Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  Mindful Steps to Cut Household Energy Use in Half

  • Install a programmable thermostat for heating and cooling, and learn how to use it—it saves a lot of energy. Each degree below 68°F during colder weather saves 3-5 percent more heating energy, and keeping your thermostat at 78°F in warmer weather will also save you energy and money.

  • Set the refrigerator thermostat at 37°–40°F. Clean the condenser coils twice a year to raise efficiency by up to 30 percent.

  • Install curtains, awnings, and shutters to control heating and cooling, and plant a shade tree in your backyard to reduce AC costs. Shading an air conditioner can improve efficiency by 10 percent.

  • Wash clothes in warm or cold water rather than hot, and rinse with cold water.

  • Set up a clothesline. Clothespins aren’t hard to figure out!

  • Air-dry dishes rather than heat-drying them, especially in dry climates.

  • Turn the water heater down to 120°F, and insulate the pipes that exit your tank.

  • Install faucet aerators and low-flow showerheads that deliver a satisfying shower for thousands of gallons less annually.

  • Bake in ceramic or glass pans that hold the heat better and require 25°F less heat, but use the pressure cooker, Crock-Pot, toaster oven, microwave, or stove before resorting to the oven.

  • Unplug coffeemakers, microwaves, computer printers, and other appliances when not in use, to eliminate “phantom” power loads.

  14

  Trimming the Fat

  Farewell to Fossil Food

  The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

  —Wendell Berry

  Don’t dig your grave with your own knife and fork.

  —English proverb

  In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel—it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.

  —Michael Pollan

  At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

  —Michael Pollan

  Seventeen percent of U.S. energy is spent to produce and distribute food; three-fourths of all the water used in this nation is for agriculture, and about a fourth of the country’s land is devoted to growing food for both domestic consumption and export. By paying more attention to what we eat and how our food is grown, we can use fewer resources as well as increase the quality of our lives. The choices we make at the supermarket or farmers’ market can literally change the world

  If we bring a sense of connection and quality back into the food chain, we can improve our health, rebuild the world’s soils, and regain a sense of control and participation in the market. Says Paul Hawken, a guru of the emerging new economy, “The cash register is the daily voting booth in democratic capitalism.” When we buy groceries, we cast a vote for the kind of farming, processing, and packaging we support, as well as what we believe healthy humans should eat. The best chefs in the country prefer organically grown produce because it tastes better. When conventional crops get too much nitrogen fertilizer they take up extra water, diluting the taste. (Conventionally grown produce often looks like something on a magazine cover, but eyes can’t taste and taste buds can’t see.) Growing food organically means using organic fertilizers and natural pest control; rotating crops to avoid disease, build the soil, and minimize erosion; and using great, region-specific varieties to optimize the flavor. These techniques are of great interest to consumers who want a chain of quality from field to table.

  Retailers are getting the message: Organic food has been growing by 20 percent annually since the mid-1990s, and when giants like Wal-Mart and Safeway expand their organic inventories, it’s clear that organic is here to stay. In fact, except for a hundred-year dot-point in human history, we’ve always eaten organically! It’s not a fad, and considering the far higher quality, it’s also not really an extra expense—we get what we pay for with better health, more flavorful food, and a less polluted world. Besides, the supermarket costs of mainstream food don’t reflect hidden costs ultimately paid by taxpayers, including billions of dollars in federal agricultural subsidies, water contamination, loss of bees, soil erosion, and so on. If you add environmental and social costs to a conventionally grown head of lettuce, for example, its price would be twice as high.

  A hundred years ago, Americans spent 43 percent of their household budget on food, but now household spending for food has dropped to 13 percent. As the exploitation of soil, water, and fossil fuels expanded, farms became food factories, fast food became an institution, and the price of food came down. But if convenience food is cheaper over-the-counter, it’s expensive in many other ways. Americans spend the least per capita for food of any country in the world, as a percentage of income, but we spend the most for health care. What’s the connection? Many people don’t realize that good food maintains health and makes us feel happy. That simple wisdom was culturally eroded when convenience food seduced the generation that is now our elders. But whole foods are making a comeback and, as the market expands, prices for organic food will come down. In any case, the percentage of total household spending for food may well go up voluntarily in the next few decades, as food’s full value becomes more widely known. At the same time, unnecessary spending for things like media entertainment, clothing, and household knickknacks will go down.1

  As both oil and water become more expensive, we’ll return to information-rich, resource-efficient agriculture. There have been many innovations in recent times that will make small farming much more pleasant than it was in the past, and the market is quickly expanding to support the small, local, organic farmer. Although five million family farmers were lost between 1935 and 2000, and most of those remaining are fifty-five years old or older, a new generation of organic growers is emerging like a field of seedlings. For example, the number of farmers in the largest organic cooperative in the country, Organic Valley Family of Farms, doubled over the last three years. Its sales rose 17 percent to $245 million in 2005 and is expected to climb to $285 million in 2006. Cities like Bellingham, Washington, that value local food, have programs to train new farmers in organic growing.

  Kicking the Habit

  The American food system as a whole is distressingly inefficient at each link of the chain. It needs greater consumer scrutiny, and not just in search of the cheapest price. Our individual share of food’s impact includes huge amounts of oil, soil, land, and water to grow the crops; and more pools of resources to transport, process, preserve, and prepare the food. Just the farm and processing sectors of the chain cost roughly the equivalent of ten barrels of oil annually, for each of us. Fortunately, there are many ways that slight changes in lifestyle will help bring the food system out of crisis and back into balance.

  Breaking the oil-dependency of industrial agriculture won’t be easy, but we’ll ultimately kick the habit because agribusiness is so inefficient and so unhealthy—from hazardous chemicals in water and human tissue through soil erosion and depletion. Most pesticides are petroleum based, and so is the nitrogen component of fertilizers—as well as the mining and processing of the other primary components, potassium and phosphorous. Chemical fertilizers alone comprise one-fifth of the energy used in agriculture. Although these industrial nutrients have helped feed (and also enable) a swelling world population, we are now seeing diminishing returns. It appears we’ve been coasting on natural fertility in the soil that nature built up over the eons. Like fossil fuels and “fossil water” (underground water stored in aquifers), soil was built up over the millennia by the incremental addition of organic material like prairie thatch, and the grinding down of rock. When we try to replace the nutrients that cro
ps have removed with synthetic fertilizers that contain only some of these nutrients, we’re mining the soil rather than building it.

  Transportation of food comprises another 14 percent of the energy used in U.S. agriculture. Public enemy number one is shipping produce by airfreight. Not only is its energy cost per mile outlandish, but total miles traveled by an average morsel of food now averages about 2,000. Traditionally, we’ve shipped food long distances by ocean freighter or refrigerated semi truck, but our expectations for flawlessly fresh produce keep jumbo jets in the air, especially during North America’s winter months—filled with New Zealand apples and kiwis. What’s wrong with citrus fruit in the winter, that at least comes from the same country it’s eaten in? (Even that has far more value when it’s fresh, as Dr. Michael Colgan discovered when he tested oranges that had been picked the same day as the analysis; their vitamin C content was 180 mg. He then tested oranges from the same grower that had been in storage for a week at a local supermarket. They looked and tasted the same, but their vitamin C content had dropped to zero).2

  As Joan Gussow observes in The Organic Life, “The water content of luxury foods (for example, 88 percent of a peach is water) means we’re burning a lot of petroleum to ship cold water around … . Tomatoes are even more watery than peaches. Keeping all that water cool as it moves north from Florida or east from California is helping warm the planet.”3

  If you already have an efficient refrigerator, canvas shopping bags, and a grocery close enough to walk to, the next step in shopping green is to pay attention to “food miles,” the distance the items travel to get to your table. Researchers at Iowa State University are investigating the feasibility of mandatory labels that indicate where the food was grown. They’ve also calculated the energy costs of various produce items. A pineapple shipped from Costa Rica consumes a third of a gallon of gasoline to get to an Iowa supermarket, while a pineapple from Hawaii consumes 2.8 gallons. The reason the Costa Rican fruit’s food miles are less consumptive is that half its journey is by sea, but the Hawaiian pineapple can only get there by air.

  Food mileage is also a factor when the fishing industry travels long distances to harvest marketable fish. For example, sardines and anchovies thrive in coastal areas and can be harvested with minimal energy expenditure; large predatory species such as swordfish however, require energy-intensive, high-tech fishing trips.

  The best way to get good food mileage, of course, is to look for and buy food grown or caught in your own region. Sometimes that’s not so simple; because of deals made on the phone and computer, a produce buyer in Colorado may arrange to buy lettuce from Maine even though local growers could supply it much fresher without jet lag. Markets also encourage a single-crop, soil-depleting mentality that’s unhealthy for the farm as well as the consumer. Idaho produces a third of all U.S. potatoes, for example—mostly for French fries. By USDA calculations, if Idaho residents were to consume all potatoes grown in their state, they’d have to eat 63 pounds a day. Pass the ketchup, please!4

  Ten Ways to Eat Greener

  1. Eat a variety of foods. Eating a wide variety of foods is the best way to meet all your nutritional requirements. The huge number of choices in supermarkets does not reflect biological diversity. Three species—rice, corn, and wheat—supply nearly 60 percent of the calories and protein people derive from plants. Of 200 crops eaten by humans, only 30 account for 90 percent of the world’s calorie intake.

  2. Buy locally produced food. The average mouthful of food travels 2,000 miles from the farm to our plates. Locally grown food is fresher and closer to ripeness, has used less energy for transport and is less likely to have been treated with postharvest pesticides. Buying local products also supports regional farmers and preserves farmland. If you get your fruits and vegetables at a farmers’ market or from a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, you can ask the farmer whether the food has been genetically engineered or treated with pesticides.

  3. Buy produce in season. Out-of-season produce is costly because transport uses so much energy. It’s also more likely to have been imported, often from a country with less stringent pesticide regulations than the United States. Instead, in winter, prepare seasonal crops, such as potatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, and beets. Put away or freeze spring and summer produce, such as berries or snap peas, from local producers. All these foods retain their nutritional content in storage; using them cuts energy costs.

  4. Buy organically produced food. Besides whatever food you eat the most, buy the following produce grown organically, to minimize exposure to pesticides, especially for babies: peaches, apples, pears, winter squash, green beans, grapes, strawberries, raspberries, spinach, potatoes.

  5. Eat fresh, whole foods with adequate starch and fiber. Whole foods—fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes (beans), nuts, and seeds—are the healthiest we can eat. The National Cancer Institute recommends we each “strive for five” servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day to protect against cancer, heart disease, and common digestive ailments. Also, most fresh produce, legumes, and whole grains, with the exception of corn and soy, are still genetically natural.

  6. Eat fewer and smaller portions of animal products. Meat and dairy products are major sources of fat in the U.S. diet, contributing to higher risk of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Animal products, including farmed fish, may contain hormones, antibiotics, and toxic chemicals, such as dioxin, DDT, and other pesticides, which concentrate in animal fat. Fish caught in contaminated waters may contain high levels of PCBs or mercury. Cattle, chickens, pigs, and sheep consume more than 70 percent of the grains produced in the United States.

  7. Choose minimally processed and packaged foods. A typical highly processed “food product” may contain little natural food and be high in fat, salt, or sugar. It’s likely to contain genetically engineered soy- and corn-based additives, such as corn syrup and soy lecithin, which are present in 60 percent of all processed foods.

  8. Prepare your own meals at home. Cooking from scratch can involve a little more labor and time, but you can be sure you’ll save money and resources, because you’re not paying someone else to prepare, package, transport, and advertise your meals. Home cooking is healthier and more nutritious because you start with fresh ingredients. And it can be its own reward, providing a truly creative outlet and rejuvenating the family meal.

  9. Start a garden and compost pile. Growing at least a little of your own food gives you control over the quality of what you eat. There’s nothing like eating your dinner or a snack right in the garden, ingesting vitality from produce that’s still alive. A compost pile means that nothing is ever wasted.

  10. Avoid these fatty foods. Whole-milk dairy products (ice cream, cheese); processed meats such as bacon, sausage, liverwurst; and tropical oils, such as palm kernel and coconut oils. They contain saturated fat, which clogs arteries and increases levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL. Fast-food fries and baked goods like packaged cookies and cakes may contain both trans fats (partially hydrogenated oils) and saturated fats.

  Sources: Children’s Health Environmental Coalition, http://www.checnet.org/healthehouse/education/quicklist-detail.asp?Main_ID=238; Consumers Union, Environmental Working Group; Msn.com Health & Fitness; also, parts of these steps are adapted from: Joan Dye Gussow, professor emeritus of nutrition and education, Columbia University Teachers College, and Katherine L. Clancy, director of the Wallace Center for Agriculture & Environmental Policy, “Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability,” Journal of Nutrition Education 18, no.1 (1986).

  Trashing the Throwaway Economy

  A full two-thirds of the energy spent on food is not for growing and transportation but processing, packaging, marketing, maintaining freshness in the store, and kitchen preparation. Consumers influence each of these sectors by the choices we make. Many people are consciously buying less-processed food to reduce their consumption of excess sugar, salt, and fat (which occur at much higher levels in canned, frozen, and packaged food
s). This sends a message to the food processing industry to change their way of doing business. It also delivers greater health to the consumer. For example, the processing of fresh produce into frozen dinners like lasagne eliminates from one-tenth to nine-tenths of its mineral content but, when we insist on fresh fruits and vegetables, we vote with our dollars. Market-savvy retailers such as Whole Foods step in to meet our needs more precisely by providing a higher percentage of unprocessed, locally grown food than a typical supermarket.

  Those on the lookout for resource-reducing opportunities will find a mother lode in packaging, and save money at the same time, since about 9 percent of a product’s cost is in the packaging.5 By buying in bulk, buying in larger packages, and shopping for products with little or no packaging, we can literally begin to unpackage the world. One person’s small contribution can eliminate a lot of the country’s wasted fuel, if the rest of us do it, too. For example, if every New York City resident used just one less grocery bag a year, it would save $250,000 in disposal costs and 28,000 barrels of oil.6 And if each American did the same (how hard can that be?!) it would save close to a million barrels of oil, or at current prices, about $70 million a year.

  What if the entire grocery industry—or the federal government—decided to enable those savings by making plastic bags so expensive that people would decide to bring their own cloth or nylon bags? That may sound far-fetched, but a similar strategy is already working great in Ireland, where a fifteen-cents-per-bag tax has led to a 95 percent reduction in what some Irish call the “national flag.” Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Great Britain, and San Francisco are following Ireland’s lead, and Bangladesh has already completely banned polyethylene bags.7