The Future of Food

After watching the documentary "The Future of Food," my feelings were much the same as they are any time someone brings up a "pressing issue." So What. Discussions like this are pointless because they bring about no change whatsoever. You want examples? How about "An Inconvenient Truth." People said it was groundbreaking, that it would change the way we think. And yet, several years later, the U.S. hasn't signed the Kyoto Accords, and we continue to pollute just as much as ever. Similarly, "The Future of Food," while certainly an interesting conversation piece, is as irrelevant as anything so long as we need fossil-fuel based fertilizers and bio-engineered crops, which we will continue to need even more as our population continues to bloom.

Now I'll be honest, if the film presented any ideas worthwhile at the end I missed it because I fell asleep. But in my defense, the screenwriters shouldn't have waited until the very end of the movie to get to the point. This is the YouTube generation, and our attention spans won't carry us through a feature length movie about Monsanto seeds.

Now on to the second part of the blog... I don't have a single favorite food so for simplicity's sake I'm going with bananas, mostly because I already know where they come from and what's involved in getting them from a field in Guatemala/Ecuador/Costa Rica/my dad's backyard to my kitchen counter.

I couldn't find any hard data describing the exact costs of banana production, so I'm just going to spout off what I know/think I know.
1. Bananas require fertilizer to produce consistently. That would most likely be sourced from fossil fuels. Mmmmm.
2. Bananas require pesticides and to some degree, treatment for viruses. The varieties grown for commercial production are extremely susceptible to several diseases.
3. Production provides tens of thousands of low-skill jobs, thereby keeping the Central American proletariat employed and therefore off the streets.
4. The bananas are loaded onto trucks and shipped to a port, where they are loaded onto boats, which take them eventually to Publix where they are purchased by yours truly and just about every other person that can afford to pay 69 cents a pound for fruit. I had a picture of one of the trucks from my trip to Costa Rica but I seem to have misplaced it.


Image taken from Univ. of Wisconsin Eau Claire website

According to Chiquita's website, they are committed to preventing further deforestation and also pay wages that are higher than the minimum wage in the countries they operate in. They also claim to recycle plant material, plastic bags, etc., and conserve water. Frankly, even if their website blatantly stated that they were napalming the rain forest and using children for slave labor, I'd still buy their bananas.

ECHO

The field trip to ECHO was definitely the best class so far. I'm not usually a big fan of missionary organizations, but I like ECHO's commitment to teaching people how to feed themselves. One of the biggest problems in our foreign policy to the third world is that we try to feed people in other countries, rather than teach them to fend for themselves.

When I was a teenager, I lived in Bonita Springs, on about three acres of land covered by fruit trees and a vegetable garden big enough to feed my dad's entire brood. I spent probably three hours a day for two years just maintaining the trees and the garden, so I like to think I have a green thumb. As such, I definitely appreciated the variety and methods of farming the guide showed us at ECHO. The starfruit tree was pretty cool, it reminded me of the one we had, and what a pain in the ass it was to clean up and compost the fruit every day. And the guide was right, the prickly pear cactus did taste like okra.



On Tuesday, unless they reschedule again, I'll be starting my volunteer work at ECHO. I'm assigned to the PR office, but hopefully I'll get to spend most of my time on the farm.