How to Cook

Okay so I read this review of a synopsis of a published study once. I think it was a study from the Union of Concerned Scientists. I don't know what their methods were, but I kinda trust UCS except when they say electric cars are good because no cars are good, it's just that some cars are less bad. In fact, the harder to measure aspects of life are where the real trouble hangs out.

Anyway, it's not their methods that were interesting, it's their conclusions.

They looked at what's nowadays called 'ecological footprint' of certain activites. They decided to focus on everyday activities rather than industrial activities or war or other things that we already know are Godzilla versus Bambi. We're Bambi. We and all the rest of the delicate balance of nature.

Okay so anyway they looked at how much damage to the environment you cause when you do your life, like brush your teeth, play video games, build a basement, get a gall stone transplant, stuff like that. They learned something very surprising, shortly after they were done learning something obvious.

We'll get the obvious thing out of the way, so you can quit bugging me about it. Cars. King Kong to you. In the living room. Sitting quietly. Us, not the gorilla, which is happily munching on shorelines and alveoli and glaciers and making quite a racket, especially if you include the car alarms and car crashes and the ensuing sirens.

So that's out of the way and we can get to the topic at hand, which is cooking. Turns out that after the resounding first place finish, the second and third most ecologically destructive things most people do in their daily lives happen to be...drum roll...eating, and ...well, eating. (Eating does indeed have to do with cooking, right?)

That's right, eating. Meat and veggies in that order.

It makes sense really. Even before chemical warfare was being used in agriculture, even before commodification of food, or the earliest pre-rototiller agriculture, humans were pushing some animals to regional extinction. Because they were edible.

And nowadays the disruption to nature of hauling tasty morsels halfway around the world—our current habit—to say nothing of devoting land that was indeed once a complex multi-species wilderness, well, like I say, it's easy to understand why the munchies rate, though I don't even think the transportation costs were included in this particular study.

But isn't that the way it should be? We animals eat to stay alive and that has a passing impact on natural systems. It's the original natural way of things. I mean, c'mon. We're here. We're human animals. We've gotta eat. What are we gonna do? Beam food out of a black hole?

Why meat? If we glare at the facts, that's not so hard to accept. Just glare at the way meat is fed before it becomes food itself, and the way land is converted for food animals, and the hormones and distribution systems and so on and so forth, meat apparently makes quite a bloody mess before it gets to your table.

But vegetables? That's not so easy to swallow. It seems like something else would be more destructive than eating your puffed cereal, your beans and broccoli. Building that luxury home maybe? Replacing your stockings every day after they run all over you? Replacing your family after your ancestors run down? Actually I don't think that last one was considered in the study. But anyway yeah. Vegetables.

And apparently that's before including transportation. The transportation thing is a biggie, since we want our favorite food and we want it now. Seasons shmeasons. Somewhere in the world the season and soil are producing what we want right now. And as long as the cost of fuel allows it, someone will tow it across salty sands and burning seas to allow us to buy it.

Okay now let's pause for a moment and point out that this study is about American daily life, not people elsewhere. In many places people do feel limited by the seasons, by droughts, and by, well, certain unforgiving natural limits.

Also, for the sake of blog relevance, I see the climate change element wasn't weighted as heavily in the 1999 study as it might be today.

Rather than just feeling bad, I think organic and less meat is a good way to go, but as with my stand on almost everything, the big task we face if we want to improve the world is taking decisions away from the megacorporations. In organics as elsewhere, that seems not to be the trend.

We need organic, small scale agriculture, and local sources. Oh, and forcing the war-car-oil-TV-fear-based economy out of business. And since that isn't happening in time to stave off trouble, let's educate ourselves and work together, rather than bicker amongst ourselves as to who's failing to eat properly or recycle. It's not the main issue, and wastes energy that could go toward revolution or deep change.

Deep breath.

I saw another study more recently, this one by Consumer Reports. I trust them, too. Even though viewing people as consumers skews the sample. This study was comparing organic against commercially grown foods on the basis of whether chemical pesticide and other cringe-inducing residues end up in your food. Turns out, oddly enough, if you base it on intake of toxic yuck, some foods aren't worth the huge price increase just to get purity into your mouth. Those foods are processed in a way that destroys the residues before they reach your table, they say. (Other foods they looked at show a clear benefit to organic.)

Make of it what you will, but it three-quarters misses the point, this study. Your health tomorrow may depend on what residues you ingest today, but your health in 40 years depends on what some greedy agribusiness sprays or doesn't spray, injects or doesn't inject, grows for export or allows locals to eat, justifies as fertilizer byproduct from the oil. I don't mean "your health" in 40 years, in the abstract, like, one's health forty years after eating. I mean your health measured individually will probably be damaged more by secondary effects of our global habits than by what you actually eat.

Forty years from right now, the factors that'll determine your health are more likely to be about whether the entire global ecology is functioning than about whether you lazily allowed a residue of contamination onto your plate. Faddish epidemics, million refugee marches, wildfires, floods, battles, crashing educational standards: those are the things that will result from 40 years of lazily ignored food systems. Besides, instead of burning the local corner store when we riot against the horrors, we should be burning the system of commerce.

Here we are trying to eat. Guilt is a bad thing. Don't bother. Instead, if you want to feel immediately, gratifyingly virtuous, stop driving, reduce or eliminate meat from your diet and eat organic. If you drive twenty extra miles a week to buy organic, give up the car and eat organic food less often. It's better for the world. If you can join a CSA, where a farm delivers directly to a home in your neighborhood, walk to that home and get your box, thereby saving not only the drive for you, but the drive for the distributor you are leaving out of the food chain. But most of all, stop with the passivity. Tell people, especially younger people, that Monsanto is ruining your future, that profit margins are guaranteeing a future of poison, global unrest, and bad eating habits. In many cases, no eating habits, like starving people by the millions.