WHERE ARE WE? (see the special announcement following this blog)
Part 3: We are wandering in a wilderness of our own making.
According to the Bible the people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were stuck in the desert for 40 years, during which the Lord provided them with ‘food from heaven’, manna. During those wandering days the manna was only good for one day, except on the Sabbath when miraculously, it lasted for 48 hours. Those Israelis with an inclination to trade and profit- not an unusual trait among these folk – got a bum deal. If they gathered a bit more than needed for their own family intending to sell it later to the lazy fellows who had not picked up enough for themselves, this effort would misfire as speculation in food proved impossible. The Lord ordained that all manna, being essential food and not a commodity, could not be sold for a profit. Does that mean that holding back food for later gain is a sin? Yes. It is equally true is that robbing food off its nutritional value, for the single motive of profit, is a sin as well.
Today we, like the people of Israel, also dwell in the desert, one of our own making. We have fashioned a world that is increasingly unfit for all living creatures, plants, animals, and us humans as well, God’s Kingdom to come. By growing and distorting the food the way we do, we are becoming self-consumers: cannibals in other words.
That needs an explanation.
Thanks to intensive land use through mining, road building, city construction, vacuuming the oceans, tar-sand extraction, and especially land-clearing, we humans have appropriated major portions of the globe for our exclusive use at the expense of everything else, and have made the earth largely unfit for organic cultivation. By mainly relying on chemicals to grow crops we are destroying the very basis of life, leaving little or no space for the non-human world. Don’t get fooled by the package: by all appearance our planet still looks OK. It’s the invisibles, the air, water and soil that hide the contamination.
Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass originally available, our total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity,” which was 100 percent ‘in the beginning.’ There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both concluded about a decade ago, that we humans, a single species among millions, consumed about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. Now, thanks to fracking, the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the rise of China as an industrial power, the never-ending global forests clearing and fires, overgrazing, ocean depleting and the ever higher pollution, a rapid increase in Primary Productivity is occurring: it could now easily be more than 45 percent. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We, the 7 billion plus of us raping plunderers, have simply stolen the food, the habitat, the soil, air, water from all other creatures, all deserving an equal portion to live, in the process distorting our own habitat.
The Dust Bowl in the Thirties and the sand storms in China and fire storms elsewhere are no accident of nature. Intensive cultivation and replacing the prairies with our own preferred grass, wheat, has vastly reduced the top soil, while Climate Change is doing the rest. The paradox is that now we feed most of this grain to livestock, while that same livestock was perfectly content to eat native prairie grass. Never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef cattle raised in the same area today. We call that progress.
I have this book: Fast Food Nation. I bought it at the Tweed Thrift shop for $2.00, brand new, never been read. The original price was $38.95 purchased at the Redeemer College Bookstore of all places. In it I read that on these same former prairies where once millions of buffalo roamed, now covered with endless stretches of corn and wheat, ConAgra operates feedlots containing up to 100,000 head of cattle, so closely crowded together that it looks like an ocean of mooing, moving mass of multiple shades of white and brown. These animals eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs, their digestion aided by anabolic steroids implanted in their ear. Just to gain 400 pounds – about 180 kilos – each animal consumes 3000 pounds – 1350 kg – of grain, while each day depositing 50 liters of urine and manure which is dumped in a nearby lagoon, leaving more excrement than a city of Chicago produces.
By plowing up the prairies, by eliminating the buffalo and replacing them with grain-fed cows, we have caused the topsoil to disappear. But no problem: when the most fertile soil in the world vanishes we fill it again with new energy in the form of (finite and polluting) oil-rich fertilizers. Chandran Nair, who runs the Global Institute for Tomorrow, argues that the true economic cost of a US$4 burger is US$100, if the cost of converting grain to meat, water and energy use is factored in. That is just one example of the debt we owe to our children and grandchildren. Indeed we live on Borrowed Time.
God had a purpose when he told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to live off the fruits of the land, be vegetarian. Now, in 2014, this truth makes eminent sense again because the mass marketing of meat is leading to the death of the country side, in the process pumping billions of tons of Green House Gases – the most lethal methane – into the air. Thanks to the nitrates in fertilizers sea-beds are deprived of oxygen, creating numerous dead zones in the world’s oceans. Thanks to endless monoculture crops, fields lose their wildlife. Thanks to expanded need for feed, native tribes are forced out of their rainforest habitat, depriving the world of so needed weather stabilizers and precious oxygen. Thanks to America’s cheap meat peasants in India no longer can make a living, committing suicide in droves. Thanks to ‘mega-dairies’ where 10,000 cows are kept fouling the air in California, children suffer from asthma. Thanks to the excess of effluent from nearby farms where as many as a million pigs are produced each year in China entire villages lack clean water.
The Oceans too suffer.
Next time you eat chicken, which, thanks to Tyson Foods, has become the lowest priced meat, you might pray a prayer for the poor people in Peru.
In Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat a special chapter is devoted to the fish meal industry. The lunacy of this business is that it takes a valuable protein that very few people eat enough of – oily fish – and turning it into a protein that is less healthy and that we already eat in excess: broiler chicken. Here is a quote from that book:
Fishmeal is one of the filthiest secrets of the factory-farming industry, an environmental catastrophe that involves sucking millions of tons of small fish out of the sea and crushing them into fish oil and dry feed for farmed fish, pigs and chickens. The process deprives millions of larger wild fish, birds and marine mammals of their natural prey, drastically depleting stocks of important species. It also pumps vile fatty waste into the ocean bays, creating dead zones; polluting the atmosphere around the processing plants, causing wide-spread human health problems; and diverts what could be a highly valuable source of nutrition for people to industrially farmed animals.
The result is that in Peru, near these factories, 20-30 percent of the people suffer from malnutrition and children develop lesions on their skin from the fumes the fishmeal factories emit. The book states that 99 percent of the broiler chickens in America are reared in the worst kind of processing plants where many chickens are diseased and in such poor shape that they can barely walk, while the minimum-wage workers suffer swollen hands from being pecked when catching the birds. Due to the crowded conditions food poisoning is rampant. Nearly a third of the planet’s land surface is devoted to rearing farm animals or growing their feed. If these cereals went directly to humans, an extra three billions people could be fed.
Where are we?
We are wandering in a wilderness of our own making and dying in the process thanks to fast – and increasingly foul food. Capitalism is decapitating us. “The lust for money is the root of all evil” writes Paul to his protégé in 1 Tim. 6:10. That is especially true in food production. Food now comes from oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least ten calories of oil. When my grandparents farmed, they produced pure food calories: no electricity but real horse- and human muscle power for input. Now even to obtain the oil takes lots of oil: today there is a lot more oil in our food and there is less oil in our oil. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today that ratio is as high as 40 barrels equivalent for 100 obtained in the Alberta Tar Sands. Fracking too has an extreme high ratio. The lower the energy return, the higher the pollution, and this danger will only increase as we need the energy to survive. Forget sustainable development. Forget measures to control Climate Change. We are at the point of no return, addicted as we are to oil, to sugar, to processed foods, all conspiring to make us dig our own graves.
About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled “processed,” 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 keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland 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. Want to abandon our sugar addiction? Simple. Make meals from scratch. Even better: grow it yourself. Liberate yourself from the corporate clutches that cater to our cravings for sweets that slowly kill us.
Get a healthy breakfast. It is so simple to prepare oats in a slow cooker at night to be ready in the morning, rather than eat cereals. 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 burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories 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.
Then there is ethanol, another lie. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The (US) 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,” which is just as much baloney as calling Tar Sand Oil ethical. This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. The grain used to make a gallon of ‘bio’ fuel can feed a family for weeks. Eating a carrot gives the eater 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 in-edibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten.
Where are we?
Just as the cows, the pigs, the chickens, all wallowing in their own dirt on the way to a cruel death, pumped full with antibiotics, our bodies too, chockfull with chemical compounds, are on that same road, rapidly losing the ability to resist infections, while wandering aimless from mall to mall.
Psalm 13 comes to mind: “The fool has said in his heart: There is no God above.” We are those fools. My commentary says, “A fool is not an ignoramus, an atheist or an agnostic. A fool is one who has his values all wrong, and is encouraged to live as if God would never take action.” In food production too we have chosen the way of death, death for ourselves and death for the planet.
I’ve been taught that Reformation applies to all of life. Everything needs to be changed drastically. The matter of SEAKING FIRST THE KINGDOM, as Jesus asked us to do, means embracing a Global Perspective, involving also seeking the welfare of all animals and every single aspect of the natural world.
Next week: Where are we in the mad maze of magic money?
The book featured below has influenced my thinking and my life more than any other book I own. Translating it so that a wider audience may also benefit, has, without doubt, been, by the grace of God, my most rewarding accomplishment. The translation has greatly benefitted from the careful editing by Harry van Dyke, professor emeritus in history of Redeemer University College.
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