The Transcontinental Lettuce

1. The Transcontinental Lettuce By Brian Halweil

2. The Mississippi • Major path for shipping about 35000 metric tons of soybeans a day. • US Army Corps of Engineer project: add to the existing lock infrastructure to allow more flow of goods. • Expansion adds to 85 million meters of sand and mud already lost from the bank and bottom every year.

3. Economic Incentive • Lower the cost of shipping soybeans by 4 cents per bushel. • Analysts think this isn’t possible even with the construction.

4. S. American Plan • The governments of Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, and Paraguay created a plan to dredge 13 million meters of sand, rock, and mud from the Paraguay-Parana River. • Came at nearly the same time as the Mississippi plan.

5. S. American Plan • Calls for the building of a major port and dozens of locks in the world’s largest wetland. • Soybean production and export in the region is second only to the United States.

6. Lobbying • Lobbyists for the Mississippi, as well as ones for the Paraguay-Parana, construction argue that the expansion is necessary to “improve competitiveness, grab world market share, and rescue farmers from their worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

7. Lobbyist Arguments • The Midwest River Coalition 2000 • Essential to feeding the world as the shipping of soybeans will be much faster. • Locks will save the environment because hungry peasants and indigenous peoples will not have to clear rainforests for farmland.

8. Um…No • The author argues that anyone who examines both sides of the debate will find that US farmers and Brazilian farmers will not just be more competitive with each other. • A more likely outcome, he states, is that there will be a race to maximize production. • Maximizing production will force farmers in both regions to cut deeper into environmentally integral lands, like river banks and rainforests, to garner the most profit. • There will be more soybeans being shipped at faster rates, but each farmer will earn less per ton. • The increase in amount of produce shipped will not matter when small-scale farmers are eventually bought out by corporate farms.

9. Why don’t they see why this cannot work? • Lobbyists calling for this plan are working for the top soybean processing companies using the rivers—Archer, Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge. • It is in these companies best interests that the price of soybeans fall because they buy the crops from farmers.

10. Just Another Day in the Global Economy • A handful of companies control the fates of many farmers. • Construction on the Mississippi will be funded at a huge public expense. • Expense not only in a dollar sense, but also in environmental and social ones. • Corporations use emotional phrases like “hungry masses” or “farmer’s plights” to gain cooperation.

11. Ecological Damage on the Mississippi • Increased barge traffic • Kicked up sediment will block sunlight, reducing the depths at which plant life can live. • Reduces the number of species that depend on the same plants for sustenance (i.e. birds, mollusks, fish). • US Army Corps of Engineers plan threatens 300 species of birds and 127 species of fish.

12. Ecological Damage on the Parguay-Parana • The proposed plan will destroy bird-nesting habitat and fish spawning areas. • Many indigenous societies depend on these animals for sustenance. • Just as on the Mississippi, reduce the depth at which plant life can survive.

13. Justification • Senators say that the plan is required for efficiency. • This efficiency relies on a short-sightedness that doesn’t factor in the environmental ruin.

14. History • Even just a few decades ago, most people obtained their food from local sources. • In ancient times though, there was still shipping and international trade for exotic flavors and supplemental foods. • Until modern times, only wealthy individuals were able to partake in these items.

15. Today • Local foods are playing an ever-shrinking role in our consumption while foreign-made foods are increasingly made available to everyone. • In 2002, $442 billion of food were shipped around the globe. • 898 million tons of food shipped each year. • 4x increase from 1961 total of 200 million.

16. Why Do We Eat Less Local Produce? • Part of the reason can be attributed to urbanization. • Food needs to be moved from the centers of production to the cities. • Technology allows for longer storage and more distant movement.

19. Food Storage • MikalSaltveit, a Plant Science professor at the University of California, “directs a lab concerned with ‘how to keep lettuce and carrots from browning, among other things.’” • He claims that throughout human history, man has been preoccupied with storing food. • Societies invented such things as salting, drying, pickling, and fermenting. • Storage practices were developed over time to lessen the hardships of summer months where there was little food to survive on.

20. Industrial Revolution • The Industrial Revolution came at a time when large standing armies were established and people began urbanizing at an appalling rate. • 1809: Napoleon offered a reward to anyone who could find a way to keep rations from spoiling. • A French chef, Nicolas Appert developed the first method for canning as a response. • He “packed food into glass jars, sealed the cork tops with pitch, and boiled the jars.” • 1815: the British had refined the technique with tin-coated steel. • 1860s: canned foods were everywhere.

21. Industrial Revolution cont. • 1875: Mechanical refrigeration • A Chicago meatpacker, Gustavus Swift, developed a refrigerated railroad car. • Later advances in freezing during WWI brought about a frozen food craze. • Mid-1920s: Birds-eye started freezing produce. • 1920s: British scientists created a storage process for apples that slows ripening. • Today: most all apples are shipped with this technique.

22. Recent Food Storage • 1924: Ethylene discovered • Ethylene gas allows companies to ship fruits unripe and ripen them upon arrival to their destination. • Most bananas today are bred to not ripen on their own, and instead must wait for a gassing. • Top food preservation techniques rely on no packing or cooling and instead look to biotechnology.

23. Mikal Saltveit • “Both traditional plant breeding and biotechnological genetic engineering are being used.” • Mikal warns that concerns about genetic tainting shouldn’t mar its uses. • “Reducing softening of tomatoes by anti-sensing [reversing through genetic engineering] a specific gene should not be viewed with the same concern as introducing human genes into a pig.”

24. Science Fiction? • For extremely fragile foods, scientists are currently looking into edible packaging. • Works best with whole, uncut foods. • Working with this technology, the US Army has created an “indestructible sandwich.” • Can stay fresh for as long as three years.

25. Squeamishness • People have always been wary of new food storage techniques. • Some of the first canned foods were labeled “embalmed.” • In the first half of the 20th century there was widespread opposition to the pasteurization of milk. • People may reminisce about veggies before genetic engineering, but they must remember, according to Saltveit, that they were not available year round back then. • Saltveit: “quality of food is increasing as is the healthfulness of the diet.”

26. Opposition • Robert Sommers, another University of California professor disagrees with Saltveit. • “The universities were supporting research to make things look pretty at the neglect of things that were important to consumers. • Argues that “hard” tomatoes were the turning point in this type of research. • “consumer resistance to the tough, square, tasteless tomato was so great that the universities couldn’t just support the mechanical, industrial type of agriculture.”

27. Opposition cont. • Sommers recalls that tough fruits are able to be picked much faster by machines than by people. • Many California farm workers have been put out of work by mechanization. • After several events like this, the University of California established a few alternative agriculture programs.

28. Jet-Lagged Fruits • Falling oil prices and new modes of transportation in the mid 1900s reduced the costs of shipping food. • Traveling produce uses as many modes of transportation as people during their vacations. • Ride a boat from England to east US coast, then refrigerated train cars across the nation, shipped to Japan, and then trucked across the country. • During all of this movement, produce is taking advantage of its many storage wonders. • Containerization, or the process of using small, uniform containers that are easily loaded and moved, has further increased the speed at which food is transported.

29. So Happy Together… • Food shipping and processing advances work in tandem. • In response to the US government asking for an orange juice that could be shipped overseas to US troops fighting in WWII. • Starting point for multibillion dollar frozen orange juice business.

30. Fuel for Lettuce • All of the movement across the globe requires ridiculous amounts of fuel. • A head of lettuce grown in California and shipped to Washington DC costs 36 times as much fuel energy as it provides in protein energy when consumed. • When this head arrives in London the fuel energy/protein energy ratio is 127. • These “Perishables” are the fastest growing segment of the food shipping industry. • Most international trade is by boat and rail. • More efficient than airplanes.

31. Fuel for Dry Food • Beans and grains can be shipped without refrigeration. • These small foods can contain loads of protein and nutrition. • Cause four times less greenhouse gas emissions than perishables. • In Britain, food transport is the country’s fastest growing industry and therefore its leading greenhouse gas emitter.

32. Farming Effects • Climate change hits farms the hardest. • Farms require a stable climate to be productive. • Studies provide evidence that in the next 50 years, agricultural yields in many areas will drop substantially.

33. Global Change • Dependence upon imported foods will become ever more expensive as climate damage continues. • Due to heavy dependence on fossil fuels. • Shocks to the oil industry like peak production or massive price increases will also negatively affect our food production.

34. Local Foods • Interest in local food production could help break an addiction to oil. • By learning to farm with less oil now, farmers will avoid negative consequences in the future. • Illogical to import foods. • Many nations import foods they already produce. • This “food swap” is part of the subsidization of transportation, centralization by food manufacturers, and trade agreements that set import quotas. • These economic forces explain why Tropicana juice bottles list over five countries for concentrate origins. • How can one be sure of what he/she is drinking?

35. Ecological Economist Herman Daly • “Americans import Danish sugar cookies, and Danes import American sugar cookies. Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

36. Waste • Food trade cycles leave enormous pressure to deal with waste on one end. • On the other end, there is a loss of useful organic waste. • Food scraps and packages now make up a greater portion of waste than ever before. • Edible packaging could help. • Landfills filled with food waste could be utilized.

37. Conclusion • Long-distance food has helped feed people, but it has been overdeveloped. • Necessary at one time. • Greed is motivation. • Technology overused. • Elimination of local growers and food. • Taste reduction. • Wasted fossil fuels and organic matter.