grow your own!
Yesterday’s BBC News had a commentary by Peter Baker taking an economist’s view of food production. It sounds like an excellent argument for growing your own food. Here’s an interesting excerpt:
The orderliness required to plant, grow, harvest, process, pack, store, monitor, administer, transport, display and sell the produce in a supermarket is simply staggering, and the expended energy intense.
As an example, tomato production in the US consumes four times as many calories as the calorific value of the tomatoes created…
Even before its sea voyage, the calorific value of US wheat is only twice the amount of calories expended to produce it. Compare this with cassava production in Tanzania where 23 times the calorific value is gained for each calorie of human energy input.
Of course, you can’t derive nutritional benefit from drinking diesel fuel or some of the other power inputs necessary to produce food in the industrial American agricultural system. But that would be fuel that could be devoted to something more important–or kept out of the atmosphere entirely.
(The statistic on farmed tomatoes has shades of the title of William Alexander’s book, The $64 Tomato, a book I haven’t read yet. It’s on my list…)
August 12 2008 05:18 am | Categories: gardening | Tags: agriculture • economics • food
Greg on 12 Aug 2008 at 8:20 pm #
Well, it sure isn’t the Early Girl worth that, I’ll tell you. She is only just now starting to get some real color on her.
Ah, but how to scare those store produce lovers to break ground and grow their own? If only they knew how much sweeter everything tasted.