Human diet and our future — from the perspective of a conscious meat-eater
Posted on November 3, 2013 | posted by:Importance of food
Since beginning of human life, food has been the epic center around which many important events have taken place. Jesus gathered his closest friends around a meal on the last day of his life. Buddha (Siddharta Gautama) fasted to the verge of starvation. The Chinese have used food as therapy and medicine for some 4000 years. Food has been the medium, and diet has been the system, through which people have tried to reach goals. As in the examples above, food and diet choices have had long-lasting rippling effects throughout time.
Today, we have an abundance of food* and we do not think of this as a new state of the (food) system. Most, if not all, of you readers have never experienced a prolonged period of food scarcity. Since humans evolved into our current version (approx. 200,000 – 50,000 years ago), the amount of available food has been rather limited, or at least not as readily available as it is today. About 12,000 to 8,000 years ago something happened: Agriculture. This allowed for humans to stay in one place and grow bigger communities. With the invention of agriculture the world population grew, thus calling for more agriculture, which then allowed for more population growth. This runaway loop spiralled world population from 4 million people to 6,07 billion people in 10,000 years.
“In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth and at least one balancing loop constraining the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.” (Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems)
To put it simple, we have a growing system (human population) with growth reinforced by technology in a finite environment (our planet). But what about that balancing loop?
Food planning
With the invention of agriculture came food planning. Strategy and choices regarding food now had immense rippling effects throughout larger systems. The Roman Empire relied heavily on agriculture and slavery to sustain its power and free resources (people) to allocate them in different parts of the system. Expanding the empire far and wide did not necessarily mean an expansion of food production capabilities, which led to regions of production and regions of consumption. Large-scale food planning and food trade was born, thus setting the trajectory for soil depletion and other blows to the gut of our ecosystem.
In our day and age, however, some people are very aware of the origin of their food. Certain foods may be difficult to source locally, say, if you live in Alaska and you want pineapple, and certain foods may have a big carbon footprint from production, processing and/or transportation. Take chicken nuggets – a heavily processed food made from chickens raised and slaughtered in the US (under horrible conditions), sent to China for processing and sent back to the US for consumption. Obviously, the carbon footprint for these nuggets is high as the nutritional value is low, and due to high-level systems policy it is economically viable to produce them like this. This production and processing method, and it’s environmental, societal and health impact, however, is not as obvious to the average consumer. The inner workings of the system has been veiled by clever marketing tricks like marking the nuggets with “raised in the US” and by the sheer scale of the system. So what good does it do that you buy locally/regionally produced food, when it has been processed on the other side of the world?
Also, when it comes to meat and carbon footprint, there are arguments stating that meat production uses a lot of energy and emits greenhouse gasses, thus deeming meat production and consumption bad. I am not sure it is that simple. To fully understand the consequences both short and long term, we have to look at it in a systems-wide perspective.
Delayed feedbacks
Going back to the beginning of this post, food has always been a medium through which people have conveyed their message or reached their goal. Whether you believe animal protein, legumes or saturated fat or to be the source of all evil, proponents of every dietary variant are able to function and sustain life — otherwise they probably would not follow that particular lifestyle. While arguments for and against these diets whir around, facts are that people are different and they react differently to certain foods — at least on the macro level, in my belief. I believe that given the very complex nature of the human body, it can take years, if not decades, before reactions manifest themselves. This delayed effect also obscures the link to the cause; was it the bacon and eggs full of saturated fat and cholesterol, he had for breakfast every day that gave him clogged arteries? Or was it the whole-wheat toast full of gluten and many carbohydrates with highly processed hydrogenated omega-6 rich plant oil a.k.a. margarine that caused his arteries to swell up due to inflammation? It is difficult to test as the body is a very complex system and many things factor in.
Zooming out to the scale of the environment or society, emissions from (sustainable) meat production might not be as bad for the environment. For thousands of years, human and animal waste (no, let’s call them by-products!) have helped nourish soil and plant life. Law of energy conservation states that energy is neither created not lost, it is transferred. Well, maybe we should look into the 6th of the Hannover Principles, described in John Thackara’s book In the bubble: “Eliminate the concept of waste. Evaluate and optimize the full life cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems, in which there is no waste.”
“…if everyone on Earth lived like the average Canadian, we would need at least three Earths to provide all the material and energy essentials we currently use.” (John Thackara, In the Bubble)
Let’s dwell out here in the scale of society for a minute. Fast forward 30-40 years. Soil depletion and over-production on farm land has but increased our current food issues. More farmers have turned to produce the highly versatile crops such as soy and corn, maybe even in genetically-modified versions, yielding ever greater amounts of crops. To squeeze the last drops of productivity our of the farmland, the farmer soils his land with pesticides and yield enhancers. Even more appalling are the effects of human lifestyle anno 2013 that are becoming increasingly evident. Obesity is the norm, and it’s viler cousin sarcobesity** is leaving more people crippled and furniture-bound by the day slowly tearing human society apart. For the first time in human history, people are dying at a younger age than their parents. The toxins from the environment and our food cause babies to be born with birth defects at an increasing rate.
Staying in this future scenario, we zoom into the everyday life of the average American or European citizen. Over the years, we have become even more disconnected from our roots as real food that grew or moved in some shape or form of what nature intended has almost vanished from our world. The things that are not packed in cardboard boxes or plastic are produced under conditions that leave them with the nutritional value of the cardboard boxes that they did not come in. If our future citizen is able to find some real food, he or she will probably not be able to pay for it since production prices have soared with the decline of the quality of farmland.
What happened? I am not sure. What do you think?
Choose a path
We have gone through the early stages of human life and food production, to the current state of our world, and we have even peaked in to the future, where food is a rather bland experience.
We have to make to choices. It took us a couple of hundred thousand years to settle down and begin to farm the land. It took us about 8,000 to 10,000 years to perfect the skill and increase our population manyfold. But it only took us 100-150 year to mess everything up — with the biggest mistake being made in the last 60 years. I bet that we can make it right again, if we pull together… in the same direction!
However, as I stated earlier, we are very different people with very different goals, values and habits. I wonder if we could agree on some basic rules that could give leeway to our individuality without compromising our overall goal — to sustain healthy life to humanity on Earth. If we could manage to devise such basic ruleset or behavioral model (call it what you want!), we could live together in a sustainable way allowing people to make individual dietary choices… And then let’s see who dies first!
If that does not work, and people start preaching about vegetarianism, I’ll leave their company with this exit line:
We should not all convert to vegetarianism or go Paleo, we should limit our population — or go disruptive on the design process and find extra planet to inhabit!
*For the sake of staying within the scope of this blog post, I shall refrain from engaging in the discussion whether most of the items in our supermarkets are indeed food or not.
**Sarcobesity: Sarcopenic Obesity is a combination of increased adiposity (the state of being fat) and lack of muscle mass.
About the author
Martin is a food lover first of all. He has spent countless hours in the kitchens, kitchenware stores and food stores over the years. A couple of years ago, he adopted the Paleo diet. This only increased his love and interest for food but in a broader way as the long-term effects of food now became part of the system. It was no longer just about the act and experience of cooking and eating. As the Chinese has a long history of using food as medicine, Martin thinks of food as means for hacking the body allowing you to release and manifest the true potential of the human body. Some of the things he does might be a little weird, like blending butter in his morning coffee, but he will be happy to elaborate — just let him have his coffee first!