Emergy & The True Cost Of Food

Monk
Monk
Sep 4, 2018 · 7 min read
This is Modern Agriculture, Extraction Of Resources.

“True Cost Accounting” as it relates to your food is an attempt to quantify the stratosphere of connected costs of embodied energy or emergy. This includes all the equipment, antibiotic resistance health care cost, human and animal welfare, carbon emissions, nitrogen water pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, biodiversity loss, electricity keeping the cold chain cold. It theorizes that none of the damage incurred to the world by our agricultural practices is accounted for in the price you pay at the grocery store. This explains the difference in the price of organics compared to conventional food.

Your food is too cheap. Does it feel like it is cheap to you? I can’t think of the last time as I was in the states and left the grocery store turning to my wife saying Honey, that was cheap. I don’t remember getting my food cost numbers on the P&L and saying to the sous-chefs, “looks like we have some more money to spend”.

I have thought about this topic for some time and have spent the last week reading, listening, and watching well-meaning people try to convince me that I should spend more money on food. They may be right but they lost me at cheap. There is a direct relationship between the spike in staple food prices and civil unrest. If the prices are raised on heavily consumed products you will increase the likelihood of instability and violence. From what I have seen in the last quarter century of selling food, raising the prices is not how we change the path.

Change is coming one way or another. Maybe it is easier to wait for our hands to be forced by circumstance. A coordinated equitable and fair solution seems like a utopian dream. Didn’t God send us forth from Eden so long ago?

There is a lot of data out there it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. I read these strong arguments for permaculture and its potential, but I also hear and relate to the need for production and efficiency. I still always think back to a local food meeting I went back to State College where a room full of 80 + well-meaning people were trying to build a local food market. It was inspiring in a way to see the desire and community investment. The practical result, however, was a small ripple of an ineffective outcome.

We can get lost in pseudoscience, in grand posturing and moral statements. I was watching the videos from a conference put on by The Sustainable Food Trust Organization, a group that has been well established for 30 + years. It’s been a failure even with focused tactics following a strategic plan. We are displaced and have no strength in our small-scale individualistic endeavors of change. It’s not going to be the bearded, flanneled men and the women who don’t see a reason to dye the grey out of their hair homesteading off the grid that takes this full scale. The efforts need to filter into the condos, and suburban Roundup manicured lawns. We have to work on the cost.

You can academically and anecdotally describe how all the evil we do as people harm the world, and animals, and ourselves. Then you can gather experts (elitist) and they can assign a fine to punish your evil behavior. But all we are trying to do is feed our children.

It is not a hidden cost. I don’t believe that anybody needs to be reminded of this. We all know the costs are there, we can look in the mirror and see how hard it is to stay in good shape, add up our medical bills to know that the pharmaceutical business is out of control, and peer out the window to see that the weather is changing.

Being lectured that you are not paying enough for your food, accused that you don’t you care about the earth or your children’s health isn’t going to change either minds or behavior. I propose that people do care about the environment, they do care about their children. When presented with the choice between a $5 and a $2 chicken 96% of people in our affluent developed economies are going with $2. It just isn’t a choice. A family of 4 is still walking out of the grocery store with a $245 grocery bill that they hope will stretch the week for the family. Is the solution to double that?

The business case for sustainability, permaculture, or organic farming methods has not been made effectively. As an example, the Organic Trade Association stated the organic market in 2018 is maturing at around 5.5% of total food sales: maturing at 5.5 %. This at a period of time when we have a record high stock market and record low unemployment. What happens when times are tough, in 2009 organic sales in the UK dropped by 31%.

30+ years of work equals 5.5% of total sales and a 31% decline in economic hard times. That is not going to change the world. How long do you need? Borlaug’s movement changed the very nature of agriculture and not insignificantly the very earth in less time than that. You can’t fight Monsanto and Bayer by tsk tsking, charging more, and taking 5.5 % of the market. Most likely that doesn’t even translate into market share for the small producer, just diversification of larger agribusiness companies that can afford to jump through a couple of hoops to put that organic label on a small percentage of their products.

There is an argument to be made that those costs need to be quantified and added to your food bill. What some propose is for the government to step in and subsidize, tax, and fine the world into a better place. This is what has been happening in support of the green revolution and modern agriculture practice since the 50’s and it looks like it worked. I have been working my way through the 1006 page Senate version of the farm bill and my initial thought on it is that this is the reason we are in this situation in the first place. The proposal of turning those carrots and sticks against the agriculture industrial complex is seductive, but then you then leave the mechanism to weight the scales on the table for sale. And that only works if the people who can peddle the influence believe the same way you do. This mechanism needs to be removed. Over 1000 pages of legislation and children will still go hungry at night. We have burned through our ecological capital at an alarming and unsustainable rate, we are creating a health care crisis of antibiotic resistance and while half the world is undernourished, the USA has an obesity epidemic.

The definition of profit, for me, is the exchange of value, given and received. Both parties in the transaction must realize profit otherwise there is no business. How that balance is corrupted is when the natural “organic” process is changed by inputs in the form of tax credits, subsidies according to well-financed lobbyists agendas. This disrupts the natural order and balance diverting profit and corrupting the exchange. The only way this becomes a reality is if the equation profit is balanced again, you need to get the weight off the scales.

Modern farming is the single biggest driver of climate change.

50 % of all emissions, use of water, destruction of rainforests. I can see the treeless mountains here in the Andes where I live; they look like they have been buzz cut, with a few hardy cows grazing the bare slopes. We all eat every day- some of us 3 times or more. If we can provide this daily bread in a focused tactical and strategic way, we have the kinetic energy to reshape the world for the better. You know this because we have been steadily shaping it for the worse since we pulled the trigger on the Green Revolution in the 50's

Our actions have consequence. We still get in our car every day and burn gas, take long hot showers, buy bottled water, and buy “cheap” food. I don’t excuse myself. You know that quote from Doc Holliday in Tombstone “My hypocrisy knows no bounds”. How, even if we look at and see with clear eyes, how and what are we doing to change it?

What is emergy? I liken to the burning of a log The tree over its lifetime has stored the sun’s energy into its physical self. When the log burns the embodied energy is released. Our food is that log. All the resources that have been used to build the farm equipment, the trucks for transportation, the diesel and gas to run them, all the electricity in the system, the creation of the pesticides, and fertilizer, the energy in the movement of water, have gone into creating the embodied energy, the emergy, in the food that we burn in our bodies to live.

If food is the most damaging production mechanism to the earth environment, the flip side of that is it could be the most healing.

The problem is time: it takes time to change fields over, it takes periods of loss. Farms that may want to change to sustainability and organic wouldn’t make it through the dip.

In his book “The One Straw Revolution,” Masanobu Fukuoka makes the observation that we should ask questions. What if we don’t do that and don’t do this? What if we don’t subsidize anything?. What if we as individual communities raised funds to guarantee seasons for farmers willing to change over their production models to sustainable? Couldn’t we call that an investment for future “cheap food”? What would a food system look like without subsidies? How about no farm bill?

Communities of consumers are the cause, the victim and the solution to breaking the grip agricultural industrial complex. I do know this, business is the solution. It is not the enemy. We must seek profit, real true profit.

If You Care About Your Ingredients

This is my story about the craft of cooking. I live in Colombia so, I am writing in Spanish and English. I am not a writer in either language I am a cook. It may be a little ugly but, it is my attempt at an authentic expression. A work in progress.

Monk

Written by

Monk

I am A Pirate King

If You Care About Your Ingredients

This is my story about the craft of cooking. I live in Colombia so, I am writing in Spanish and English. I am not a writer in either language I am a cook. It may be a little ugly but, it is my attempt at an authentic expression. A work in progress.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade