Does it Feel Warm to You? Ask Your Food

I know there are those who continue to deny man-induced climate change, either because

1) they are politicians who receive copious amounts of money from the industries who are responsible for much of the polluting that is causing climate change,

or

2) they are so deeply committed to their partisan political beliefs that they couldn't possibly admit Al "I invented the Internet (but never really said that, the media just keeps saying I did)" Gore and liberal f@#$ing hippies have been right

or

3) they find some sort of strange amusement in denying that most of the scientific evidence produced suggests the climate is changing and man's activities are a big reason for that, even as a good portion of Russia is on fire, a good bit of Pakistan is under water, and a nice big piece of Greenland four times the size of Manhattan is now floating around in the ocean, just looking for off-shore oil rigs to take out.

So, while, as a country we do very little to lead the rest of the world toward engaging in activities to help at least start to limit the harm we are doing, the impact of climate change on how the world eats is quickly making itself known:

Already the extreme drought and heat has badly damaged grain harvests in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, the old Soviet breadbasket responsible for one-fourth of the world's wheat exports. Russia's grain harvest could drop from 94 million tons to 65 million tons or less this year—an alarming figure that prompted Moscow to ban grain exports, steps that could be followed by its neighbors.

And it's not just wheat.

Grain isn't the only crop that will under more intense heat. The production of rice—the world's most widely consumed grain, with some 700 million metric tons produced a year—could suffer as temperatures rise, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wheat, rice. Feh! What are those, but just staple crops required to feed much of the world. Screw it. Didn't we get, like, 8,000 inches of snow or something this winter? See, it's all a crock. A global conspiracy. A George Soros-funded plot to make people turn down their air conditioning and ride bikes so that they'll be more tired and more easily succumb to the socialist plot of the dirty hippy liberals to take over the world.

Or something like that.

March Madness and Dan Barber

Shwooooo.... That's me taking a deep breath that Pitt got through the first round of the Big Dance, with relative ease. So now just sipping on an Old Fashion and enjoying a really bangin' game between New Mexico State and Michigan State, and catching up on a few bloggie type things...

Beginning with, this really, really, really great talk by Dan Barber, the well-known chef, writer, and uber local food advocate, at that TED thing. It begins with the memorable line, "I've known a lot of fish in my life, I've loved only two."



From there, it maneuvers to fish fed bits of chicken and then to an amazing fish farm -- three words I'd never thought I'd put together -- in southern Spain. A farm so amazing, so healthy that it welcomes flamingos and other bird predators -- flamingos that fly 300 miles round trip, every day, to eat the farm's quality output.

Also I would recommend reading an accompanying TED Q&A with Barber, in which a few Q&As caught my eye:

So you argue that acre-for-acre, over time, the yield on an organic farm surpasses that of conventional farms.

Yes. The TOTAL CALORIC yield on an organic farm far surpasses a conventional farm. That's on every credible study out there. That's not even an issue.

Let's talk about grain. Because if you're talking about feeding the world, it's really about grain. Now, if you're an organic corn farmer, by definition, you can't grow corn every year. You have to get nitrogen back in the soil. So you'll grow corn, and then you'll grow a legume, and so you'll fix the nitrogen and improve the soil structure. Now, if you're a conventional farmer, you're growing just corn and nothing else but corn. So you might look at this system and say the conventional farmer got more corn. But what that doesn't show is that the organic farmer also got soybeans, switchgrass, vetch, alfalfa ...

And this one:

Your TEDtalk presents itself as a really gentle tale, but it's actually a pretty radical proposition for rethinking food production. Talk to me about where you think agriculture has gone wrong.

When you say that agriculture has gone wrong, it sounds like you're advocating for a system that's 200 years old. I couldn't be further from that; I love technology. But I do think we're heading for a vastly different food experience, in our lifetimes. I think the conventional food system -- which is based on lots of cheap energy, lots of cheap labor, lots of available water, lots of soil erosion -- is going to be a dead man walking 20 years from now. And that's because the things it relies upon are not going to be available.

Watch the video, read the entire Q&A. It's great stuff.