By Elizabeth Anne Hull
Elizabeth Anne Hull
While I’m struggling to lose the twenty pounds I gained from several weeks of prednisone, I do appreciate the irony that, for most of the last century, our problems with food in the West — particularly North America and Europe — usually stem from the availability of too much tempting, cheap food, while the rest of the world has historically always struggled with the threat of famine. A plea for CARE came to my mailbox last week, and ordinarily I would have immediately sent them a contribution, but I delayed because I was too busy to write the check. (I did however, drop off a grocery bagful of nonperishable surplus from our pantry to the food pantry at the Palatine Township office.)
I also didn’t have the time to open my latest National Geographic till this morning. Aside from Playboy, NG is probably the magazine most subscribed to for its pictures and not its articles. The June issue shows pages and pages of pictures of the current problems in the world and the looming Malthusian crisis that will affect America. I recommend everyone should not only see these pictures — which give a glimmering of the extent of the current problem and leave to one’s imagination what the future will hold — but also read the article.
Meanwhile, I’m getting together another bag of groceries — Spam, tuna, dry cereal, powdered milk, peanut butter, Triscuit, canned corn, peas, and green beans — to take to the food pantry for the hungry close to home, for those who have suddenly lost jobs, young healthy men as well as those who traditionally depend on the kindness of strangers: women with children and the elderly. I’ll probably never see their faces, or if I do, I won’t know that they received our bounty. But I’ll feel better about myself and my weight problems.
Palatine Township Food Pantry
John H says:
One element that is exacerbating the problem (that was noticeably absent in that NatGeo piece) is the increasing reliance on food-based alternatives to petroleum. Demands for ethanol from corn and soybeans is putting additional pressure on stockpiles while simultaneously encouraging farmers to switch from crops that are less desirable from a biofuel standpoint. As the cost of petrofuel goes up, so too does the demand for biofuel to supplant foreign oil, leading to higher prices for corn and soybeans.
And it’s not just corn and soybeans that go up in price. Since most meat and dairy producers rely on corn feed, those prices go up as well. As do the prices for vegetables as farmers switch to the more lucrative biofuel crops.
It’s sadly ironic that twenty years ago, so many midwest farmers were bankrupted by the glut of excess supply (and subsequent collapse of prices).
May 30, 2009, 2:58 pmJeff says:
Monsanto. Don’t even talk to me about Monsanto. Maybe the problem they are having isn’t in creating a drought-resistant corn, it’s creating a drought-resistant corn mule. Monsanto doesn’t like to sell seed that can self-replicate. There’s no money in it. And when their ge crops fail, they fail spectacularly. The article failed to note that the suicide epidemic in India has been tied directly to the massive debt the farmers have been placed under by ge crop failure. The ge seeds are expensive, and they can’t save seeds to plant next year because they’re mules. So they have to go back to Monsanto every year to buy more expensive seeds. These farmers bet the farm and lose and end up as sharecroppers.
Thus is has always been. My grandfather was first a farmer, until he lost the farm and ended up sharecropping.
Where I live, I have watched farms disappear over the last 20 years, swallowed up by urban sprawl. There used to be corn fields, soyabean, and cotton everywhere. And where the land wasn’t good for farming, there were ranches that raised cattle for beef, and there were dairies. There were also pecan and peach orchards. But now all of that is gone. Now there are miles of subdivisions, and even more miles of industrial parks. Our peaches come from California and Chile. I wonder how much American farmland could be reclaimed if we could only plow under the urban sprawl.
June 1, 2009, 9:18 amStefan Jones says:
Oregon has been hit really hard by the recession.
I’m not a religious guy, but I’m really impressed by a new-wave church that has set up shop in an industrial park down the street. In the winter they run a “warming shelter” for folks with frozen pipes or who are living in cars; they have a special mass (or whatever they call it) for ex-cons and sex offenders. And a clothes closet and a food pantry. Imagine, acting like Christians rather than bothering science teachers and gays!
While I’d never go to a service there, I’ve been dropping off $100 of food each month. I clip coupons and look for sales and load up on cereal, pasta, canned food (stores sell cans cheap when labels change) and the like and then pile it in front of their office.
June 4, 2009, 1:00 pmpsikeyhackr says:
The Space Merchants has always been among my top 30 sci-fi books. I don’t think I could select a top 10, I like too many books for too many different reasons. But economics is an inescapable part of the background of every story. Some stories just bring it to the foreground more than others.
I recently read a short story by Mack Reynolds, Subversive from 1962, that lays things on the line far more than most. It used the term “planned obsolescence” 3 times within 20 pages. Most economics books don’t use it at all. A trouble with America is that the technology of television has been used to brainwash us into consuming more, and more and more…. But there is a flip side to that consumption which economists do not mention. If someone bought a $2000 laptop 3 years ago how much would it be worth today? Maybe $500. So that meant $1500 lost in depreciation even if the laptop works fine. In 1995 the US automobile population passed 200,000,000. So at $1500 per car per year that is $300,000,000,000 lost every year.
Economists add those purchases to GDP and call it economic growth but all of that depreciation on the demand side is never subtracted from anywhere. Economists treat cars like bananas.
Another curious thing is that double-entry accounting is 700 years old. How hard can it be? With today’s cheap computers it should be a piece of cake. I have never read a science fiction story where EVERYONE was expected to know accounting the way people are expected to know how to ride a bike. How would that affect the economic power games? Most plots use an economic background much like the West since WWII.
Star Trek gave us a hint:
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/DS9/episode/68180.html
But we are stuck with the results of decades of nonsense now.
http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=28529&sid=6b798843388e88c3a822bf418c9d287f
psik
June 20, 2009, 5:33 pm