Melanine milk, aluminum dumplings and glow-in-the-dark pork. The grubby side of the growing appetite for better quality food has tempted some food producers to cut corners for an extra yuan. You would think these Chinese food scandals would be enough to turn some people vegan, but that would mean actually believing that our vegetables are far healthier alternatives.
The swelling middle class populations in China, India and other emerging economies are stressing an already stressed global food system. To secure a supply of soybeans and other crops, Chinese companies have been trying to buy large swathes of farmland in Brazil. In the same way that China’s emerging middle class has changed global demand for hard commodities like metals, its appetite is changing the consumption of soft commodities like grains too. As people become more affluent, they tend to crave more meat. Chinese per capita consumption of meat quadrupled from 1980 to 2005, according to the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization. In turn, more demand for meat means a greater demand for grains. About one third of the global cereal harvest goes to feed livestock. Larger animals require more feed: when it comes to converting feed to weight, chickens are more efficient than pigs, which are more efficient than cattle.
When we step into a modern supermarket and see its shelves stocked high with food, it is easy to believe in plenty. Spurred in part by catastrophes like the Bengal Famine of 1943, Norman Borlaug and other scientists spent decades helping create a “Green Revolution.” To feed our growing populations, we industrialized the way we produced food. We favored high-yield grain, vegetable and fruit varieties that could withstand copious amounts of fertilizer and pesticides, and could largely be standardized in size and shape, so that they could be more easily harvested and processed by machinery. We genetically modified our foods and increased the amount of food that we could produce per square foot. We herded more cows and chickens and pigs into “concentrated animal feeding operations” (or “CAFOs”).
To wring your hands about the food supply is to belie the miracle of the Green Revolution and to risk ridicule as a neo-malthusian, a radical animal rights activist or worse. Yet worries about our food supply are not unfounded. Our post-Borlaug food supply assumes continual access to cheap oil and cheap water when their continued cheapness is becoming questionable. Michael Pollan, the author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma says that the amount of chemical fertilizers used on modern varieties of corn means it takes 1.2 gallons of oil for every bushel of corn fed to cattle. Our known supplies of oil are in places from which it is more expensive to extract or locations that are politically unstable. Water supplies must travel further over systems that are strained and inefficient, and questions over water distribution are causing more geographic squabbles. Agriculture constitutes 70 percent of our water consumption.
Traditional farming methods combined animal and crop raising: surplus or discarded vegetables and grains could be fed to the animals, while animal waste could be used to fertilize crops. Now waste run-off from CAFOs often risks poisoning water supplies or seeping into nearby crops, as they have during recent outbreaks of e. coli on leafy vegetables. (This summer’s e. coli breakout in Europe has been tracked down to Egyptian sprout seeds). Our use of pesticides might also be putting us at risk. Some scientists believe that pesticide run-off is a major cause of declining bee populations throughout the world—a troubling development since we depend on bees for fertilizing many of our food crops. The radioactive contamination found in Japan’s crops and other foods in the aftermath of the Fukushima incident was yet another reminder of how vulnerable our food system can be.
The dark side of the Green Revolution miracle is that there are unintended consequences of GMO crops. Their use has meant that farmers grow more dependent on them and so farmers grow fewer varieties of crops. Waning genetic diversity means that something virulent to a particular strain could sweep across our monoculture fields. (That is why there are seed banks like Norway’s Global Seed Vault, which collect and house seeds as a means to protect genetic variety among food crops).
Fish have also become challenged as a food source. Already, aquaculture constitutes about half of the fish we eat, while fish farming itself faces issues similar to that of animal raising: genetic modification, the prevalence of antibiotics and other chemicals, the contamination of local ecolological systems, says Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish: the Future of the Last Wild Food.
These days our food travels thousands of miles to get to our plates. The migration of people to the cities means that people are further removed from even a basic understanding about the production of food. Meanwhile more people do not know what green tomatoes look like or what meat looks like before it is plucked, skinned, deboned and processed into clean, geometric shapes that are then prettily shrink wrapped. As a graduate student, I remember once deboning chicken to prepare my dinner. A young undergraduate housemate, who had grown up in an affluent New York suburb, asked me what I was doing. “Is that what chicken looks like when it is uncooked?” she exclaimed.
Only a pessimist or luddite would believe that technology cannot ultimately find solutions: vertical farming and hydroponic gardening are techniques that might help. Additionally, Greenberg says that aquaculture solutions might entail the development of self-contained, above ground aquaculture systems. Those techniques help place farms and aquaculture systems in or closer to cities, where they are needed most. More controversially, agribusiness companies continue work on genetically modified seeds, since they and others believe that improving yield is one of the only realistic solutions to the growing number of mouths to feed in the world. Food problems are as much about distribution and income inequality as production, however. Writers like Raj Patel, the author of Stuffed and Starved, note the terrible irony that there are one billion obese people versus 800 million starving people in the world.
Regardless of what solutions we ultimately choose, the transition to a new food system could be pronounced and painful. Will there be a new green revolution or will we have to change our concept of what constitutes a meal? The wealthy will likely have access to more local and organic food than most of us, but an exploding global population clearly means that most of us will consume food that is produced on some kind of mass basis. Heaven forbid, however, that people like Arnold van Huis of Wageningen University, who promote insects as a protein source, are correct about their future primacy as food; there are those of us who prefer good steak. Even van Huis concedes that many people would have to overcome the “yuck factor,” though many Asians and Europeans are less queasy than Americans about food. The Cantonese like to say that they will eat anything on four legs except a table.
We will not likely see the disappearance of the cow, chicken and pig as major meat sources, but it is possible that they could become more like luxury foods. Our ancestors were not ignorant of that concept. They ate meat when they could afford it, not at every meal, as many consumers in developed countries have become accustomed. Haves and have nots might be further separated by what they can afford to eat. Even good untainted fruits and vegetables are getting expensive. Some of us will eat mostly mass produced food, while others will enjoy foods that are more artisanal. A banker friend who was eating at a Shanghainese hot spot recounted once sitting down to lunch when a migrant from the countryside looked in through the window. As the migrant peered at the restaurant’s finery and its well-dressed diners, my friend did not detect any anger or envy. Instead, he said it was as if the migrant, his rags strongly suggesting of homelessness, was looking at a lunar landscape. The frame of reference was utterly, incomprehensibly alien to him.
Posted by wayneyang 
