Food production, climate change, and national security

There's a fascinating article on the New York Times webpage about food production and how we need to change the way we look at food in the coming years. I've long thought the way we subsidize farmers to grow huge monoculture crops is pretty ridiculous, but it's actually now becoming dangerous for a variety of reasons. Here are some sobering statistics:

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

The article goes on to discuss some really interesting points about how food production is tied to climate change, and even national security. The amount of fossil fuel we use to simply grow food makes us even more reliant on foreign countries. This article has some great ideas on how to reform our food production systems to get away from the glut of fossil fuels, monoculture crops, and get back to real food production.

The ideas outlined in this article include many of the reasons I don't eat hardly any meat, avoid packaged food like the plague, and buy as many veggies as possible from my local farmer's market. If you're interested in climate change, energy issues, and how food production is polluting our world, you need to read this article.