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Food for Fuel

Old 10-08-07, 09:14 AM
  #26  
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Originally Posted by ChipSeal
Yeah, It would've been a bad thing -fer sure- to allow farmers with the bad luck of having a farm further away from competing for your business! Sure do love them fair trade practices.

While I'm wondering if I want to move so I can continue to enjoy seafood, perhaps we should revive the big cattle drives of yesteryear! No more of that wasteful driving doggies to the slaughter-house in the back of a smelly old truck- make 'em walk! (If a steer walking down a highway is centered in the lane, is he a vehicular hamburger on the hoof? Do you think he will be subjected to close passes by inconvenienced motorists?)

I'm gonna miss cranberry's, blue, red and blackberries. I wonder if they grow hops around here? I guess pancakes are out for me cause I won't eat 'em without genuine maple syrup. (How big do you suppose the local north east maple syrup market is?) I'm glad they grow wheat and corn nearby so I can still enjoy my Capt Crunch!

I'm gonna miss chocolate...

No wonder this idea isn't catching on
.
Cap'n Crunch is local food for me, as it's made in Battle Creek, MI. And this local idea isn't new at all. It worked very well for our industrial society until about 60 years ago, right after WWII. That's when "advances" in agriculture and the availability of cheap petrochemicals made large scale agriculture possible, and the family farms were put out of business. All those old county roads in Texas--known as "Farm Market Road"--point out how important the locally grown food was in Texas and all over the world until a short time ago.

Now the idea of marketing food more locally is catching on again. For example, Burlington, VT grows about ten per cent of its food within the city limits, and much more within the surrounding rural area. You make the point that regional specialization--Wisconsin cheese, Vermont maple syrup, Michigan berries--will always be part of the food economy. But many more of the staples should be grown closer to home for reasons that wahoonc explained very well.
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Old 10-08-07, 12:25 PM
  #27  
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Biofuels is one of those issues that I'm just ish about. And now there's so much in this thread that's grabbing my attention, I don't know where to go with it.

The general idea of using food for fuel is absurd to me. I also take issue with the fact that most of the grain grown in the US is used for feeding livestock, not for feeding people. Now we're going to start putting it in cars? Ridiculous. We could feed the entire world many times over with the amount of food we grow, but it's not possible considering the way it's distributed. Furthermore, it's important to note that the corn grown for livestock feed and ethanol is NOT the same corn that we eat, at least not directly. it is the same stuff used for highly processed food additives like high fructose corn syrup. Imagine how much land, money, water, and petrochemicals we could conserve if we used only a small portion of the land that grows all that mostly useless (but highly subsidized, therefore profitable) field corn for real human food like oats, wheat, beans and vegetables. Or turned it into diverse farm operations that use more efficient methods like cover crops and rotational grazing.

There are many reasons to buy locally that have already been explained very well. I like shopping farmers' markets because the person I hand my cash to is the same one who planted, tended, and picked the tomato I'm buying. I know who grew my food, and that's important to me.

Back to carfree living. It's far more complicated than just reducing CO2. And even if we switch all personal and commercial vehicles to non-fossil fuels, we still have all the other problems that come with relying on personal autos for transportation--sprawl development, amazingly high rates of injury and death from car crashes, health epidemics like asthma and diabetes which are both caused by and exacerbated by sedentary lifestyles, urban decay from freeways that chop up and isolate neighborhoods, ... It's going to take a lot more than just finding alternative fuels. One of the huge steps we need to take is reducing our dependence on cars, not just reducing dependence on oil.
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