corn producers have (not just the growers) then we might be able to make a dent int the problems that are arising  in food production, and be able to have the majority of people afford sustainable foods. Market forces  are helping right now, but the problem is so large that I'm afraid that the market won't be able to change such large industries in time.

Oceans

One of the biggest impacts food production has on the environment  right now is the abundance of nitrate run off in the watershed, which flows ultimately to the oceans. Where the fresh water meets the salt water is typically very nutrient rich water. Where this nutrient rich waters are confined, for example in mangrove swamps and salt water marshes. The nitrates, introduced often by agriculture, cause algae blooms . The big problem comes when the blooms die and fall to the bottom, where bacteria process the dead algae. The bacteria use oxygen to do this which leaves the bottom oxygen less, some times up to three yards. As anyone who has ever gone snorkeling or scuba diving knows, this bottom few feet is where most of the life in the oceans live. This is what has created at least some of the dead zones in the oceans where no life seems to live. Whats even more disturbing is that the areas that this tends to hit are also breading grounds for the many of the fish in the ocean. Of recent years fish populations have become inconsistent, many fish populations have dwindled. In the past few years nitrate use has increased dramatically in the US. In the past few years the number of ocean dead zones have increased by 30%, from  150 to 200 world wide.   All of these things are happening, but science needs some time to irrefutably tie them all together as it did for global warming. I hope the proof doesn't come too late to change things.
  So what can we do now?
   There has been an increase in studies in the past ten years to find the right balance of nitrogen need. Part of these are due to the expense of nitrogen, but also due to nitrate run off, which people are beginning to worry about for legal and environmental reasons.  For example it has been found that if you use 210 lbs of nitrates per acre to grow corn, the modern corn plants will be able to use most of it. Any more than that will likely go into the watershed. Making sure that these studies are put to use and the standards are  adhered to by the farmers and  promoted by the chemical companies.
  Organic farming has about 20% less nitrate runoff (or blow off since it is the wind that often steals the nitrates from a field) so even the switch to 100% organic farming will, at best, keep up with population increases. The problem is that raw cow manure has a high nitrogen yield.
If the cow manure is composted then the nitrogen becomes better fixed into the soil and the run off becomes much less. Organic farming requires that no fresh manure be used for the last 90 days before harvesting, so for at least part of the growing period of the crop can have fresh manure. Biodynamic standards are more stringent than that of organic and don't allow any fresh manure to be applied directly to the fields.
  Strange as it may seem the best thing we can do is the best thing we can do for ourselves, eat more vegetables. Many of the high nitrogen crops are grown for feed, not for human food. The amount of nitrates that goes into a calorie of energy from a cow is much more than the amount of nitrate for each calorie of a vegetable we eat. Don't get me wrong, i am not a devout vegetarian, though I respect those who are, I just think for us and our environment we should simply eat less meat.

To begin

Sustainability in food is a very confusing question. There are many criteria for which to work from like carbon foot print, waste stream, production issues.... What I wish to do here, and at The Bread Workshop, is explore all the daily decisions and discussions we go through.