The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [94]
But perhaps most discouraging of all, my industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as its conventional counterpart. Asparagus traveling in a 747 from Argentina; blackberries trucked up from Mexico; a salad chilled to thirty-six degrees from the moment it was picked in Arizona (where Earthbound moves its entire operation every winter) to the moment I walk it out the doors of my Whole Foods. The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate. And while it is true that organic farmers don’t spread fertilizers made from natural gas or spray pesticides made from petroleum, industrial organic farmers often wind up burning more diesel fuel than their conventional counterparts: in trucking bulky loads of compost across the countryside and weeding their fields, a particularly energy-intensive process involving extra irrigation (to germinate the weeds before planting) and extra cultivation. All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, according to David Pimentel, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby.
Yet growing the food is the least of it: only a fifth of the total energy used to feed us is consumed on the farm; the rest is spent processing the food and moving it around. At least in terms of the fuel burned to get it from the farm to my table, there’s little reason to think my Cascadian Farm TV dinner or Earthbound Farm spring mix salad is any more sustainable than a conventional TV dinner or salad would have been.
Well, at least we didn’t eat it in the car.
So is an industrial organic food chain finally a contradiction in terms? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it is. Of course it is possible to live with contradictions, at least for a time, and sometimes it is necessary or worthwhile. But we ought at least face up to the cost of our compromises. The inspiration for organic was to find a way to feed ourselves more in keeping with the logic of nature, to build a food system that looked more like an ecosystem that would draw its fertility and energy from the sun. To feed ourselves otherwise was “unsustainable,” a word that’s been so abused we’re apt to forget what it very specifically means: Sooner or later it must collapse. To a remarkable extent, farmers succeeded in creating the new food chain on their farms; the trouble began when they encountered the expectations of the supermarket. As in so many other realms, nature’s logic has proven no match for the logic of capitalism, one in which cheap energy has always been a given. And so, today, the organic food industry finds itself in a most unexpected, uncomfortable, and, yes, unsustainable position: floating on a sinking sea of petroleum.
TEN
GRASS
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture
1. MONDAY
For something people profess to like so much, grass is peculiarly hard for us to see. Oh, you can see it well enough in a general sense, but how much do you really see when you look at a patch of grass? The color green, of course, perhaps a transitory recording of the breeze: an abstraction. Grass to us is more ground than figure, a backdrop to more legible things in the landscape—trees, animals, buildings. It’s less a subject in its own right than a context. Maybe this has to do with the disparity in scale between us and the uncountable tiny beings that make up a pasture. Maybe we’re just too big to see what’s going on down there in any detail.
Curiously, we seem to like grass less for what it is than for what it isn’t—the forest, I mean—and yet we’re much more likely to identify with a tree