The holiday season is upon us and soon we'll be feasting as we have for centuries - but for how much longer will our food supply model (and expectations) be reasonable?
Usually around Veterans Day I re-read "The Hunt for Red October" as a sentimental journey to the Cold War and my Navy days at the very end of it. This year however, one scene in the book gave me particular pause. When one of the Russian officers asks what the defectors might find most surprising about life in the United States, he is told about supermarkets, where the abundance of meats, groceries, and produce fill a space almost as large as a football field.
Certainly the supermarket (like the big box store which followed it) is a truly American achievement. Conversely though, many may consider this less an achievement than a momentary blip in the long history of mankind, food, and consumption.
I, for one, have never been a fan of supermarkets. Fortunately I have spent most of my life in urban areas where the use of them can be mitigated. But for huge swaths of the American population, their entire food supply (and choices) are governed by large national or regional food chains, which are themselves governed by commodity markets, weather, natural and man-made disasters, rail availability, trucking availability, ships, dock workers, farm labor and of course, seasonality. Keeping abreast of all this as well as the normal difficulties incumbent in the guessing game of consumer supply and demand is a puzzle that has stymied logicians for millennia.
The current vogue these days is to discuss how climate change is going to affect our global food supplies. This is a valid discussion to have, but not one I am going to pursue here beyond this point--. As a globe changes its climate to the warmer (or cooler) the arable land belts change in kind. In the case of warmer, this means that in 100 years the Eastern Shore of Maryland might be growing citrus while Siberia is growing winter wheat. In some ways a warmer planet will actually increase the amount of arable land available for production since much of the planet's northern continental mass is currently held-up in tundra and permafrost. As an organic entity - the planet can balance itself.
What's more dubious going into the future is the expectations we have developed for food availability dependent upon three very volatile and fleeting things: global production, cheap labor, and cheap transportation. Let's start with global production.
Since the Roman Empire and salt, the flow of luxury food stuffs has been the pride and purview of princes. This continued on through the caravan routes of the Silk Road and of course the navigation race in the 15th Century that eventually led to the Colombian Exchange in the 16th Century and beyond. With each advance in arable land production around the world the luxuriousness of various food stuffs diminished - let's call this "food democratization" for lack of a better term. To colonial Americans (as an example) the rarity and exotic nature of the pineapple made it a symbol of abundant hospitality and good fortune - now the same fruit is unceremoniously dumped into a smoothie at the gym along with such other former delicacies as oranges, bananas and mangoes.
The post Colombian Exchange world opened up huge swaths of tropical and subtropical lands for intensive cultivation, and this in turn required huge amounts of cheap labor to work the land and harvest and process the crops; first indigenous labor and then imported. This problem still persists. During the recent pandemic, fruit crops in many places such as Australia and New Zealand suffered for lack of migrant workers from say Tonga and American Samoa to pick the crops before they spoiled. The persistent problem with illegal immigration in the United States has a direct link to the need for cheap agricultural labor. Whatever moral trepidation some may have regarding the plight of migrant workers, few are inclined to pay the prices "fair labor" will impose upon the retail cost of food in the marketplace.
Right alongside global production and cheap labor is cheap transportation. In the United States the 19th Century rail system was so tied to agricultural production that farms and homesteads were literally envisioned in the railroad's master plan. Before that, the nation's first infrastructure allotments were in the form of funds to build highways and canals primarily for moving agricultural produce to markets and naturally - consumers - and Europe was no less preoccupied with infrastructure of this sort. Two World Wars only underscored this problem. Going back to The Hunt for Red October, the whole premise of the novel begins with the elaborate NATO plans designed to protect the North Atlantic shipping lanes from submarine attacks as a safeguard against starvation in Western Europe and Britain in the event of a war.
Thus in many ways, cheap transportation becomes the lynch pin of our modern food supply. Whatever arable land we have, and whatever the labor costs involved in growing produce upon it, it is the price (and timeliness) of transportation that ultimately makes an agricultural product viable (or even available) and here is where supermarkets will run into difficulty in the decades to come, especially as we transition away from carbon based energy sources. Some will say this becomes a mandate for nations to change their consumption practices. But is this fair, desirable or even practical? Will mankind want to change their eating habits based on the concepts of cheap transportation? And if not, will we see a reversal in the democratization of food?
Personally I feel we can find better ways to protect and localize our food supplies, even with products that are not native or even tolerant of our local climates. Whereas it's true that some agricultural products like cereal grains require large amounts of arable land and water, others like fruits and vegetables may be very well adapted for smaller micro-climate concepts with limited distribution. Take for example citrus. Up until the mid Twentieth Century, is was not uncommon to find greenhouses, conservatories and orangeries in middle class homes, where pineapples and citrus were grown as common hobby plants. Imagine if
we dedicated the same square-footage currently allotted for garages in suburban tract housing to orangeries. Imagine also it we took the flat, black tarred roofs off of abandoned shopping malls, replacing them with angled glass roofs, and turned these too into orangeries; the combined local production could be impressive.
Going forward into an era where huge containers ships will have to be either nuclear powered (something no country wants for many national security reasons) or much smaller to allow for the limitations of solar power, growing everything everywhere locally will have increasing appeal both economically and gastronomically.
Another thing to consider is what I call "the butternut squash" compromise. Early on, living in Puerto Rico, I had a craving for butternut squash one evening, but was appalled at the price. I told a friend of mine (who was originally from California) about this, and he gave me some excellent advice: "boil some green bananas, mash them with butter, add salt and pepper, and they taste just like butternut squash." I did as he suggested and voile - mock butternut squash! The point being, we can bemoan food costs or we can look to other substitutes within our own particular biosphere, and not sacrifice the spirit of our choices regardless of the letter of those choices our location otherwise dictates.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge however, will be meat and dairy production. Some meat like goats and poultry are well adapted to urban and suburban localities; others like cattle - not so much. I only eat beef a few times a year, so I am a bad example of this problem - but I do eat a lot of chicken and pork. How we address the locality issues with meat production and balance this with the humane treatment of the animals in question will be a difficult moral dilemma for decades to come, however more consumption of commercially raised venison might be a solution. For centuries venison was a prime protein, and unlike cattle, venison is ideally suited for free-range growth in both urban and suburban settings. Perhaps we will see a return of game preserves as a solution to increasing locally produced meats. The same can be said of allowing free range pigs in local preserves. Yet another solution is a return to popular proteins from the not so distant past - pigeons (squab) is easy to raise in urban and suburban environments as are rabbits. Its not so much a question of not having enough to eat as much as what we want to eat and from where we get it.
And these are things to consider as our holiday cornucopias suffer a year of backed-up supply chains. Wars, plagues, and natural disasters have caused real famines for millennia, but that no longer needs to be the case. Nor do we need to rely on oranges from Spain or grapes from Chile. We have the ability to produce an Eden in every suburban town. It is not a question of can we do it but rather, a question of will we do it. Buen Provecho and have a happy Thanksgiving.
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