THE OIL WE EAT:
Following the food chain back
to Iraq
Richard Manning
Harper's Magazine, February 2004
Richard Manning is the author of Against
the Grain:
How Agriculture Has Hijacked
Civilization (North Point Press, 2004)
+
"The secret of great wealth with no obvious
source is some forgotten
crime,
forgotten because it was done neatly."
Balzac
The journalist's rule says:
follow the money. This rule, however, is
not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice
president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll follow
the energy.
We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you
don't get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down,
and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly
more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth
century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion
to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and
there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an
option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.
Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the
rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is
the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to
turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the
basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only
way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just
as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our
plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are
as sure.
Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass
created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They
call it the planet's "primary productivity." There have been two
efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group
at
biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans,'
a single
species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary
productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may
explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which
existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have
simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.
Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it
can be
concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context
of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote
in 1948 as the head
of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian
policy but really about how the
newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. "We have about 50
percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its
population," Kennan wrote. "In this
situation, we cannot fait to be
the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period
is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to
maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our
national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all
sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will
have to be
concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need
not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism
and world,benefaction."
"The day is not far off, " Kennan concluded, "when we are going to
have to deal in straight power concepts."
if you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field
somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and
industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of
primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in
turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000
years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has
remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store
solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of
carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel
of refined
oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they
are the most concentrated form of true wealth-sun energy-to be found
on the planet.
As
concentration of wealth often requires violent action.
Agriculture is
a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by
gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why
humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of
agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially
because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers
were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than
their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most
lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in
the difference between early agricultural villages and their
pre-agricultural counterparts-the presence not just of
grain but of
granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly
larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those
granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the
accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people
have been in charge ever since.
Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution
of wealth within the plant world. Plants can spend their solar income
in several ways. The dominant and prudent strategy is to allocate
most of it to building roots, stem, bark-a conservative portfolio of
investments that allows the plant to better gather energy and survive
the downturn years. Further, by living in diverse stands (a given
chunk of native prairie contains maybe 200 species of plants), these
perennials provide services for one another, such as re, taining
water, protecting one another from wind, and fixing free nitrogen
from the air to use as fertilizer. Diversity allows a system to
"sponsor its own fertility," to use
visionary agronomist Wes
There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow
in patches of a single species and store almost all of their income
as seed, a tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed
eaters such as ourselves. Under normal circumstances, this eggs-
in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But
not during
catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such
catastrophes strip established plant communities and create
opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed
bearers. It is
no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe,
it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have,
that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly
this is not true. They needed the
power of flooding, which scoured
landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I
think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously
around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous
upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal
waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.
Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe.
It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe
would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then,
under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that
niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the
soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the
catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping
that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial
catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of
TNT per acre for a modem American farm.
energy of 4,000
find what Iowans call a "postage stamp" remnant of some, it most
likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from
the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six
feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers'
accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops,
like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a
moldboard plow. A robbery
was in progress.
When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as
rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to
flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground
as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich
repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy,
puts it into seeds we can cat. Much of the energy moves from the
earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists. And much of
the energy is simply wasted, a trail of dollars billowing from the
burglar's satchel.
I've already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the
globe's primary productivity every year. You might have assumed we
and our live, stock eat our way through that volume, but this is not
the case. Part of that total—almost a third of it—is the potential
plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical
rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows
destroy the deep mat
of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering
erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning
grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the
most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it's
mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can't cat. So we
replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind
that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is
perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there
likely were more bison produced naturally on the
farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our
ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and
when it ran out move on.
Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we
fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers.
Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust
fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it
takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost
fertility to an acre of eroded land-in 1997 we burned through more
than 400 years' worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it
from someplace else. Even as the earth beneath
being globalized.
Six thousand years before sodbusters broke up
blood ancestors broke up the Hungarian plain, an area just northwest
of the
short for linearbandkeramik, the German word that
describes the
distinctive pottery remnants that mark their occupation of
Anthropologists call them the wheat-beef people, a name that better
connects those ancients along the
the
domesticated plants and animals, but wheat and beef dominated. All
the domesticates came from an area along what is now the
Iraq-Syria-Turkey border at the edges of
the
is the center of domestication for the Western world's main crops and
livestock, ground zero of catastrophic agriculture.
Two other types of catastrophic agriculture evolved at
roughly the same time, one centered on rice in what is now
water, so it developed only in floodplains, estuaries, and swamps.
Corn agriculture was every bit as voracious as wheat; the Aztecs
could be as brutal and imperialistic as Romans or Brits, but the corn
cultures collapsed with the onslaught of Spanish conquest. Corn
itself simply joined the wheat-beef people's coalition. Wheat was the
empire builder; its bare botanical facts dictated the motion and
violence that we know as imperialism.
The wheat-beef people swept across the western European
plains in less than 300 years, a conquest some archaeologists refer
to as a "blitzkrieg." A different race of humans, the
Cro-Magnons—hunter-gatherers, not farmers—lived on those plains at the
time. Their cave art at places such as
sophistication and profound connection to wildlife. They
probably did
most of their hunting and gathering in uplands and river bottoms,
places the wheat farmers didn't need, suggesting the possibility of
coexistence. That's not what happened, however. Both genetic and
linguistic evidence say that the farmers killed the hunters. The
Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of
Cro-Magnons, the only trace.
Hunter-gatherer archaeological sites of the period contain
spear points that originally belonged to the farmers, and we can
guess they weren't trade goods. One group of anthropologists
concludes, "The evidence from the western extension of the LBK leaves
little room for any other conclusion but that LBK-Mesolithic
interactions were at best chilly and at worst hostile." The world's
surviving Blackfeet,
the best idea of the nature of these interactions.
Wheat is temperate and prefers plowed-up
grasslands. The
globe has a limited stock of temperate grasslands, just as it has a
limited stock of all other biomes. On average, about 10 percent of
all other biomes remain in something like their native state today.
Only I percent of temperate grasslands remains
undestroyed. Wheat
takes what it needs.
The supply of temperate grasslands lies in what are today the
United States, Canada, the South American pampas, New Zealand,
Australia, South Africa, Europe, and the Asiatic extension of the
European
plain into the sub-Siberian steppes. This area largely describes the First
World, the developed world. Temperate grasslands make up not only the
habitat of wheat and beef but also the globe's islands of Caucasians,
of European surnames and languages. In 2000 the countries of the
temperate grasslands, the neo-Europes, accounted for
about 80 percent
of all wheat exports in the world, and about 86 percent of all corn.
That is to say, the neo-Europes drive the world's
agriculture. The
dominance does not stop with grain. These countries, plus the
mothership-Europe-accounted for three fourths of all agricultural
exports of all crops in the world in 1999.
Plato wrote of his country's farmlands:
"What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton
of a
sick man. ... Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains
that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once
covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only
food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were
not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the
sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the
water in loamy soil,
and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running
streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly
there were springs attest that our description of the land is true."
Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted
his country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines
that pushed centers of civilization to
and moving on ran up against the
agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with
famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500,
major "corrective" famine about every ten years; there were
seventy-five in
however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new
food to
The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists
themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic
nature by his hosts at a dinner party in
of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the
French, Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes
enjoyed greater
stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant mortality rate—all
indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down
of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.
The precolonial famines of
would happen when the planet's supply of arable land ran out? We have
a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply
of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to
plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.
The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the
green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled
the amber
revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain-wheat, rice, and
corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three
grains so that they could be hypercharged with
irrigation water and
chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed
nicely with the increased "efficiency" of the industrialized
factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication
of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever
happened to the planet.
For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural
life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land
and into the world's most severe poverty. The experience in
population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not
that people make more people so much as it is that they make more
poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the
world's population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3
billion to the world's poorest classes, the most fecund classes.
The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed
hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population
that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.
Discussion of these, the most poor, however, is largely
irrelevant to the American situation. We say we have poor people
here, but almost no one in this country lives on less than one dollar
a day, the global benchmark for poverty. It marks off a class of
about 1.3 billion people, the hard core of the larger group of 2
billion chronically malnourished people-that is, one third of
humanity. We may forget about them, as most Americans do.
More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution,
which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the
iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make
nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers
had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its
dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it
extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping
past assets.
The common assumption these days is that we muster our
weapons to secure oil, not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever
since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we
eat is backed by at least a calorie of Oil, more like ten. In 1940
the average farm in the
energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last
year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:
1. And this understates the problem, because
at the same time that
there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple
of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and
distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of
oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each
barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that
no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and
Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in
David Pimentet, an expert on food and energy
at Cornell
University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the
United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global
fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his
detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations
by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten
years.
Fertilizer makes a pretty fine bomb right off the shelf, a
chemistry lesson Timothy McVeigh taught at
Murrah Federal Building in 1995-not a small matter, in that the green
revolution has made nitrogen fertilizers ubiquitous in some of the
more violent and desperate comers of the world. Still, there is more
to contemplate in nitrogen's less sensational chemistry.
The chemophobia of modem times excludes fear
of the simple
elements of chemistry's periodic table. We circulate petitions, hold
hearings, launch websites, and buy and sell legislators in regard to
polysyllabic organic compounds—polychlorinated biphenyls, polyvinyls,
DDT, 2-4d, that sort of thing—not simple
carbon or nitrogen. Not that
agriculture's use of the more ornate chemistry is
benign-an infant
born in a rural, wheat-producing county in the
about twice the chance of suffering birth defects as one born in a
rural place that doesn't produce wheat, an effect researchers blame
on chlorophenoxy herbicides. Focusing on
pesticide pollution, though,
misses the worst of the pollutants. Forget the polysyllabic organics.
It is nitrogen-the wellspring of fertility relied upon by every
Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban groundskeeper-that we
should fear most.
Those who model our planet as an organism do so on
the basis
that the earth appears to breathe-it thrives by converting a short
list of basic elements from one compound into the next, Just as our
own bodies cycle oxygen into carbon dioxide and plants cycle carbon
dioxide into oxygen. In fact, two of the planet's most fundamental
humors are oxygen and carbon dioxide. Another is
nitrogen.
Nitrogen can be released from its "fixed" state as a solid in
the soil by natural processes that allow it to circulate freely in
the atmosphere. This also can be done artificially. Indeed, humans
now contribute more nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the planet
itself does. That is, humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen in
play.
This has led to an imbalance. It is easier to create nitrogen
fertilizer than it is to apply it evenly to fields. When farmers dump
nitrogen on a crop, much is wasted. It runs into the water and soil,
where it either reacts chemically with its surroundings to form new
compounds or flows off to fertilize something else, somewhere else.
That chemical reaction, called acidification, is noxious and
contributes significantly to acid rain. One of the compounds produced
by acidification is nitrous oxide, which aggravates the greenhouse
effect. Green growing things normally offset global warming by
sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane
from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre
of
Fertilization is equally worrisome. Rainfall and irrigation water
inevitably washes the nitrogen from fields to creeks and streams,
which flows into rivers, which floods into the ocean. This explains
why the
environmental catastrophe. The nitrogen fertilizes
artificially large
blooms of algae that in growing suck all the oxygen from the water, a
condition biologists call anoxia, which means "oxygen-depleted," Here
there's no need to calculate long-term effects, because life in such
places has no long term: everything dies immediately. The
River's heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in the
America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is
raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes.
Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat
hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These
four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this
country is not about food; it's about commodities that require the
outlay of still more energy to become food.
Part 2 follows...
... continued from Part I
About two thirds of
meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial
uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially
high-fructose corn sweeteners, the key, stone ingredient
in three
quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of
American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold
increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels
developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early
seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor,
who eat the most processed food.
It began with the industrialization of Victorian
empire was then flush with sugar from plantations in the colonies.
Meantime the cities were flush with factory workers. There was no
good way to feed them. And thus was born the afternoon tea break, the
tea consisting primarily of warm water and sugar. If the workers were
well off, they could also afford bread with heavily sugared
jam-sugar-powered industrialization. There was a 500 percent
increase
in per capita sugar consumption in
around the time when the life expectancy of a male factory worker was
seventeen years. By the end of the century the average Brit was
getting about one sixth of his total nutrition from sugar, exactly
the same percentage Americans get today-double what nutritionists
recommend.
There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The
grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal
requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food
energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal bums the
energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the
food-processing industry in the
of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.
That number does not include the fuel used in transporting
the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by
millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on
the edge of town, where the land is cheap. It appears, however, that
the corn cycle is about to come full circle, If a bipartisan
coalition of farm-state lawmakers has their way-and it appears they
will-we will soon buy gasoline containing twice as much fuel alcohol
as it does now. Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for
processed corn in the
According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of
fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The
Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a
quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA
calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a "clean fuel." This
claim
to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly
ignores the dead zone in the
the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. Nor does
this claim cover clean conscience; some still might be unsettled
knowing that our SUVs' demands for fuel compete with the poor's
demand for grain.
Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food
chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the
diner all that carrot's energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken,
then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The
chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other
inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long
enough to be eaten.
As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up
the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror
in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only
doesn't eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other
fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred
times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian's case can
break down on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim
their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how
wiping out 99 percent of wildlife's habitat, as farming has done in
farmers have a peculiar tactic for dealing with the predations of
whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with small-bore rifles, in hopes
the deer will limp off to the woods and die where they won't stink up
the potato fields.
Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the
energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories of
fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced. The
question, then, is: Does eating processed food such as soy burger or
soy milk cancel the energy benefits of vegetarianism, which is to
say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace? Maybe. If
I've done my due
diligence, I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating
was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly
reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches here in
Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under closely
controlled circumstances-no farming, no plows, no corn,
no nitrogen.
Assets have not been stripped. I can't eat the grass directly. This
can go on. There are little niches like this in the system. Each
person's individual charge is to find such niches.
Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the
short end of this argument, especially in the
case of beef Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the
grass-fed lamb. Some cattle cultures-those of
grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in the Unit, ed
States, and it
is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the grain the United
States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of
our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly
corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend
their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much
bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed
with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the
disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is
rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm's fertilizer. The feedlots,
however, are now far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not
“efficient" to haul it to cornfields. It
is waste. It exhales
methane, a globalwarming gas. It pollutes streams.
It takes
thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this
way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.
Still, these livestock do something we can't. They convert
grain's carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good,
except that per capita protein production in the
about double what an average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be
stored as protein in the human body but is simply converted to fat.
This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a
living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a blackmass
remake of the loaves- and-fishes miracle. Prairie's productivity is
lost for grain, grain's productivity is lost in livestock,
livestock's protein is lost to human fat-all federally subsidized for
about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only
two crops, corn and wheat.
This explains why the energy expert David Pimentel is so
worried that the rest of the world will adopt
should be, because the rest of the world is.
percent of its grain to livestock, up from 5 percent in 1960.
went from 3 percent to 31 percent in the same period, and
a sixth of the world's population, has gone from 8 percent to 26
percent. All of these places have poor people who could use the
grain, but they can't afford it.
I live among elk and have learned to respect them. One
moonlit night during the dead of last winter, I looked out my bedroom
window to see about twenty of them grazing a plot of grass the size
of a living room. Just that small patch among acres of other species
of native prairie grass. Why that species and only that species of
grass that night in the worst of winter when the threat to their
survival was the greatest? What magic nutrient did this species alone
contain? What does a wild animal know that we don't? I think we need
this knowledge.
Food is politics, That being the case, I voted
twice in 2002.
The day after Election Day, in a truly dismal mood, I climbed the
mountain behind my house and found a small herd of elk grazing native
grasses in the morning sunlight. My respect for these creatures over
the years has become great enough that on that morning I did not
hesitate but went straight to my job, which was to rack a shell and
drop one cow elk, my household's annual protein supply. I voted with
my weapon of choice-an act not all that uncommon in this world,
largely, I think, as a result of the way we grow food. I can see why
it is catching on. Such a vote has a certain satisfying heft and
finality about it. My particular bit of violence, though, is more
satisfying, I think, than the rest of the globe's ordinary political
mayhem. 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.
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