We love our apples, oranges, bananas, pickles, corn, carrots, eggs, pork, chicken, beef and baby back ribs (well I love all of those except the meat—I am vegan and proud)! I believe you already read or glance at the little labels that stick to your fruits and vegetables, telling you where they come from. I assume you probably do not think twice about the distance? Or, how long it sat in the truck or ship to get to your plate? That meat on your plate may or may not, comprise of corn and grain, maybe a few pieces of chicken remains, fed to the cattle and beef in factories. Additionally, those tomatoes or cucumbers, celery or carrots—unless organically grown in a local farm—most likely grew in a garden of pesticides and fertilisers made from...oil. Yes, oil. That meat on your plate? Oil surrounds it. How do you think those factories run? Or, the grain and corn produced to feed the cattle? Or, the fertilisers and pesticides sprayed and mixed into the soil of those beautifully and perfectly round and red tomatoes? Oil. Oil. Oil. The peak of oil has surpassed us and not much more remains, but our current agricultural system continues to depend on that oil, as though it shall never end.
In regards to the meat industry, which heavily relies on electricity and gasoline, the average amount of energy it consumes by the time you have it on your table amounts to almost “twenty times more than an equivalent serving of bread” (Bomford 123)³. Moreover, animal feedlots and greenhouses account for a lot of the energy used to get that produce to us on our tables. Does this mean we must become vegetarians or vegans? Not exactly, because although a diet comprised of grains vegetables and fruit uses less energy than a diet comprised of meat, vegetables grown in a large green house actually consumes as much as meat. For instance, one tomato grown in a greenhouse that ends up on your plate ‘is about the same as for a serving of chicken, or twelve servings of’ tomatoes that have been grown on a field (Bomford 123)³. Moreover, a locally greenhouse cultivated tomato grown ‘out of season’ typically consumes a lot more energy than a tomato that grows in a field, but then imported from a long distance—via air, sea or land (Bomford 124)³.
The main message here, and what often gets ignored, revolves around, ‘how food travels’ (in addition to the distance travelled) (Bomford 125)³. The efficiency of ‘how food travels’ varies from boats to trains to large and small trucks to even your own car. Large boats are more economical than trains, which are more economic than using trucks. Driving your car over to buy, say, some bananas “two miles down the road uses more fuel per banana than the journey of thousands of miles over water” (Bomford 125)³ that carries them from wherever they grow (i.e. Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala etc.) So what does this, then, all entail? It demands for locality and the reduction and elimination of processing, packaging and storing food, as well as preparing it to a certain extent. Such aspects of our current food system produce the greatest costs in energy use.
In our post-carbon future village, Communitas Crescit, food will revolutionise. The food revolution movement opposes our current food system by emphasising local, organic agriculture and healthy and sustainable ways of living. By sustainable I mean shopping at a local farmers market, rather than purchasing from a big grocery shop, walking more often to a local food produce shop rather than driving, or take your local transport buses down to the market. Living more sustainably also means we must consider our own appliances at home, from our fridges to our microwaves, dishwashers, stove-tops, and electric water boilers for our coffee and tea. We do not need the latest high-tech fridge that takes up a third of a wall, or a stove with two built in ovens that you might only use twice a year: on Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. The drastic amounts of new technologies that prepare our foods tend to use up a lot more energy (electricity and gas) than we might think, despite their efficiency levels. High-efficiency does not mean less energy use (Bomford 127)³. Overall, Communitas Crescit will stipulate to not think about the newest and biggest technologies for our kitchens to prepare and store our foods, but instead, promote creativity in a world without fossil fuels.
Now imagine a different food system in which the community only purchases produce from local farmers that grow their foods within, say, about a 30 mile radius. (The closer, the better, but not all areas around the Bay Area are able to grow certain produce.) Food will also come from ‘microfarming’ (Sharashkin, Gold, and Barham 2)⁴ or farming done by individuals, families or a small group of people, who garden and produce food for themselves (they usually rely more on their own gardens than purchasing from other famers). In order for ‘microfarming’ to work, small gardens established around the village, will allow for people to cultivate and nurture their crops. Commuitas Crescit will also provide farmers markets, where famers from the city and some from the outside—who cultivate the foods that cannot grow in the city—come together and deliver to the people their energies of life. The personal and/or community garden becomes the place where you and the villagers living there harvest those red and green tomatoes that you can grab from the stem. Use it in your salad or tomato soup that you cook at home or at the community kitchen where you all share your delicious creations. Yes, imagine that—sharing your meals! Who would have thought?
Imagine also a village where meat, since meat consumption will still play a role in the food system, comes from cows that graze grass lands in Vacaville, for instance, less than 50 miles away from San Francisco. These cows and chickens feed on only what they are naturally supposed to eat—grass—versus what our current food system feeds them: grain and corn. These organic farms do not use heavy machinery to produce the meat that the villagers will gladly consume. These Communitas Crescit villagers may even encounter some farmers bringing whole chickens and pigs that they will cut pieces from, as desired, and sell to them or you!
The age of fossil fuels already peaked, and since this village exists in a post-carbon world, the use of fossil fuels for the processing, packaging, transportation and storage of food becomes much different. Since most of the vegetables and fruits will grow in the garden(s) within the village, the villagers (adults and children) and local farmers will help manage the growth of the produce in the community garden. Once the tomatoes, cabbages or peaches are ripe, villagers can use those right away, without having to go long distance or store the produce in fridges. Moreover, if the meat comes from a place, like Vacaville, an area with green pastures to raise cows and chickens, the farmers will make their way over to the village and sell their freshly skinned beef that the farmers stored in reusable ice-storage containers. So how do all these foods get stored without relying on energy from fossil fuels? Since the village will use a combination of solar and wind power to generate electricity in their homes, small micro-fridges with freezers will run on this type of renewable energy. A food cellar will hold leftover produce (from the community garden), located in the basement of the building in Communitas Crescit; the temperatures remain cool enough to store produce for a few days. All the facets of food agriculture, including producing, packaging, transporting and selling, does neither require nor need much, if any, reliance on fossil fuels. In this day and age, and in Communitas Crescit, such agricultural futures become a thing of the past.
This piece bears importance to our project of Envisioning a Post-Carbon City in two ways. It first identifies how much our current agricultural system rests on the production and use of fossil fuels. Second, since our project focuses on a time after the age of when fossil fuels cease to exist, this piece explains how our village, Communitas Crescit, will provide food, and thus energy, for our very own community. We also stress locality because the more we cultivate around us, the less we import from other locations, which then becomes problematic since attaining oil for transportation no longer exists or becomes quite difficult and very expensive to find. Overall this piece on food production in our little village portrays ways in which a community can sustain itself without the use of fertilisers or pesticides or the reliance of others in different countries to provide for us. It also comes down to food security and the relief of knowing that your community will not suffer from food price inflation or even worse, food shortages or famines.
This is “a community food system” where “neighbouring stakeholders are the ones growing that food, moving it around, and in control of land tenure or wherever soil-, food-, and Earth-based materials are being grown” (Allen 140)⁵. In essence, we are discussing independence from a dominating, fossile fule-run, centralised agricultural system, and replacing it with a vision entailing community resistance—a food revolution. This project requires envisioning, and through our community we envision a food system separate from other food systems, in which people choose what they want to grow and what they want to eat. Food is the essence of every life, and every life should choose what goes on their plates.
¹ Btu stand for British thermal unit. One British thermal unit (Btu) is equal to 1055 joules (1.055 kJ) (BFIN).
From: Bioenergy Feedstock Information Network (BFIN). ‘Conversion Factors.’ Bioenergy Feedstock
Information Network (BFIN). Web. 02 April 2011.
² One quadrillion Btu is equal to about 172 million barrels of oil (BFIN).
From: Bioenergy Feedstock Information Network (BFIN). ‘Conversion Factors.’ Bioenergy Feedstock
Information Network (BFIN). Web. 02 April 2011.
³ Bomford, Michael. ‘Getting Fossil Fuels off the Plate.’ The Post Carbon Reader. Richars Heinberg and
Daniel Lerch, eds. Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010. Print.
⁴ Sharashkin, Leonid, Michael Gold, and Elizabeth Barham. Ecofarming and Agroforestry for
Self-Reliance: Small-scale, Sustainable Growing Practices in Russia. Colombia,
Montana: University of Missouri-Colombia, 2005. Print.
⁵ Allen, Erika. ‘Growing Community Food Systems.’ The Post Carbon Reader. Richars Heinberg and
Daniel Lerch, eds. Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010. Print.
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