Environmental Guru
July 3rd, 2008 by Colin
Our environmental expert in residence, Colin Clark, writes these words and has contributed many more on environmental subject to the Daze for several years now. His column has always been incredibly informative. We had more questions, though. So we decided to ask. And will continue to from now on. As Ambassadors of the Less Informed-and-slightly-cynical, we hope that we might get you thinking. Hell, maybe even doing.
It’s quite remarkable, when you stop to think about it, that almost all food and cuisine in the United States of America is available in every season. There are exceptions, but does the produce section at the grocery store really look much different in January than it does in August? Do most restaurants change their menus based on what’s in season? Maybe a handful, but the vast majority have menus that are completely oblivious to seasons. Whatever you want you can have. Think about your favorite restaurant in Austin. Have you ever gone there and ordered your favorite dish and been told, “I’m sorry, it’s not in season”?
It has not been this way for very long in human history. Imagine your great, great grandparents. Wherever they lived in the 1800s, they didn’t have strawberries flown in from thousands of miles away to the general store. They didn’t have perishable food moved across continents in hours, available in stores with electricity, water misters, and air conditioning. (This is not to say that life was “better” or “worse” then.)
We have conveniences, and we have luxuries that we think of as conveniences because they are commonplace and have become expected. Like strawberries year round. And I am as guilty as anyone of being a consumer in our industrialized agriculture. I like strawberries.
How did we get here? How did we reach a point in just a few generations where the average ounce of food we eat has traveled over a thousand miles from farm to mouth?
-COLIN CLARK
AUSTIN DAZE: It’s great to hear all of this stuff, but what are your solutions? What can people reading this do to make things better?
COLIN CLARK: The first thing is to be aware of the magnitude of the problems that face civilization and the planet. Before you know how to solve a problem you have to know that there is one. A lot of concerns that I have as a society is that our eyes aren’t open to the problems that we have so we don’t even know where to start anything. What’s good is that people are becoming more aware of things like global warming. Most people have an awareness of the problem. As oil and gas prices are going up people are starting to think about the fact that we have a problem. But in the energy arena people are upset that the prices are high but they don’t really understand why. They will probably continue to be high for as long as people are alive.
What can a single person do? People have been told, “Well you can change your light bulbs.” Ok, that’s good. Reduce your energy use. Something that Al Gore has been saying is that you can reduce your carbon footprint more by eating a vegetarian diet than by selling your SUV and driving a hybrid. Because it requires so much fossil fuel to get a pound of beef to your plate compared to the reduction in oil use or energy use of switching cars. So you can switch to a vegetarian diet.
AD: Why are we talking about food today?
CC: There has been some popular books recently encouraging people to think about food and where it comes from and that you can buy anything you want whenever you want. How did we get there? Mainly: transportation and refrigeration. A hundred years ago we didn’t have a system of transporting fruit from South America to mainland US in a quick enough way. But with airplanes and railroads we can do all of that. It really struck me how ingrained in American culture that whatever you want you can get at any time. It’s a remarkable thing that hasn’t been true for most of the generations of people that have ever lived on the planet. Some of the things that we take as conveniences are really luxuries—they have become commonplace because of cheap transportation.
AD: What are some examples of luxuries?
CC: Strawberries. Having strawberries out of season. Most of the year, you can have strawberries because they will be grown in a greenhouse in California or Chile. It’s an unsustainable food system we’ve set up.
AD: When you say unsustainable…
CC: It can’t go on forever. The energy required to make our current system function is going to become so expensive that strawberries from Chile are gong to be too expensive. We are either going to have to not eat strawberries or pay for them. We might as well start preparing for that by thinking about where our food comes from and eat what is in season and grown closer to where we live.
AD: Isn’t it human nature to want things that we can’t have?
CC: Maybe. A lot of where my thinking comes in is to start transitioning to a world with less cheap energy. How are we going to do that? Thoughtfully and smoothly, or abruptly and in an unplanned way. The trajectory now is abrupt and could have painful impacts for our society.
AD: So OK, I know that I will probably be able to eat and afford to eat strawberries for the rest of my life. Why should I care? What’s the context?
CC: The planet is heating up; Polar bears are probably not going to have any ice to survive on. One way to look at it is that eating food that comes from really far away is pretty selfish because food transported thousands of miles produces global warming emissions that are going to make life harder for all of humanity. We owe it to future generations to reduce carbon emissions as much as we can. One way to do that is to not consume food from really far away. But it’s really hard to do. It’s a huge challenge to go to the grocery store and find foods from close by. You can go to a Farmer’s Market. But they don’t have everything you need. Another thing that we need to ramp up is gardening. It’s probably forgotten for our generation during WWII the government encouraged people to have gardens: Victory Gardens. What a crazy idea. Could you imagine the Bush administration encouraging people to plant tomatoes? But it would be really smart for the next President or city council or state legislature to encourage us to grow our own food.
AD: A lot of us here have the ability to do that because of the outdoor space. What about city dwellers who don’t?
CC: There are options for growing food if you live in an apartment. There is a product called the Earth Box. If you have some window sunlight you can grow plants indoors and There is a system for efficient ways to maximize crop yield by planting plants close to each other that work well together. So some people that live in apartments have balconies or stairwells that get light. Another option is a community garden where you can pay a small amount and you get a plot and you can grow whatever you want. Another option is community supported agriculture where you can sign up to receive food from a local farm and they give you whatever is in season.
AD: Restaurants seem to be on the seasonal menu trend. That can generally be more expensive. What do you think about the gap between people that can afford to be more environmentally conscience and those that, well, can’t?
CC: I think if you suscribe to one of these communities, you get so much produce and vegetables you would have to spend very little money at the grocery store. It can be cheaper to be on one of these subscriptions and it has nutritional value. If you try and buy organic at Whole Foods that is going to be expensive but you don’t have to have a lot of money to eat well.
AD: Do you think it’s something people are lazy about or just don’t know about?
CC: I think it’s like most things in our society where people say, “Why on earth is that going on?” whether it’s the war in Iraq or our food system. I think people aren’t aware of it. It’s not something you learn in school.
AD: That’s another interesting solution—to start kids at a younger age.
CC: Yes. There is a great organization in Austin called the Green Corn Project that help low income people start organic food gardens. They get volunteers and go build plots and prepare them and try and enable people that don’t have a lot of money to provide healthy food for themselves. You can volunteer with Green Corn Project.
AD: What about the cost of having to water your garden in Austin? Is that fixing one problem and causing another?
CC: Something else people can do is catch the rain water. You don’t pay for the water and plants like rain water more than tap water.***
