What we lose through "efficiency" - feedback

Tim told me this morning that in yesterday's post, I have confused industrialisation with efficiency. He says that we choose and want to be efficient in everything, including non-industrial agriculture and food production. I see what he is saying, and I agree with him. Maybe I have confused or not delineated between the two concepts thoroughly enough. What I am trying to get at is the notion of trying to get more for less (or more for the same amount of input), which is exactly what industrialisation is, and which is exactly what efficiency is. When we choose to apply fossil-fuel based energy and chemicals to agriculture, we think that we may be able to increase "yield," or the amount of output per area of land (which, I emphasise, is not true in practice). But the concept of "efficiency" is also the foundation behind genetic modification and the development of seeds and crops that are better able to survive given inputs of industrialisation. Through this process of increasing "efficiency," we deplete the natural balances of nutrients in soil and water, resulting in poorer tasting food. What is then lost is the experience of food - no one can deny that better tasting food makes you feel better, mentally and physically. If the notion of "efficiency" is to be applied to non-industrial agriculture, it would entail treating the land and what feeds it in a way that doesn't overburden it (exactly the opposite of industrial agriculture), and respecting the land enough so as to get the best tasting food.

To Eleanor's point that efficiency and industrialisation has allowed us to taste foods that only exist in other parts of the world, and that industrialisation feeds the world. There is a grain of truth in what she says, but I think what industrialisation is good at doing is underestimating the costs of itself. "Economies of scale" applied to industrialisation are good at providing "low-cost" food to people, but the costs, especially environmental and social, are completely neglected. When we go to Wal-Mart or Kroger, we do not pay for the costs of petroleum or lost livelihoods of small farmers. (Those costs are indeed covered by subsidies.) Furthermore, even though Americans have continued to spend less and less on food, and it is possible to get entire "meals" at fast-food restaurants for $2, the number of people going hungry locally and globally is still remarkable, and nothing that industrialisation "promises" can address that. It is also undeniable that industrialisation leads to a decrease in the quality of food, and it is debatable whether you can call industrial, fast food "food."

With the issue of flavour, I am speaking to the mental and social impacts that good tasting food can have. Maybe people will eat bad-tasting food if a gun was put to their head, or that was all that was available on a particular day. But once you have tasted good food, the smell, flavour and experience stay with you lifelong. I do not believe we have to sacrifice the quality of food for quantity - Cuba has resisted this sacrifice since petrochemical exports to the country stopped with the fall of the Soviet Union, through innovative approaches of biodynamism and organic urban agriculture.

What we lose through "efficiency"

As an engineer that works in a combustion laboratory, I am constantly surrounded by the miracles of modern machinery. Let me tell you about some of the things around my lab. There exists a vacuum pump that can pull a large volume to near vacuum, to a pressure lower than exists at the higher reaches of the atmosphere. There exist fast-acting solenoid valves that have an open-shut cycle time of 2 milliseconds to capture with high accuracy and precision small volumes of gas to understand how fuels break down. There exist computers that can solve systems of very stiff differential equations to understand chemical kinetics. There exists lasers that emit photons with high spatial and temporal coherence. All of these gadgets, gizmos and machinery are made to operate as "efficiently" as possible - use the least amount of energy to get a certain amount of work out. This seems wonderful - planes now fly on 40% less fuel per kilometre than they did 40 years ago. Efficiency can work marvels with engineering, and in some sense, "save" the environment. But it can also wreak havoc on the environment and more primal attributes of our world.

My thoughts are flowing at this moment primarily through food, but one may apply this thought process to other forms of human behaviour. In our attempt to increase output of food, we have turned to fossil fuels and chemicals and genetically modified seeds to allow increased yields (although this is completely debatable, and more likely than not false) given the size of a plot. Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan eloquently speak to the degradation of land, the waste of farming operations, and the lives of ecosystems that are ruined because of industrial agriculture. But Chef Dan Barber lends another perspective to the voices speaking out against industrial agriculture. On Being, he speaks to something food has lost over time due to excessive chemical and biological modification - flavour. Indeed, flavour, an essential quality of food, is nowhere talked about amongst large scale agribusinesses and farmers. As I have written about previously, food, when cooked with love and thought, using the right ingredients, can open up minds and hearts, and remind people of days gone by. In our quest to produce large amounts of food for increasingly lower costs to the customer (although the true costs are not billed, nor are calculable), the social aspect of food surrounding thought, smell, taste and emotion has been systematically neglected and carelessly snipped out of the DNA, both of the food and of our culture. With the loss of native species of crops, plants and animals, these things no longer survive in our collective memories. In the end, bland tasting tomatoes are shipped thousands of miles to be served as poor substitutes to the miraculous tastes of nature...generating trash along the way.

Why focus on trash and waste?

Katie asked me a pointed question on Thursday, while we were talking about nuclear waste - "Some people say focusing on a problem like trash takes away from devoting energy to more significant environmental problems. What do you think?"

Trash is visceral. We feel trash. We smell it, touch it, and hear it, sometimes every day, several times a day. When we go out to dinner, we use napkins to wipe our hands. When we crack open a bottle of wine, we rip off the wrapping hiding the cork. As soon as we're done with a plastic bottle of orange juice, some of us lift lift the lid of the trash can in our kitchen and throw the bottle out. The yard of a college fraternity house is littered with plastic cups on game day. We hear the early trash collectors with their huge truck at the crack of dawn, lifting and crushing pounds of trash. A trash bin filled to the brim releases a putrid smell that just makes us want to walk away. Indeed, trash, when we are near it, suffers way less from a problem of perception than do our other friends, such as greenhouse gases. Take carbon dioxide for example. When we flip on the light switch, the light appears here, but the odorless, colourless carbon dioxide is emitted elsewhere. How many of us can visualise such an invisible threat? What does 385 parts per million mean? That means that out of a million, there are 999,615 parts of other gases. Greenhouse gases suffer from a perception problem.

But that doesn't mean that trash and greenhouse gases aren't related. The social, economic and philosophical structures in place that cause the formation of trash and greenhouse gases are the same. Trash is just a different manifestation of the same problem - consumption without limits, carelessness about the future and disrespect for the ecosystems of the present.