Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan's books include In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, and the newly released Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.
From Pollan's Q & A with Rachel Khong in The Daily Beast:
Is the way we’re eating going to bring about end of the world?--Marshal Zeringue
The way we eat now is having a profound effect on climate change, which certainly threatens to bring about the end of the world as we’ve known it.
For better and worse, the industrial food system has made food very cheap. The poor can eat a better diet than they once could. It used to be that only the rich could eat meat every day of the week. Now just about everyone can, three meals a day. Fast-food chains make it easy. It’s not very good meat, and most of it is brutally produced, but it is within reach.
But meat has a tremendous carbon footprint: beef in particular because it takes so much grain to get a pound of beef. It takes about 15 pounds of grain to get 1 one pound of beef, and that grain takes tremendous amounts of fossil fuel—in the form of fertilizer, pesticide, farm equipment, processing, and transportation. All told, it takes 55 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get one calorie of beef. The average for processed foods is 10 calories of fossil fuel per calorie of food.
Before World War II every calorie of fossil-fuel energy put into a farm—in the form of diesel energy for tractors, and in fertilizer—yielded 2.3 calories of food. That’s nature’s free lunch—the difference between that 1 calorie in and the 2.3 out, which is the result of solar energy. Now, it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of food. It’s absurd that we’re now running an energy deficit with food, the production of which is theoretically based on photosynthesis. It should be the one area in our lives that is carbon neutral or even better, because plants are really the only way to take energy from the sun.
Our goal should be to eat from the solar food chain to the extent we can and not from the fossil-fuel chain, which is...[read on]
