By Sarah Streed

…connecting faith and the environment

High gas prices will certainly affect our lives. We think immediately of fewer driving vacations, fewer trips to the mall, forgoing that new SUV, etc. But do we think of how the price of petroleum and gas will affect one of life’s basic necessities, i.e., our food?

Take the area of food distribution. A vast transportation network is required by the food industry in order to connect its numerous parts. Fuel is needed in all its parts—from fueling the trucks, railroads, airplanes, and ships that carry our food to fueling the refrigerators as it waits in storage to be distributed. Vast amounts of oil and gas are used, both in raw materials and as energy, in all stages of food production—from fertilizers to pesticides, from fueling farm machinery and machinery at processing plants.

A piece of food in the U.S. travels, on average, 1,300 miles and changes hands half a dozen times before it reaches you, the consumer. You can imagine what an enormous job this is. If we want to get mathematic, the huge amounts of oil it takes to get our food from field to fork becomes downright startling: When iceberg lettuce is imported to the U.S. from Britain/England, the energy ratio is 0.00786. In other words, 127 calories of energy (aviation fuel) are needed to transport 1 calorie of lettuce across the Atlantic. If the energy needed for the lettuce cultivation, packaging, refrigeration, distribution in the U.S. you, the consumer, shopping by car, were included, the energy needed would be even higher.

You can see how inefficient our food system is when viewed mathematically. Take another example: ketchup. Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology analyzed the production of tomato ketchup. They studied the inputs to the growing, cultivating of the tomato and converting it to tomato paste in Italy. Then they looked at the processing and packaging of the paste and other ingredients into tomato ketchup in Sweden. The aseptic bags used to package the tomato paste were produced in the Netherlands, transported to Italy to be filled, placed in steel barrels, then moved to Sweden. The five layered, red bottles were either produced in the UK or Sweden with materials from Japan, Italy, Belgium, the USA and Denmark. The polypropylene (PP) screw-cap of the bottle and plug—made from low density polyethylene (LDPE) was produced in Denmark and transported to Sweden. Also, LDPE shrink-film and corrugated cardboard were used to distribute the final product. Altogether, this involved more than 52 transport and process stages—and this didn’t even include the labels, glue and ink.

Our food system requires cheap energy—but the extensive environmental costs associated with cheap energy are regarded as superficial and not worth noticing. In agricultural language, they are called externalities, or the hidden costs. Of course, you, the consumer, are paying these hidden costs every day in air and water pollution, increased health risks from chemical toxins, and so on.

Sustainable agriculture is based on systems that can be used for centuries (not decades) without degrading our resources. Sustainable agriculture emerged in the 1980s in response to many of the problems of industrial agriculture that we have just been talking about.

Industrial agriculture produces an enormous amount of food. Many people wonder how something so low-key and small-scale as sustainable agriculture can possibly produce enough food.

Well, let’s look at some facts: Today, less than 2 percent of the people in the U.S. are farmers. We spend 10 percent, or a dime out of each dollar of our disposable income on farm produced food. The farmer gets only a single penny of that dime while the other 9 cents goes for marketing and input (fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) firms. We can’t squeeze much more from the farmer’s penny—food won’t be cheaper if we squeeze more farmers out of business.

In contrast, a study of 2,800 sustainable farmers in northwestern Europe produced twice as many crops as conventional farmers, yet used 60 to 70 percent less fertilizers, pesticides, and energy. In addition, these farms contributed more to the local economy by each farm spending more than 13500 pounds on local goods and services

Our food system, once simple, direct and community based, has become increasingly complex, indirect, and global. Sustainable agriculture is better for the environment, uses less oil and petroleum and is better for our communities. The choice is ours to make.

September’s tip: Talk about the hidden costs of industrial agriculture. Support sustainable agriculture precisely because it doesn’t have these hidden costs.

Sarah Streed is a board member of the Wisconsin Interfaith Climate & Energy Campaign (WICEC) and runs Write Stuff Works (www.writestuffworks.com ) a writing business. She lives in Stoughton, Wisconsin with her husband and children. Email smstreed@sbcglobal.net

All rights reserved by Sarah Streed.

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