Halve meat consumption, scientists urge rich world

[Gorp]

110. I agree with almost everything you just posted except for the "model for all" line.

Smaller farmers tend to practice crop rotation that the factory farm model doesn't embrace. Soy and corn should be alternated at least every two years. We're fortunate to have an excellent farmers market with a few stands that make every effort possible to buy as close to local as possible and actively seek out organic produce.

So when corn first becomes available in FL, that's what they start with (and label place of origin) and they work their way up the coast as the season progresses until they're purchasing from small farms in the immediate area. They also grow their own produce when the seasons are right.

And contrary to a popular myth, organic produce is not more expensive to produce and often less so. I walk out of the farmers market with BAGS of produce for what seems like a rediculously small amount of money and I couldn't even estimate how much we save each year by growing our own organic food, but it's a lot. Chemicals are expensive and harm the soil.

We're also fortunate to have a lot of farm stands on back roads around here. That's a great way to get high-quality (tender loving care) produce for a good price. I don't have room for large vining plants like watermelons, crook-neck squash, and sugar pumpkins. I always hand over a little more than they're charging just for their effort.

The problem we have is that people want everything to look pretty, so if corn has silk worms or lettuce has a few brown spots, people don't want to buy it. I remember sorting through kale and collards with my grandparents to look for caterpillars and corn ALWAYS had silk worms. They don't eat much, just cut/pick them out. On the other hand, you do NOT want to compost them. That part you throw out.

A family owned grocery store (I know, a dying breed), small chain, has a tractor symbol they use to identify local produce, and they mean local - often picked the day it goes on sale and delivered directly to each store. The giant chain grocery stores use central warehouses so you're lucky if anything in the produce section is less than a week old. Obviously the more northern states aren't going to have local oranges, and drought hits all farmers equally hard, so transportation is a key element for diversity. But adjusting your diet by the season compensates for a lot of that.

As for raising animals, yes, free-range is optimal but the larger the farm the less likely that is to happen. Factory farms depend on over-crowding, heavy antibiotic use (a problem in its own right), growth hormones, run-off that's destroying waterway ecosystems, dwindling bio-diversity, and factory farms account for most of the corn and soy that's grown in the US as feed for the animals. Ethical issues aside, that's not sustainable in the long-run.

On top of that, the protein ratio (what is consumed vs. what comes out of the meat) is always a net loss. Chicken has the best ratio with something like 5:1 and beef has the worst at around 16:1. Pork falls somewhere in the middle. This is true regardless of whether they graze or get feed meal, but the latter is a major waste of growing space, water, and other resources.

India doesn't have nearly the agricultural advantage we do in the US and relies on importing wheat and rice. Lentils and other legumes grow very well there and they export those. Of their 1.2 billion citizens, about a third are vegetarian (some do dairy, others dairy and eggs as I do) - that's more vegetarians than the entire US population.

Sure, they've got problems with poluted water, poverty, and malnutrition just as we do, but it can safely be argued that the problem stems from industrialization and their caste system rather than their diets. They went through the same sort of squeezing out of small farmers that we're going through, and continue to go through.

There's also a cost advantage. Meat is expensive. Legumes and grains are very inexpensive and will last pretty much indefinitely if kept dry and out of the reach of pests. We use 1/2 gallon mason jars for the purpose. I've still got chick peas from 20 years ago when I bought a 25 lb bag for about $15. They all cook quickly, are convenient, and provide an excellent and easily absorbed protein source. Peanuts are the exception with respect to shelf life.

Amaranth and quinoa are both complete proteins, each on their own. It's almost impossible not to get enough protein as a vegetarian, but I have known a few who live on pizza and diet soda - I'm thinking maybe that's not so healthy.

What we need to do as a society, and even as a world society, is make the mega-aggriculture businesses like Monsanto see that they need to change their approach. As it stands, the US subsidizes the hell out of mega farms and chemical/GMO companies. We need to stop that and prop up the small farmers before they disappear.

Monsanto is throwing lawyers at small farmers who want nothing to do with the company merely because, through no fault of said farmers, their non-GMO crops fell victim to cross-polination from nearby GMO crops or if they fail to purchase more seeds each season, indicating that they're growing from saved seeds (a violation of the "lease" on the DNA). They use "Round-Up Ready" seeds so they also have to purchase large quantities of the chemical for spraying. Yet the weeds are gaining resistance to Round-Up. That house of cards is just waiting to come crashing down.

Food is not intellectual property. Corporations aren't people. Yet the laws we have lean toward giving large corporations the advantage and that's coming at a great cost to our survival security and the well-being of our society. Unless we change that, I cringe to think what things will be like in twenty years.

We grow a lot of our own food, store, can, dry, and freeze a good deal of it, and save seeds for the next season. We've still got a lot of potatoes that we harvested in September. Yet very few people seem to bother with gardening anymore. At least my kids have grown up knowing how to turn bad soil into good and tend to the crops. I just hope that doesn't become a necessity in order to live. I'm not worried about zombies, asteroids, or massive earthquakes, but rather what we are doing to ourselves.