Feeding People is Easy Part 2

Book review

In Part 2 of Feeding People is Easy, Colin Tudge points out that: “The task before us is to provide good food for everyone, forever; at the same time to create agreeable ways of life for farmers, and for everyone else involved in the food chain – and for all humanity; to do this without cruelty to livestock; and to ensure that the world as a whole remains beautiful and secure, and that as many as possible of the other species with whom we share this planet continue to thrive and to evolve.” “Modern policy-makers have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the myth of monetization – the belief that if human beings simply set out to make as much money as possible, in all the spheres in which they operate, then somehow or other everything will turn out all right.” “The powers-that-be are forever lecturing protestors like me about the need to be ‘realistic’; but the only reality they recognize is the political-economic, commercial-military power game that they happen to be engaged in, and which makes them rich.” “The world is suffering, possibly terminally, from a huge irony: that the powers-that-be live in a fantasy world of their own devising, blind to every observation that is any way inconvenient, yet they believe that they really do know what they are doing, and that they alone are the realists. We are dying of their illusions.” “We (humanity) must now take matters into our own hands – and, I believe, it is well within our power to do so.” “The world’s food chain could supply the thing that has been lacking this past few thousand years – the vehicle for true democracy.”

FEEDING PEOPLE IS EASY

COLIN TUDGE

PARI PUBLISHING                                    2007

PART II

Chapter 3: Great Food and Enlightened Agriculture: The Future Belongs to the Gourmet

• The task before us is to provide good food for everyone, forever; at the same time to create agreeable ways of life for farmers, and for everyone else involved in the food chain – and for all humanity; to do this without cruelty to livestock; and to ensure that the world as a whole remains beautiful and secure, and that as many as possible of the other species with whom we share this planet continue to thrive and to evolve.
• Farming is the key to all this – or at least it is the thing we really have to get right. It is the source of the thing that we need in greatest quantities, and without interruptions; and it is the principal interface between humanity and the fabric of the Earth itself. The kind of farming that would do all that is necessary I call ‘Enlightened Agriculture’.
• Modern policy-makers have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the myth of monetization – the belief that if human beings simply set out to make as much money as possible, in all the spheres in which they operate, then somehow or other everything will turn out all right.
• Never in history have the powers-that-be had the wherewithal to operate on the global scale as they do now.
• Never have they been able, as now, to take the whole of world farming by the scruff of its neck and ram it into a structure and a philosophy that are so alien to its purpose, and so at odds with the needs of humanity and the biological and physical constraints of the world.
• The powers-that-be are forever lecturing protestors like me about the need to be ‘realistic’; but the only reality they recognize is the political-economic, commercial-military power game that they happen to be engaged in, and which makes them rich.
• They have a great deal of ‘data’, which they collect and publish selectively, and manipulate with the aid of lawyers and other rhetoricians, largely for our bamboozlement.
• The world is suffering, possibly terminally, from a huge irony: that the powers-that-be live in a fantasy world of their own devising, blind to every observation that is any way inconvenient, yet they believe that they really do know what they are doing, and that they alone are the realists. We are dying of their illusions.
• We (humanity) must now take matters into our own hands – and, I believe, it is well within our power to do so.
• The world’s food chain could supply the thing that has been lacking this past few thousand years – the vehicle for true democracy. (The last chapter.)
• For now I want to look at Enlightened Agriculture: what it looks like; what it is.

 

A lightning course in nutrition

• Food provides us with the raw materials from which to construct our own flesh and with energy called kilocalories or kcals. It also supplies a miscellany of bits and pieces which, broadly speaking, oil the works.
• The components of food that meet all these requirements are roughly classed as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, which can be called ‘macronutrients’; plus a very mixed bag of minerals, vitamins, and other recondite organic molecules, which are known collectively as ‘micronutrients’.
• Human beings need between 1500 and 4000 kcals per day depending on whether they are children or adults, growing or not growing, men or women, lactating or pregnant or neither, sedentary or sweat-of-the-brow labourers, and also on whether they naturally metabolise rapidly or less rapidly.
• In most human diets, carbohydrates are the chief sources of energy, and as they provide roughly 420 kcals per 100 grams an average person could get all his/her daily energy needs from about 500-700 grams (a pound-and-a-half) of carbohydrates. The chief carbohydrate is starch, found mainly in the seeds and tubers of plants.
• From 1970 nutritionists agree that ‘roughage’ or ‘dietary fibre’ is an important component of diet even though it provides virtually no calories.
• Since there is a limit to the amount that people can eat, fibre helps to limit total intake. Indeed it is the greatest ‘slimming’ food of all.
• Grossly obese people are typically pop-swiggers. White sugar provides 394  kcals per 100 grams; wholemeal bread 216; potatoes 80 – but chips or fries 250. Coca-cola and Pepsi provide 175 kcals per 100 ml (100grams). You can drink a litre – 1750 kcals – in a day without suppressing appetite before you even start eating, adding 50% to your required daily intake without noticing.
• It became clear by the 1970s that human protein needs had been greatly exaggerated. Healthy adults get by perfectly well on 5 grams or less.
• In the days when we were supposed to need boundless protein, it seemed essential to raise as much livestock as possible, giving rise to intensive livestock systems.
• People can get all the protein they need from cereals and pulses alone; and while getting their protein, they would also get most of their energy, with a liberal dose of fibre too.
• Meat and other animal products provide essential minerals that plants cannot provide in sufficient amounts so don’t write them off. But don’t build the whole diet around them either.
• The shift in nutritional theory could and should have transformed the face of agriculture, but of course it did not because livestock can be highly lucrative.
• Currently we feed 50% of the world’s wheat and barley to livestock; 80% of the maize; and well over 90% of the soya. By 2050, on present trends, when the population numbers 9 billion, our livestock will be consuming enough grain and pulses to feed another 4 billion.
• When the factual truth is inconvenient to the powers-that-be, they simply ignore it, or find some tame scientist who will say whatever he or she is paid to say. But I will come to that.
• The last broad category of essential foods are classed as ‘micronutrients’ that may be considered under three headings: minerals, vitamins, and ‘paravitamins’.
• Our need for vitamins became apparent in the 17^th century when it was realized that scurvy was caused by nutritional deficiency and sailors should eat citrus fruit.
• By the 19^th century it was clear that the essential ingredient was vitamin C – alias ascorbic acid, now known as one of the body’s many ‘anti-oxidants’.
• More and more vitamins have been identified, all very different chemically, all essential, all leading to disorder that could be fatal if present in too small amounts.
• If paravitamins are lacking, this does not necessarily lead to overt disease, but if they are present they seem to be health-promoting.
• We need to acknowledge that it is logically impossible to identify all the paravitamins our bodies might need: only by eating many different things can we be reasonably sure of covering all bases.
• If people were simply encouraged to grow herbs, there would be no profit for food processors. We are told that the only way to obtain essential ingredients is by buying particular foods produced by particular companies with particular bands of shareholders to answer to, at huge cost.
• This is the way of the modern world: not to do things that are merely sensible and beneficial; but to do those things – and only those things – that bring profit to big companies and at the same time increase the power of the political parties who are financed by those companies.
• Biologically speaking those huge companies are redundant. This is the nonsense we have to escape from.
• The powers-that-be revel in complexity and the more we apparently depend on experts; on the powers-that-be, who alone are able to handle the knowledge. Obfuscation and esotericism has been the con trick of charlatans through the ages.
• The underlying simplicity of modern nutritional theory can be summarized in 9 words: ‘Plenty of plants; not much meat; and maximum variety’.
• That’s it. All the thousands of textbooks and diet books and healthy eating books that occupy miles and miles and miles of shelf-space in hundreds and hundreds of libraries and book shops can be expressed in this one brief adage: ‘Plenty of plants; not much meat; and maximum variety’.
• Let’s ask the next biological question: How can we best produce the food that we really need?

 

A lightning course in good farming

• Farmers seek efficiency, a slippery concept.
• Traditional farms making no use of artificial pesticides or fertilizers, and using only muscle power of people or animals, in general produce about 10 kcals of food energy for every 1 kcal of energy expended on cultivation.
• The industrialized farm expends 10 kcals, largely in the form of fossil fuel, for every 1 that is created in the form of food energy.
• Traditional farms are therefore about 100 times more efficient.
• British- and American-style agriculture is ‘efficient’ only in cash terms. Oil has been absurdly cheap. Industrial farmers have rarely paid for rivers and offshore reefs that they have ruined, or for the fisheries that their endeavours have wrecked in passing.
• Hundreds of millions of people have been thrown off the land in the cause of cash efficiency.
• Success in modern agriculture, like everything else in the modern world, is gauged entirely by cash – as if cash was a perfect mirror of reality. But of course it is not.
• As human misery mounts, and other species die out, and soil disappears, and the lakes dry up, and the climate grows warmer and more violent, we might have hoped that even the powers-that-be would realize that money alone is a very dangerous yardstick by which to measure success in any endeavour.
• Agriculture must be judged by criteria quite detached from present-day cash: criteria that have to do with morality and justice and with bedrock biology; with matters not of personal wealth and the mirage of ‘economic growth’, but of survival.
• Agriculture is what we need to stay alive, and to keep the world habitable; and we are in serious danger of messing it up, irrecoverably.
• If we are to maximize biological efficiency, what should we be growing, and how and where, and who should be growing it?
• Our task is two-fold: to devise agriculture that really can feed us; and by-passing or neutralizing the present-day powers-that-be.

 

Biological efficiency

• Maximizing biological efficiency means producing as much food as possible per acre or hectare, by means that are minimally destructive – preferably by means that leave the soil and the waterways better than we found them.
• From all that has been said so far it’s clear that we can reasonably focus on the macronutrients – energy and protein; and if we also strive for maximum variety we will take care of the essential fats and of the micronutrients in passing.
• It is now clear that we can get all the protein we want, as well as the bulk of our energy, from plants: more particularly from the crops that are generally called ‘staples’ – cereals, pulses, tubers, and also various oilseed crops which can be major sources of calories.
• Grow these in sufficient quantities and where people actually are and the problems of feeding people is all over bar the shouting. Feeding people, looked at in these simplest terms, really is easy.
• By far the most important staple crops are the cereals – the seeds of wheat, rice, maize (corn), barley, rye, oats, sorghum, millet, and teff.
• The pulse crops are the beans – soya, the various kidney beans, and broad beans; peanuts (groundnuts); chickpeas; pigeon peas; lentils; and peas.
• Some other non-grass seeds serve as grains: quinoa, amaranth, ‘wild rice’, rapeseed (canola), sunflowers, olives, coconuts, and palm oil.
• Peanuts, maize and soya also serve as significant oilseed crops. Nuts also are seeds and can be very important locally.
• The worlds most important tubers are the potato, plus cassava, yams, taro, and sweet potatoes.
• Of all these staples, by far the most important worldwide are wheat, rice, and maize.
• All we have to do to ensure that the world is at least adequately fed is to grow staple crops in the places where they grow best. They are the priority.
• An all-staple diet would leave us short of some essential fats; some minerals; some vitamins; many paravitamins. We need two more classes of agriculture to run alongside or amongst the arable: horticulture and pastoral.
• Horticulture is the art, science, and craft of growing fruit and vegetables, herbs and spices. Pastoral farming is the art, science, and craft of raising livestock.
• Cattle, sheep, and goats can feed on the kinds of vegetation that we cannot feed on. The specialist herbivores thrive in the kinds of territories where we cannot readily raise staples or practise serious horticulture – notably in cold/hot hills and semi-deserts. Pigs and poultry can be fed on leftovers and/or crop surpluses, or crops of inferior quality.
• Guided by such principles the structure of the farm defines itself. All march to the drum of their local ecology. Although landscapes and climates vary enormously the fundamental principles of ecology are the same, just as the laws of physics are the same.
• In short: farms that are designed with sound biology in mind – with respect for the physical needs of human beings, and of the crops and livestock, and the restraints of landscape and climate – produce plenty of plants, some but not much livestock, and great variety.
• The output of farms that march to the drum of sound biology exactly matches the nutritional needs of human beings as defined by modern nutritional science: Plenty of plants; not much meat; and maximum variety.

 

The future belongs to the gourmet

• Great chefs are extremely well paid. They stress the things that matter: fine, fresh ingredients, prepared as simply as possible. Great chefs also emphasise that the very finest cuisine, all the world over, is rooted in traditional cooking.
• What are the basic ingredients of traditional cooking, all the world over?  Plenty of plants; not much meat; and maximum variety.
• In short, we can’t lose. Farms that are designed to feed people for ever – deliberately tailored to conform to the bedrock principles of human, animal, and plant physiology, and to the demands of ecology – produce exactly the right foods in the right proportions as recommended by modern nutritionists; and these in turn are precisely what is required to produce the world’s finest cooking.
• All serious cooks need is plenty of staples, a mass as various as possible of other plants in season – leaves, fruits, roots – and whatever meat, eggs, milk and occasional fish as may come their way, and they can live as well as any royalty.
• Enlightened agriculture is what used simply to be called good husbandry. Enlightened agriculture requires truly agrarian communities – the very thing that ‘modern’ governments are seeking to eliminate.
• If we really care about our future; if we really want to ensure that our grandchildren have enough to eat, and live in tolerable societies, and have other species to share the world with – and that their children and grandchildren can in turn enjoy the privileges of this astonishing Earth – then we need to acknowledge that the future economy of the world needs to be agrarian. Behind Enlightened Agriculture lies the new Agrariansim.