SAGE WORDS ON FOOD AND GLOBAL WARMING
A pinch of sage can add bite to the discussion on global warming, which leaves most people scratching their head wondering what specific things individuals or governments can do to do something positive and meaningful.
Colin Sage, chair of the geography department at University College, Cork, Ireland, and chair of the Food Policy Council in the same city, is the author of the book, Environment and Food. He says food is the place to start. Food offers many options that can be put on a to-do list right away, while also opening doors for profound change over time, he argues.
“We won’t solve global warming unless we fully engage with food and agriculture,” Sage told a well-attended public lecture in Toronto, sponsored by New College’s Global Food Equity Initiative on April 6.
Sage’s book shows that the food system as a whole accounts for 31 per cent of all global warming emissions.
As powerful as that quantitative impact is, food’s relevance also comes from the qualitative empowerment it grants to individuals to take action. Because food has the highest global warming impact of any daily activity — the fortunate among us eat three times a day, but can only choose enviro-friendly cars or homes a few times in a lifetime — only food empowers everyday people to act and improve on an everyday basis, Sage argues.
Food and agriculture rely on a long supply chain that goes from seed to fork to waste disposal. Each step of the way is laden with significant greenhouse gas emissions. Not only are food production and storage energy-intensive activities that lead to emission of carbon dioxide. Many of the emissions from the food cycle feature methane (from plants, food scraps or manure rotting without access to oxygen, as is the case with rice grown underwater, and land-filled food waste) or nitrous oxides (off-gases from nitrogen fertilizers) that have staggering impacts.
Methane has 23 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxides have 296 times the impact. A little bit goes a long way, but agriculture and food are responsible for more than a little bit, despite their popular image as activities close to Nature.
The global warming emissions from agriculture start before seeds are planted. When forests are chopped down and the earth is ploughed, carbon formerly stored in the soil is volatalized and escapes to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Any livestock that burp or fart release methane. Almost all farm equipment, from irrigation pumps to tractors and harvesters, is made with energy from fossil fuels, and runs with energy from fossil fuels.
FARMING IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
The farm is only the beginning. Three-quarters of all food sales in the world have been processed — a heavy industrial activity that requires energy to clean, cook and store food, as well as energy-intensive paper, cardboard, metal, plastic and glass to transport and package it.
Retail is as high-impact as farming and processing. Supermarkets cool and freeze a large proportion of their products. Individuals driving to the supermarket for a day’s or week’s supplies account for the most gas-guzzling trip of all; in terms of the amount of energy used to carry a few kilograms of food, that car trip required by a supermarket-centered food system has hundreds of times the impact of the same weight carried in one long-haul truck crossing a continent.
At the consumer end, refrigeration, cooking and dishwashing, whether at home or at a restaurant, also take energy, as does transportation of food waste (on average, about 40 per cent of what’s purchased) to landfill sites. Waste food is almost as weighty as edible food, but rots in a landfill site without access to oxygen, producing emissions 23 times the impact of carbon dioxide.
From cradle to grave, the entire journey produces gassy food.
THE MEAT OF THE MATTER
The fact that so many decisions made by individual eaters are optional has led many food advocates to campaign for “sustainable diets” — conscious choices that favor foods producing fewer polluting and global warming emissions.
Sage cites Jose Graziano da Silva, head of the Food and Agriculture Organization, lead United Nations agency in charge of food, as saying that sustainability requires that everyone rethink “what we eat, how we eat, and how much we eat.”
Once the spotlight is shone on individual daily actions centered around what, how, and how much people eat, meat is put on the hot spot.
In common with most analysts, Sage says meat in its own right is responsible for 18 % of all global warming emissions. North Americans and Europeans are the heaviest meat eaters in the world, eating far more than is optimal for their nutrient needs or health.
As a consequence, the spotlight shone on meat quickly spotlights the most affluent countries in the world — a focus of particular importance to equity studies, and the Global Food Equity Initiative, which sponsored Sage’s lecture.
Meat ranks at the top of the priority list of food-conscious environmentalists for many reasons. First, the grazing of livestock animals takes up a quarter of the world’s arable land, displacing forests or tall grass prairies that might otherwise store be storing carbon, rather than releasing it to the atmosphere.
Second, most livestock are fed mainly on corn and soy, rather than on the pasture they evolved to eat. The grain and bean diet is designed to speed up their weight gain, and reduce the turnover time of the rancher’s investment. As a consequence of this historically abnormal diet, livestock consume 40 per cent of the world’s cereal grains, which in turn rely on about 30 per cent of the land devoted to all crops, Sage argues.
From an equity standpoint, land and grain used to feed livestock eaten by wealthier people in the world are not used to nourish 800 million of the poorest people who suffer chronic hunger.
From a global warming standpoint, land used to produce feed for livestock is displaced from forests and grasslands that once drew down carbon from the atmosphere, storing it in soil and plants, thereby keeping carbon in a safe equilibrium.
Throughout the distribution, processing, retailing and meal preparation stages, meat requires ongoing energy inputs for refrigeration, sanitary packaging and cooking.
WHERE IT GETS EXCITING
Problems resulting from such food system inequities are too complex to be solvable through one-shot “technical fixes,” Sage argues. “We need wholesale root and branch change,” he told the audience at New College’s Wilson Hall.
As well, Sage argues, “at some point, we’re required to walk the talk,” and adopt a sustainable diet that is part of a more ethical and sustainable food system.
These challenges “call us to start to envision a different sort of food system,” Sage said. “We have to really imagine what kinds of things are possible,” he said, which might include eating more local foods, as well as more sustainable food items. New ways of connecting with food, such as respecting it more and wasting it less — a major project of the Cork Food Policy Council which he chairs — are also on Sage’s to-do list.
“We need to start creating new possibilities,” he said. “That will raise all sorts of new options, and will need new collaborations, above all,” bringing people together in new ways, he said. “This is where it gets really exciting.”
(adapted from www.new.college.utoronto.ca/dr-colin-sage-apr-2016/ )
