Cuba

This next chapter is primarily sourced from my talks with Andy Gaertner, who visited Cuba while in the Peace Corps. The numerical statistics were gleaned from numerous sources. These numbers would vary widely from source to source. Based on the bias of the sources and the varying contexts from which they were presenting the numbers, I gave them a best guess. Connected to what Andy was saying in our talks I believe the numbers I present here are accurate.

Cuba

After the big Soviet pull out of 1989 and U.S. embargo, Cuba found itself not able to internally support the mechanized system of farming it had become dependent on. There was immediate shortage and hunger. There was no fuel to transport the food.  Nor was there fuel to refrigerate the food in order to store and transport it. Havana, the capital of Cuba, a city of 2 million people at the time, had no way to feed its populace.  

For three years the people of Havana had hardship. During this time they started to figure out their own problems. People concentrated on producing for themselves what they needed. The government set up a system of extension workers to help urban gardeners get the knowledge and supplies they needed. The government also made decisions that had to be followed. All vacant land was appropriated and made available for food production. Scientists were tasked to devise systems for urban agriculture that would maximize efficiency and yield. Within five years after the Soviet pull out the crisis had abated.

Currently, the population of Havana is roughly 2.2 million people. They are fed but they have less food than before. Their diet is limited to what is available at the time. There is less space to live as the land is necessary for food production. Thirty percent of Havana’s available land is under cultivation and is made up of two hundred gardens. These gardens produce seven crops a year and up to ninety percent of Havana’s fruits and vegetables, all from within the city’s borders. Sixty percent of Havana’s total food is produced inside the city. Forty percent, mostly animal products, comes from the countryside. Imagine a city the size of Houston, Texas (2.2 million), and a slightly larger Chicago (2.8 million), doing the same.

However, Cuba is a tropical country. In the upper Midwest, winters make the seven crops per year an improbable goal. Midwest farming can produce crops year round with the right techniques, technologies and plants that are adapted or indigenous to the area. But, the people would have to make a radical diet change. It would also take an intensive amount of infrastructure to make this kind of system happen, a sustainability problem in and of itself. Can this work here if it had to? Why can’t this process begin before a crisis does happen? Before the infrastructure to build the gardens is difficult to come by? Can the food system change now and not when it is forced to?

Of course. All that needs to happen is for the people to want it to and be willing to do the work.

In Havana, it was theorized that when the crisis of shortage abated, the people in the cities would become less interested in food production. The opposite happened. Interest grew. Since there were no for profit corporate systems controlling food production in Cuba, the people who worked the gardens got to experience the direct benefit of their labor. What this kind of agriculture did was to connect people to their food source - the land. They ate more fresh foods. And, coupled with the physical nature of gardening, walking more and riding bikes because there was no fuel, people became healthier. The use of plants for medicine grew as there weren’t as many pharmaceuticals available. Hospitals practiced less interventions. Currently, the infant mortality rate in Cuba is lower than the United States. All this with much less industry, importation and infrastructure.

Why can’t this be our reality?

Cities

I'm posting early today as the Fall Equinox is approaching. Below is the chapter entitled Cities, with a supporting comment. Please read thoughtfully and share your views.

Cities

The population of the U.S. is growing. In 2001, the U.S. Census Bureau concluded that in 50 years, by birth or immigration, the population of this country could increase by 120 million. Currently, there are about 285 million people in the United States. By the year 2050 that totals 405 million people; roughly a 40% increase over today’s population. All these people will need food, housing, energy and, if our current system is still in place, employment. The land does not increase. The resources do not increase. The majority of this population will live in cities. The cities in the United States do not produce their own food. The vast majority of everything a city resident eats must come from outside of the city.

Agriculture allowed for the creation of cities.

The town where I used to live has three large grocery stores and a co-op. There is on average three full days of food within the stores themselves. Three meals a day for a population approaching 15,000 people. Just three days. The people who live there are dependent on a steady supply of food that is trucked in. The city, however, is not isolated. There is ready access to the farms that surround it, to the woods and water. It is easy to leave the city itself and access the natural world.

Compare this to the Chicago metropolitan area, with a population around 8.15 million, with 2.8 million people residing in the city proper. The suburbs stretch for sixty miles in various directions. A city that, especially for the people who live deep within it, is very difficult if not impossible to leave. The city is isolated from the natural world of forests and water. Lake Michigan is accessible for the coastal dwellers. There are the patches of woods called Forest Preserves which actually have deer populations. There are community gardens in places. But, for the most part the food is very very far away.

Cities of any size have one thing in common: They must constantly take from the land. For the most part, they give nothing back. Municipal sludge does not count as it contains the toxins of the city’s organic wastes. Leaf composting is a bit helpful. 

Cities are useful, though. They are useful to the system of power. People are concentrated and made dependent on the infrastructure that the system of power provides - electricity, water, food, etc. The inhabitants of the cities will profess the system’s value. They will fight to keep this system because to not keep it means their lives must radically change, quickly. They would have to change their habits. They would have to change their way of being within the world. They would have to change the way they relate to the world. This is a hard nut to crack.

If the cities of the world vanished and the people who live in them had to live in the surrounding land, the Earth could not support them all. There simply is not enough habitable land to support the people who live on the planet at this time. The existing land must be used for food production and not for living on.

Unless there is a massive die off of people in the United States, which is a possibility, we here are stuck with the cities as dwelling areas for the majority of people. So, how are the cities to be made more sustainable? How can the existing city populations exist in greater harmony with the Earth? How can they support themselves instead of having to rely on trucked in foods and non-renewable energy?

Feeding Cattle Grain

In the last section I included a critique of the dairy industry and their add campaign of "Got Milk?".  I want to be clear that I am not against dairy farmers, cattle ranchers or any farmers, for that matter. I am, however very critical of their "industries".  A small dairy farmer is not the dairy industry. The dairy industry is factory farms, international food corporations, marketing departments and multi million dollar add campaigns. The small dairy farmer is held captive by the prices set by the dairy industry's control of the market. In my memory I have many instances where small dairy farmers dumped their milk in protest of low prices. If small family farms were the dairy industry would they not be sharing in the profits of that industry?

Currently the dairy industry imports dairy products from countries as far away as China so as to have a less expensive base of dairy ingredients for processed foods like flavored chips and cheese poofs. This increases the dairy industry's profits. This, even though there is a surplus of milk produced domestically. This process further undercuts the small dairy farmer. Do we have milk yet? 

In this next section I critique the meat producing industry, not the farmers involved. An industry that has, like the dairy industry, successfully convinced us that we have to eat more of their products than necessary. This is how all food industries operate. This is how business operates. They must get the population to eat or buy as much of their product as possible. This makes them money. This makes the investors profit.

To stay healthy, do we really have to eat meat with every meal? Do we have to have a meat ingredient in every dish we cook? Where does that shrink-wrapped-on-styrofoam steak come from? It's now just another product to buy. Where does that dollar burger come from? It's a convenient meal on the go. What about those eggs? Do all eggs have paper thin shells? That crispy bacon, is it always so uniform in its fat content? How do they get it to be low fat?

The First People ate meat. They had what we now call a traditional diet. The difference is they hunted their meat. The animals lived a life that was their own. The animals were free to roam and live in the world. There was a balance of hunter and prey. The hunters revered their quarry and viewed the animals as sacred because they were a life giving food source, as well as a source for tools, clothing and shelter. The animals were integral to The People. Through its factory farms our society breeds, confines, abuses and slaughters the animals it eats. Our process completely devalues the relationship between people and animals. Our process creates disconnection from the Earth and all that lives on it, even ourselves.

We can domesticate animals and still have a connection to them. We can raise animals for our food without devaluing the fact they are alive. We do not eat products. We eat living things as all else in nature does. But we insist on separating ourselves from nature, from the Earth, from our food as much as possible. We create a barrier from the visceral act of killing our food. The majority of us do not kill to eat. We pay someone to do it for us.

Here is the next chapter.

Feeding Cattle Grain

To make a more sustainable food production future for ourselves as a population, we need to change our habits and assumptions about food. We need to eat less animal products. We need to eat less milk, eggs, cheese and especially less meat.

To raise animals for slaughter in a modern, mechanized way to feed as many people as currently consume meat is a very resource intensive and wasteful method of producing food. Grain must first be grown. The ground turned and plowed. The seeds planted. The fertilizers made. In the case of conventional agriculture, fertilizers are made out of extremely toxic petrochemicals using energy intensive processes within factories. The fertilizers are then applied. The plants harvested. The grain separated then processed into feed. Trucked to a warehouse. Trucked to a feed store. Bought by the farmer and finally fed to their cattle. Just so someone can eat the meat of a cow. Only ten percent of the grain fed to a cow becomes edible body mass. It is more beneficial and more efficient to feed people the grain directly rather than to feed grain to animals who are then slaughtered and fed to people.

Pasturing cattle is more efficient than grain feeding the cattle for slaughter. It would be better and simpler to eat the grain directly and eat less of pasture raised meat, or none at all. Changing our habits could have a direct impact on how food is produced and allocated.

If cheap, easily accessed energy is not available to the agricultural industry, grain feeding of cattle will become cost prohibitive. Rather than eating more meat because there is more of it available due to grain feeding, we would then be eating less because there is less produced, or it would become too expensive to afford as a staple food. Or, our meat production industry would pasture feed their cattle and produce less beef for consumption, driving demand down. Or, we could just eat less beef demanding it be pasture raised because it’s one way to help the planet survive, sustain ourselves as a population and feed more people.

We have a choice.

Factory Food

Food as Manufactured Goods

Factory food has been completely filled with unnecessary extra ingredients. Some of these ingredients are toxic to our health. To manufacture food takes more water than to grow it. Factory food pollutes our bodies as well as our water. In many cases, factory food costs less to buy than whole, fresh food. How come food that has more ingredients, has had more research and development, is trucked around the country, has hardly any real nutrition, pollutes our environment and our bodies costs less than whole, unprocessed foods coming from local farms?

Economy of scale. More is produced in faster ways whether we need it or not. Then, instead of rotting, it can be stored in a giant 60,000 square foot warehouse that has been turned into a freezer. A freezer the size of a city block.

Marketing. Got Milk? We don’t really need to drink so much milk. Do cows really need to be injected with hormones to produce more of what we don’t really need?

Consider the organic TV dinner your local co-op carries. The 4 oz frozen macaroni and cheese dinner has many ingredients in it from all over the world, shipped refrigerated from their sources, manufactured into the dinner, kept frozen while warehoused, shipped to the store in a card stock box which has been covered with ink, shrink wrapped, palleted, wrapped and trucked in a freezer truck.

All this takes an enormous amount of energy.

When the store receives the dinner, there must be a back stock freezer, floor freezers and power 24/7. You, as a customer, have to have a freezer which has to have been manufactured, shipped and powered 24/7 in your home to store this future meal. And, you bought that dinner for $3.29 on sale. Yet, if the exact same product was to be manufactured locally by an independent maker of 4 oz macaroni and cheese dinners, you can be rest assured the cost would be so high that no one would buy them. Even though that dinner would have come from within fifty miles, had less energy and materials used in its manufacture, had its ingredients sourced from farms in the area and been delivered fresher to the store. Why? Economy of scale. Marketing. And, the simple fact that people cannot afford the real cost of processed food. $3.29 is a cost that has much hidden, indeed.

If we eat a diet focused on whole food we eat less food because our bodies use more of the food. Processed food has less nutritional value causing our bodies to want more. Marketing causes our minds to think we want more. More, larger, bigger portions that we can’t easily finish. The Humongous Meal. If we as individuals and as a culture can consciously change the way we eat and think about food, then this will lead us as a population to much healthier lives.

Our food system is now a chemical laden, genetically altered, cloned, nano technology laden, mechanized and industrialized system which produces excess. There is usually more supply than demand, driving down the price. Instead of working on farms people are working in food factories. Raw, whole foods are processed down into things like frozen dinners and cheese poofs instead of being fed directly to people.

This will change when the cost of fuel goes up dramatically. Processed food will begin to cost more because the profit margins for share holders must stay the same. Anything that cuts the profits will be passed to the consumer. This will drive down the demand. Prices of processed foods will rise further until there is even less demand. This is an over-simplification of the systems involved in the retail pricing of processed foods, but the end result is that factory made food will cease to be a choice for the majority of people in this country.

Habits will then have to change.

Water & Industrial Water Market Value

Water

“Know where your water comes from and where it goes when it leaves you.”

From Taj Mahal - given to me by Don Roberts

In the western U.S. water is subsidized for agriculture. Certified Organic as well as commercial agriculture crops are grown in deserts and irrigated with surface water. This water is diverted from sources up north in California and from the Colorado River. The Colorado river is a polluted river, like most in this country. This water is not processed to remove the contaminants. This water becomes part of the food we eat. There has been so much diversion of the Colorado river that it no longer reaches the ocean. It can then be argued that there is that much less pollution entering the oceans of the world.

Industrial Water Market Value

Without a healthy water-base life cannot be healthy. If life does exist with an unhealthy water-base it will mirror that water-base.

Through the existing industrial infrastructure comes the pollution and the toxicity that destroys our water; hence, sealing the infrastructure’s, the culture’s and the society’s own doom.

There are corporations buying water rights from municipalities to provide water for the populace at a market value. There are corporations around the world succeeding at getting control of water rights so they can sell the water at market value. Water can never be reduced to market value, because it is a life giving right

not a product.

The argument goes that if companies had to pay more for the water they use in their manufacturing processes then they wouldn’t pollute it. Really? 

Assigning a market value for water only makes water more expensive and consequently only gives the biggest companies access to the water-base. This means that those companies get to exercise more control over the water and the population that depends upon it. This means that the population ultimately pays for cleaning up their drinking water. When water has a market value, poor, marginalized populations are going to lose access to water they can drink, pollution is going to happen anyway and corporations are going to make a lot more money. This means that the populace loses. The corporations win. In exchange, the population gets to keep buying cheap stuff when they want it. Business as usual keeps going. Are we willing to have this kind of trade off?

Instead of charging companies more for water thinking that they won’t pollute something they paid a lot of money for, we need to hold them accountable for the pollution they cause and make them clean the water they pollute. Be it ground water or surface water, corporations can still have cheep water. But then, if they pollute this water it won’t matter what the cost is to clean it up. They would have to clean it. The polluters must fix the problems they caused. Not the government, not the people who live there

but the polluters.

All the Infrastructure, Trucks and Fuel You Can Shake a Stick At

Infrastructure

Moving food needs infrastructure. Growing that food needs infrastructure. Producing and storing just the right food to satisfy tastes and demands needs infrastructure. This kind of infrastructure needs resources in intensity.

We are running out of resources.

Trucks

Trucks move the majority of the food in this country to its final destination. Trucks need roads and bridges that can handle vast tonnage going over them over and over again, for years. Trucks need parts. Trucks need to be manufactured. Trucks need fuel. Fuel must be found, drilled for or grown, transported, refined, trucked to a fill station and finally sold. Those are the simple parts of the infrastructure. Break these simple parts down into the infinitum of their own infrastructures. These parts are contributing to the degradation of the land we all live on and the water we all drink. All this so we can continue as we are, without change and without modifying our habits.

Fuel

Fuel is best thought of as something to eliminate or minimize from our society and not something to produce in alternate ways so that current levels of consumption can be maintained.

Because

they can't.

That is part of the problem industrial society faces today. Current consumption levels of everything need to go down not stay the same or increase.

A good example of improper thinking in this matter is the idea that we can grow our fuel. Using food crops such as corn for biofuel is not something that could be sustained. Food is best used as food and fed directly to people. Corn is best as a food grain grown in companionship with other food crops, not mono-cropped as the majority of it is in this country.

Systems within nature interrelate, overlap and interact in ways that are not always noticeable until there is a grave problem. Growing fuel is not an interrelation. It is a profit maker for industrial agriculture which is contributing to the destruction of the whole world.

Do we need more energy? Do we need more power plants? More nuclear plants? Can’t we live within our limits? Can’t we find ways to change our habits so we can use less energy than is currently made? Can’t we live without the newest technological devices and gadgets? If so, maybe we can actually shut down power plants and not replace them.

Seeking alternative fuel sources to maintain current consumption sounds great and seems very “green”, but it is not sustainable. If consumption of fuel were to go down substantially and shift into renewable sources that do not deplete the land-base they are from, then maybe the fuel use could approach sustainability. But, this would mean more of an emphasis on changing people’s habits, awareness and consciousness,

not just technology.

Choices & When We Want It

I'm posting chapters early as I am able to do so. I will always be able to post on Wednesday nights late, but not always earlier in the week. There's some good food for chewing over coming up and I want to get several chapters posted and get some good discussions flowing.

The next two chapters begin to get at the center of what ails our culture and Industrial society as a whole.

Things to think about when reading these chapters are, how did our culture become what it is? Why did this happen? Why is it maintained in this way? Who benefits from this? Who does not benefit? Do you personally truly benefit? Is this helping our planet?

Choices

The fact that we in the U.S. can choose the food we buy, different foods for different meals, is a thing taken for granted by our society.

The fact that we can choose so much of what we buy means we have a responsibility tied to those choices. We are responsible for the consequences created by those choices. We are ultimately responsible for the actions of a company our dollars are supporting. It is too easy to say, “ I don’t run that company. I’m not responsible.” If our money goes to a company, then our money is funding its activities. We have a choice and a say as to where our money goes. The problem is that in this heavily corporate society, it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to spend our money where it can actually do good. Sometimes, our choices are so restricted that we have no choice. The idea that if a corporation provides your food you have more choices

is a myth.

What drives your choices? We need to research what we buy, becoming our own experts. If we find something really good, we need to talk to people about it. Talk to people about what is made nearby and spread the word. Clue people into what isn’t made nearby. What things are made by the most egregious companies and to not buy those things. If small businesses such as manufacturers, food producers and food distributors don’t get support they will close. It takes a lot of work to reinvent those small businesses once they’re gone. Corporate run business would love to fill those voids and take your money for the benefit of their share holders.

The choice is yours.

When We Want It

We in the United States of America are a comfortable people. We are not used to lines, inconvenience or hardship. The vast majority of us have not lived through a depression, war rationing or poverty.

Doing without.

The vast majority of us have grown up having choices as to what to eat for each meal. Our diets are varied and full of foods that normally would not be available to us. We burn jet fuel to have foods that are completely out of season to us. We have stopped waiting and started moving food from long distances just to have it

when we want it.

By the time Europeans first came in contact with the Americas, there had been people living here for thousands of years. Most living within the rhythms of their environment, some not. Only several hundred years later this land is reduced to a former shell of its old self due to the philosophies, systems of power and world view brought here by the conquerors. These ideals still guide our system of governance, our corporations and other institutions within our culture. Now, the land cannot sustain the population without great intervention. This is the legacy we must wipe away.

Here Begins the Project

“Empowered, aware and engaged human beings will make sustainable decisions.”

Andy Gaertner

Sustainable Humans: Sustaining Ourselves

by Chris Koszalka

Begun August 2008, appreciating the beauty of many late night skies.

Finished January 2010, under a stunning full moon.

The natural world is where reality is.

The world where everything begins and will end.

Change

Every day at work I like nothing better than to create a lush, living canvass of beautiful produce. Tweak it and fuss over it until it’s just right. Every day, with every fruit and vegetable that I touch, I am very conscious of where it has come from, how far it has travelled, how it was raised and who else has also touched it on its long journey here, to us. Every day I think of ways that our entire food system can be modified, overhauled and made to be sustainable. Every day I come to the same conclusion.

Everything has to change.

Change is hard. Or not. It depends on the individual. Change in nature just is. It would be easier for most people if change could just be change. But it’s not.

Truth

A sub-atomic particle can be in two places at once. Two sub-atomic particles can be interconnected even though they are not inhabiting the same space or in the line of sight with each other. If one of these particles reacts to stimulus, so does the other one. These two seeming impossibilities are proven quantum phenomena.

Truth is a hard nut to swallow. It usually goes down with rough edges and gets stuck in our throats, having to be coughed out and beaten down with a mallet in order to get it soft enough to go down. Sometimes it has to be masticated by an expert in order for us to consider it palatable for swallowing. Such is our fate if we abdicate being an expert on a subject so someone else can tell us what is true.

Western industrial culture looks with derision at other cultures who believe the supposed impossible. Out of body travel, healing with plant spirits, communicating through dreams. Industrial Western culture calls these beliefs primitive and superstitious. Is the seemingly impossible, possible?

The truth is not universal.

Sustainability is Perpetual Motion

The Earth keeps on spinning. The various species on the planet keep on living. They are all governed by their environments, both extended and immediate. Within the last 10,000 years or so, humans have modified their environments so as to have a greater control over their personal existences. This is inexplicably linked to spiritual beliefs as well as culture. It is linked to systems of power such as governments and religions. At some point industrialized people lost sight of their actual role on this perpetually spinning earth. They have forgotten that it will continue to spin with or without them.

People’s actions directly affect their immediate environments. Industrialized people understand this because they modify their environments constantly. But, what they tend not to see are the far reaching effects of what they do right outside their homes. Everything we do affects something else and travels along a chain of consequences until the energy of our action dissipates. The more intense the action, the farther reaching are the consequences.

Dropping a Pebble Into a Pond VS Building a Nuclear Reactor

A pebble will create ripples on the surface of a pond and land on the bottom. Stirring up silt, it will disturb the critters that live there. Eventually the ripples subside, the silt settles, the pebble is buried in the silt and the critters go about their daily lives. A nuclear reactor will produce waste that could potentially poison the land for up to fifty thousand years. The benefit of -  mining uranium, producing radioactive pollution through the mining process, constructing the reactor, maintaining it for a potential 40 year life span while it constantly produces radioactive waste so it can heat water to produce steam to turn a generator turbine -  needs to be rethought. 

Footprints

Some prints may be deeper than others but ultimately are worn away by the earth without too much effort. Others may be made of concrete but the earth can make short work of that in its own time. Can you leave no lasting footprint after you have walked? Can you put back what you take from the land base where you live? The only way for anything to be sustainable is for this to happen.

What will end up happening in the future will not be easy. It will be easier to live, however, if we change ourselves now.

Yesterday.

Twenty years ago.

Fifty years ago.

Questions and Postulations

The Question

So, what is sustainable? There is no one and only definition. There are attempts at definitions. There are definite personal interpretations.

A Personal Postulation About Our Culture

In order to approach sustainability, our society and culture would have to be radically different.

We would have to be radically different. 

What it is

This Project

This project is the culmination of almost a year and a half of work and interviews. It deals with issues of sustainable food production and ultimately the sustainability of the human species on this planet. Touching on the parts of these issues seldom discussed, this project attempts to open new dialogue and new ways of approaching the topic. Showing that food is inextricably linked to other critical systems in our society such as energy production, environment, economy, health, and the fabric of industrialized society as a whole, this project attempts to tear through the media buzz words and get at the actual issues. Issues that are crucial in environmental stability and in human society as a planetary whole.

The Project and the People

This project is a conversation. It is a conversation about food, sustainability and all the issues, obvious or not, that connect with food production, distribution and ultimately consumption within industrial society. All the people I talked with are passionate about what they do. Their ages differ by as much as 68 years. Their life experiences vary as greatly as their views on sustainability. I have interwoven our ideas, thoughts and experiences to create this written work.

The Interviewees

Don Roberts - Local Grower - conversation contributed to - Water, societal vibrations, Infrastructure, Yes, No

book recommendation - Post-Petroleum Survival Guide Cookbook: Recipes For Changing Times

by Albert Bates, New Society Publishers, Canada 2006

Andy Gaertner - Local CSA Farmer, Montasory Instructor

conversation contributed to - Cuba, Education, Farming

book recommendation - As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay In Denial

by Derrick Jensen

Erin Altemus & Matt Schmidt - Local CSA Farmers

conversation contributed to - Farming

book recommendation - Animal Vegetable Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Crystal Halvorsen - General Manager, Menomonie Market Coop

conversation contributed to - Choices, Juneau Alaska, Food as Manufactured Goods, subsistence living

media to view - The Story of Stuff, by Anne Leonard  www.storyofstuff.com

Peter Kilde - Executive Director, West Central Wisconsin Community Action Agency

conversation contributed to - Collapse, peak oil

blog recommendations - Arch Druid Report - by John Michael Greer and ClubOrlov - by Dmitry Orlov

The Menomonie Homeschool Group  pre-teens and teens. A great group of young people - discussion group on Food Systems and Sustainability

discussions contributed to - Young People

movie to see - Idiocracy