Crazy Town
Crazy Town
Eating the Future: The NY Times Goes Full Ecomodernist on Food and Farming
How will we feed people living in the megacities of the 21st century, especially while confronting climate chaos and the depletion of fossil fuels and fossil water? According to the mainstream media: ecomodernism! Massive deployment of technology on factory farms and an extreme ramp-up of industrialization will save the day – right? RIGHT?!? If you read the New York Times, you might think that supermarket shelves will forever overflow with 3D-printed fish sticks, mylar bags full of genetically modified cheesy poofs, and faux corn dogs that ooze out of laboratory vats. Jason, Rob, and Asher question the wisdom of doubling down on industrialization in food and farming. It’s no surprise they recommend paying attention to nature and ecological limits. Stick around for ideas you can use in your community to support a healthy, regenerative food system (and keep on eating). Originally recorded on 1/21/25.
Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.
Sources/Links/Notes:
- Jason Bradford, The Future Is Rural, 2/19/19.
- Eliza Barclay, "What to Eat on a Burning Planet," The New York Times, 7/29/24.
- David Wallace-Wells, "Food as You Know It Is About to Change," The New York Times, 7/28/24.
- Andrew Nikiforuk, "A Reality Check on Our 'Energy Transition'," Resilience, 1/6/25.
- Michael Grunwald, "Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food," The New York Times, 12/13/24.
- "Changing How We Grow Our Food: Readers disagree with an essay about factory farms," The New York Times, 1/4/25.
- Jay Famiglietti, "Will We Have to Pump the Great Lakes to California to Feed the Nation?" The New York Times, 8/5/24.
- Clip of the Hydrologist in Chief "explaining" the oh-so-simple solution to water shortages.
Rob Dietz
I'm Rob Dietz.
Asher Miller
I'm Asher Miller.
Jason Bradford
And I'm Jason Bradford. Welcome to Crazy Town, where 3D Printers at FedEx now serve take out.
Asher Miller
Yummy.
Melody Allison
Hi. This is producer Melody Allison. Thanks for joining us in Crazy Town, where Jason, Rob, and Asher tackle crazy-making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we're all deluding ourselves. Here's a quick warning. Sometimes this podcast uses swear words (Language!) Now, onto the show.
Rob Dietz
Hey, Jason, Asher, you guys know that I've had this policy almost my entire adult life of avoiding the news? Don't pay any attention to it.
Jason Bradford
Yes, you remind us of this.
Asher Miller
That's why I keep sending you more and more horrific things. To see if I can break you.
Rob Dietz
You do send me horrific things, and a lot of them come from the New York Times, which I feel like I've been somewhat force fed. Because here at PCI, we've got this subscription to The New York Times, and I, every morning, look at their summary of the news. Now, I am good at just skimming through the quote-unquote "news" part, and I mostly go play crossword and strands and connections, whatever their little word games.
Asher Miller
I'm so glad we've got the subscription so that you can do that.
Jason Bradford
That's how they make their money nowadays, by the way.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, you know, they're very high on themselves. You know, their motto is "All the news that's fit to print." But somehow I manage to ignore it.
Jason Bradford
And that's complete BS, of course.
Asher Miller
What is? "All the news that's fit to print."
Jason Bradford
Yeah, so, so this is what's interesting. You wonder, right? Because if you read something from New York Times, it is not something you know much about. You might just kind of nod along and say, oh, you know, they've got reporters that know what they're talking about, and editors and these are serious people and blahbity blah. But then, every once in a while, you read something you know a lot about, and you just, you want to tear what hair is left out of your body. And this happened to me recently.
Asher Miller
That explains a lot. Okay. You had this enormous afro, like, three weeks ago.
Jason Bradford
I know, yeah. I had hair like yours. It was incredible. I'd just run my fingers through it. Oh, luscious.
Asher Miller
This is what I do all day, Jason.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Anyhow, this article was titled, "What to eat on a burning planet?"
Rob Dietz
Barbecue, right?
Asher Miller
I'm guessing it's charred.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, and you would think someone like me who's concerned about climate change, I'd be into this, right? Like, hey, how are we gonna feed ourselves in the future with climate change and resource depletion? You know, what are we gonna do? And I wrote an entire book about this topic. So, I'm figuring maybe they're referencing "The Future is Rural," right? Obviously they would do that.
Asher Miller
Right.
Jason Bradford
Turns out, no, they don't care at all about anything I ever said, and they went --
Asher Miller
And so you're gravely offended. This is what upsets you. This is why it's not fit to print, because it doesn't quote you.
Rob Dietz
Why should the New York Times be any different from like the members of your family or your friends?
Jason Bradford
Exactly. This basically, is a full throated throttled, whatever you want to call it, promotion -- Throttled? Yeah. Throatled? Promotion of what would be called ecomodernism, right? Ecomodernists are kind of my nemesis-ize
Asher Miller
That's what we need in a burning planet, are ecomodernists.
Rob Dietz
I know this is a regular, recurring topic here on Crazy Town. But let's just take a quick minute to look at what is an ecomodernist. And I would say you can loosely define that as someone who's completely aware that we have existential risk from climate, from being in overshoot. They recognize the importance of energy to the way we live today in modern society. But here's the divergence, they will not acknowledge limits. You know, they see how important energy is, they see that we have real threats, but the idea is they want to double down on more industrialism, more technology.
Asher Miller
As the only way to solve the problems that, in fact, those things created
Rob Dietz
Exactly. So it's like they see that past industrial activity and technology put us in overshoot, but they can never get to this idea of, let's scale it back. So that's kind of the ecomodernist -- Trust in technology.
Jason Bradford
And it's kind of become the default mode of of most so called, you know, a lot of so-called greens and environmentalists. So the ones that get all the money in the world tend to be ecomodernist leaning, right? So the New York Times runs this series of seven articles, starting in July and August for a couple weeks, and then they finished with this piece in December. It was actually the one I actually found and read, and I realized, oh my gosh, it's not a one-off stupid article. This is a series of really bad articles.
Rob Dietz
Well, Jason, they had to get all the news that's fit to print. Not just one article is worth the news.
Jason Bradford
Now, I want to pause and try to contain myself here. The writers are actually grappling with thorny problems, things I really care about, biodiversity loss, climate, water pollution, aquifer depletion, and agriculture. They describe well how agriculture contributes mightily to these and may actually be impacted by these. So there's a recursive sort of feedback where you know, if you deplete your topsoil too much, you can't really farm it anymore. So they acknowledge all this, and it seems like they're trying their best to offer well-meaning suggestions, which is kind of sad because they're horrible suggestions. But anyhow, I think that, you know, for a lot of these people, I'd probably get along with them. Alright? They're nice enough folks in general, alright? And, you can kind of get a -- I'm gonna give you a quote from the introductory article that sort of lines out this series by the other saying that, "these articles coming up will offer us a glimpse of the future growing closer by the day, in which our food may be grown in vast, sustainably managed factory farms, and water is pumped across the country from the Great Lakes to California. I hope you'll find ideas to marinate on."
Rob Dietz
Worst pun ever to end that quote.
Jason Bradford
It's a very barfable quote.
Asher Miller
Barfable quote, hah. I like that. That's the future of food.
Rob Dietz
In fact, Jason, your keyboard is now crusty from when you vomited the first time you read this.
Jason Bradford
Smells kind of acidic still.
Asher Miller
Well, at least she, at least the editor, I'm assuming it's a she said, "may be grown," right? But the range of options that are being presented here . . . And in fact, you know, the series starts with an article by David Wallace-Wells, who's, you know, a really well known writer, particularly around climate issues. He wrote a, you know, a best selling book. And I think after that, wound up joining New York Times. And his piece, you know, was titled, "Food as you know is about to change." And he actually did, I'll give him credit. I mean, these are, especially the writers at New York Times, not maybe contributing op-ed people, but the writers, you know, they're steeped in journalism. He clearly did a lot of work really trying to understand and lay out some of the challenges of feeding a growing population in the future. And he actually quotes a guy, and I think it's worth sharing what he said. Because it, I think, is a fairly good encapsulation of some of the challenges we're facing. So he lays out what this guy from NASA, Jonas J germeyr, calls the challenge of our generation, right. And I'm quoting here, "How to save the food system from what he calls a quadruple squeeze. First, the problem of productivity and hunger. Second, the risk to ecosystems under threat from fertilizer runoff, deforestation and other pollution. Third, the challenge of nutritional deficiency, as those foods we're growing more of are generally getting worse for us over time. And finally, climate, which is driving a quote, 'fundamental change across most bread baskets on the planet.' It's pretty complicated he (this is J germeyr) admits. And the scary part is that we have to solve them all." So I think it's a fairly good, you know, of course, a lot of the challenges he lays out here are, in fact, created by the industrial agricultural system that we've created.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, totally squares with what you were saying, Jason, like these writers get the scene correct. And it totally squares with what I was saying about ecomodernism. Like the ecomodernists understand the existential threats. It's just the flip side. Once we've laid out the preamble, what are the therefores that come after?
Asher Miller
You know David Wallace-Wells throws out, basically -- it's pretty casually -- He throws out assumptions, yeah. I mean, he narrows the aperture of what is viewed as being possible. Just like the editor in that introductory piece. The range of options, you know, the possible food, future, or a certain thing, you know. And it's basically all techno- optimistic kind of eco stuff. And he just tosses out, like, in trying to lay out the challenge of agriculture, he's like, well, it's a lot harder than what's happening with the renewable energy transition, which we figured out. Like, we totally figured out how to electrify the energy sector. And we've even figured out how to solve, like, tricky things, like how we make steel and cement without fossil fuels, which is -- Excuse me? We solved those things? We figured those things out? We could do those things at scale? We've actually done the energy transition? Like that's all solved? All done. Just finished.
Jason Bradford
That was also fascinating. So yes, you he's like, Uh oh. Sorry, we're gonna have, we're gonna have plenty of electricity. We're gonna have plenty of steel and cement, no problem without fossil fuels. But we may not be able to feed ourselves, guys. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do. Massive R and D, basically doing to agriculture and the foods what we've done already and solved for energy and materials.
Asher Miller
Exactly. Yeah.
Jason Bradford
Holy crap. I've just been flabbergasted the whole time I'm reading all this stuff, so
Rob Dietz
So David Wallace-Wells is kind of doubling down. We need more R and D, more tech. Well, I paid special attention to the article that was on water, and this one was written by an actual hydrologist academic, a guy named Jay Famiglietti.
Asher Miller
Famiglietti. You've gotta say it the right way here.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, beautiful Italian last name. He goes over the problem of groundwater depletion, especially in the West. So you have places like the Central Valley of California, you've got the Lower Colorado River Basin. You've got the Ogallala Aquifer, that huge area east of the Rocky Mountains, you know, like Nebraska down to Texas and New Mexico. And we've just been draining that groundwater to feed crops in what are essentially deserts, or at least pretty low rain areas.
Jason Bradford
This guy lives in Phoenix, by the way. He's a professor at University of no, Arizona State.
Rob Dietz
His thesis is the U.S. has not really addressed the problem. We are depleting these aquifers that are filled with water that's from centuries or even millennia ago, and they do not replenish at the rate that we're draining them. And so we're gonna run into a problem. And he doesn't like the only solution that he proposes, really, which is that we partially drain the Great Lakes, pipe water across the country in what he calls an expensive and unpopular project.
Asher Miller
So that's the only option he presents?
Rob Dietz
Well, he presents that as an option, but he says we need to avoid that. So what he says, in order to avoid it, we've got to prioritize the exploration and evaluation of what we have in the groundwater supplies in these places. Okay, so study how much we actually have. And then, his big ideas and make aplan to end or dramatically reduce groundwater depletion.
Jason Bradford
This is just absurd. There's no option. I mean, you cannot sustainably harvest groundwater. It's basically, it's saying we either pipe from the Great Lakes or we learn what we've got and then we can't use it. So what's the point?
Asher Miller
You guys are all wrong. Famiglietti is wrong. I want to talk about another great hydrologist. In fact, the hydrologist in chief, our new returned president, Donald Trump. Because he's got a solution for this problem. And, you know, maybe I'll just share this clip. He was talking about it, you know, during the campaign.
Jason Bradford
I can't wait.
Asher Miller
Yeah, here we go. Okay, ready?
Donald Trump
So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north, with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down. And they have a essentially a very large faucet. And you turn the faucet, and it takes one day to turn it. It's massive. It's as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. And you turn that, and all of that water goes into the, aimlessly into the Pacific, and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down.
Asher Miller
See, so, problem solved, right guys?
Jason Bradford
There's a faucet somewhere. It could be, it could be up in Canada. Not very clear. But there's a faucet.
Asher Miller
You just turn it in one day.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, in one day you turn it and then we get all the water we need.
Asher Miller
That's all you have to do, guys. There's a faucet. Somebody built this faucet. We just need to turn it.
Rob Dietz
There's so many awesome things here. First of all, I'm pretty sure Trump thinks that, because it's in the north, and a map has the north at the top, that the water flows down the map from Canada to California, not that it goes actual downhill. I also love that the faucet is huge. You think of a faucet that would control all of the water flowing off the Rockies and the Cascades and and it's only, it's the size of a building that that's behind him.
Asher Miller
That's huge, Rob.
Jason Bradford
And then he starts. with his hands making this turning motion, like there's somebody who's going to get out there and just spend a day
Asher Miller
Yeah, all you gotta do is turn the faucet. That's good,
Jason Bradford
Like Arnold -- and what was that movie Arnold Schwarzenegger in? What was that movie Schwarzenegger was in? Conan, where he's like walking in a circle to grind grain or something like that. I don't know, but yeah,
Rob Dietz
Yeah, he's like, playing the role of the horse, right? Just turning it.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, so somebody like that, whose job is to turn that faucet.
Rob Dietz
Well, Trump would love to put Arnold back into that faucet turning role. But look, okay, great, the hydrologist in chief. That's a great title. But let's go back to the real hydrologist who does understand something about ecology. This professor, Famiglietti. I mean, I don't.. If he's going to go ecomodernism, why stop at the Great Lakes? You guys know that some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have water on them. Let's just make a plan to export water from there back to the deserts of California and Arizona and Texas so that we can grow alfalfa to feed cows that are raised in the deserts of Saudi Arabia.
Asher Miller
You think we could create just like a pipe from some of those moons to Earth, and just have the water come directly.
Jason Bradford
A flex tube, but yeah.
Rob Dietz
It'll take two faucets. You have to turn two faucets to get it from Saturn. If you take his logic all the way, you know, like you were kind of alluding to a bit earlier, Jason, it really means an end to growth in an entirely different economy and culture, or you're just talking about privatizing these last bits of aquifer and a few powerful people own the water in these places.
Jason Bradford
There are people that are like scoping this out and trying to buy groundwater as aggressively as hedge funds and private equity. This is a real thing going on.
Asher Miller
I mean, we already have large corporations, Nestle and others, who own water rights all over the world. You know they're already doing this ---
Jason Bradford
Doubling down on this, yeah. Now, he never mentions option three.
Asher Miller
What's that? What's up with three?
Jason Bradford
Well, this is what I talked about on New York Times in my "The Future is Rural" report in 2019. Move people to where water.
Asher Miller
Oh, so instead of moving water to where people are in the desert . . .
Jason Bradford
Yeah, now here's what's funny. Is the New York Times will do all these migration articles where they talk about it, but in this situation they don't actually talk about moving people. So I don't know why -- There's zero dots being connected. Like little kids could, drawing on little books connecting dots, do a better job than these supposedly professional reporters and editors who should have a good view of the whole landscape that they're dealing with.
Asher Miller
You can't move Arizona State University so that he can keep his job --
Jason Bradford
There we go.
Asher Miller
-- because you'd have to change the name of it. Like to Great Lakes University, or something else. Like, just that's too difficult. So let's just make a pipeline that goes thousands of miles.
Rob Dietz
Or maybe he could work for Great Pipeline University.
Jason Bradford
We need to basically get in some right relationship of what's sustainable. But so far, these guys have no idea what that means. And this was driven home by the final article, which is the one that drew my attention in the series. A journalist, Michael Grunwald, this article is called, "Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food." And this is a great title because the content and tone of the piece is like he knows he's going to be unpopular when he writes this. And oh is he ever unpopular! The comments that came back on this article were livid about this. And he tries to answer this David Wallace-Wells article early on, sort of set up like, I don't know how we're gonna do this. I'm a little scared. And his answer is, more of the same. We're gonna try harder and we're gonna be cleaner, but it's basically gonna be a giant industrial food system. And suck it, basically, is what he says.
Asher Miller
Well, he's extremely condescending, basically, about alternatives to that industrial, factory farm future, right? I mean . . .
Rob Dietz
Yeah, you guys once again made me read this. So I had to read another condescending, wrong article flowing out of the New York Times, or out of the mainstream media, or anywhere. And one thing's really clear, this guy loves technology, not surprisingly for an ecomodernist, but he starts going on about combines and talking about how the bigger the combine, the greater the harvest you get. And I don't quite see how that works. I mean, maybe the faster the harvest. But how the hell do you how do you get more corn just because you have a bigger combine. He's talking about like a, you know, a 500 horsepower combine. Let's get him 100,000 horsepower combine. Let's see how much more corn.
Asher Miller
I think that's really telling. It's like, if the demand is there, then, of course, the supply is going to always be to meet the demand, right? So you could look at that similarly to everyone's going to want to eat meat, so we're going to all have to have a lot more meat in the future. Everyone on earth is going to want to use energy as wastefully as we do, so there's going to be more energy just because everyone wants it, right? So if you have a huge combine harvester, of course there's going to be more for it to harvest.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. And you know the thing that can really increase meat production, whether you're talking poultry, beef, pork, is large combines.
Jason Bradford
There is this sort of technology fetish. There's this kind of wow factor going on when he talks about it. And there's a real like, yeah, kind of almost like disgust of anything that smacks of romanticism or idealism. And so, it's fascinating. He uses terms like, you know, Old MacDonald and, you know, artisanal grains, and you know, where animals have their own names. Those are, those are like worse than chemically drenched corn and feedlot fattened beef.
Asher Miller
Yeah, I mean he literally says the artisanal grains and grass-fed beef are worse for nature than chemical drenched corn and feedlot fat and beef because they require much more land for each calorie they produce.
Jason Bradford
And this is the key is that there's this whole discussion about efficiency. They like to talk about efficiencies. And it's completely bogus. But again, it's one of those things that they throw it out there authoritatively. Like David Wallace-Wells with like, we solved the energy issue. And there's so much more nuance here, and there's no definition. Now, if you're an engineer and you say, I've increased the efficiency, you've got a numerator and denominator. You've got a goal, an output goal --that's the numerator. And the denominator is the units of whatever input you're interested in tracking. So it's always an output over an input. And here, they care tremendously about yield per area. That's the efficiency they seem to care about. But the problem is, is that that's not the way the world works in terms of, you know, sustaining the soil. It's being driven, obviously, by piling on fertilizers and herbicides like crazy. And it's just sort of this treadmill you're on that you can't stop. And so, they don't define it. And it's actually not necessarily the goal that if you are a good agronomist or a soil scientist or a human being living on the planet, that's not the goal you're going to care about. And what's interesting is, you know, they also talk about how these artisanal, organic, regenerative farms, are probably not going to yield as much. And we have to get more yield per area, because if we don't, we're gonna have to expand and cut down more forests, you know. So they draw this logical line, and it's not really well, you know, this is all debatable stuff. And so a lot of this has to do with how you draw system boundaries. And one of the things that's interesting, and it gets to what you were saying, Asher, is that we over produce like you wouldn't believe. Like 40% of the U.S. corn crop is going to ethanol to basically be an energetic breakeven to be 10% of our gasoline. So that's an absurdity, right? That's an absurdity.
Asher Miller
Oh, it sounds logical to me.
Rob Dietz
Let's look also, Jason, you're talking about outputs per input. I mean, you know, yield over land area. What about the pollution and the risk of bird flu and other diseases like that that come from that small area. From cramming too many cows in one small space, too many chickens in one small space.
Asher Miller
And we're just not even acknowledging the suffering and the, you know, the experience of these living beings, right?
Jason Bradford
And thing is, because the efficiency that actually is happening, the actual efficiency that the market is suggesting we do is reduce labor and mechanize more. Because labor in an industrial society, is the highest cost of production. And when we have cheap fuels, they can substitute for labor. You're going to do stuff like build factory farms, including piling animals in. So this was what happens as soon as you get to these then artisanal, Old McDonald style places. What they're doing is more labor inefficient. They look from a labor perspective, bad. They also, there's a system boundary problem. If someone compares like a factory chicken now raised outside on an artisanal farm, that chicken does pretty poorly. It has been adapted. It's been selected for these factory conditions. That is the same for almost every crop we grow. So, if you do a side by side study and say, "How does this corn crop do in this sort of regenerative organic system? It doesn't do so hot." Well, guess what? The genetics of the corn has actually moved to need to have those fertilizers and those herbicides. This gets back to, you know, some of the problem we have with boundary definitions. If you start breeding for other systems, systems with living soils, systems that are actually worried about nutrition and not just yield -- That's another problem that was identified. We're having lower nutrition crops. Then you maybe need less food actually because you're getting actually better mineral density and vitamins and stuff. And you don't need to eat so much to compensate for diminished food quality. So when you do side by side studies, where you actually look at systems, the systems that are more diverse, more regenerative, end up producing better once you actually put the system in the right context.
Asher Miller
You lost me there.
Jason Bradford
I'm sorry. I lost you?
Asher Miller
Nutrition is secondary to profit.
Jason Bradford
Well, that's it, yeah.
Asher Miller
And if we have to eat less to get the nutrition that we need, then how does the profit thing work?
Jason Bradford
That's the thing. That system is set up to maximize profit and to maximize yield. So obviously, these guys are completely missing the point. They have no answer to okay, if we're going to double down on this industrial food system where fossil fuels are in everything, and the tractors and the fertilizer, and the drying and the processing, and the packaging and the shipping, and the mega retail space, and our cooking, and it's leading to soil erosion, water drawdown and pollution . . . They have zero answer to that. They just say we're going to get more efficient somehow at this.
Asher Miller
We could sit here and very reasonably shit on the logic or the illogic of some of the arguments. But I think for me, what really stands out again, and this gets back to the ecomodernist worldview, is it seems like in this entire series, all of these different authors are operating with this sort of assumption that the thing that cannot be changed is our behavior, right? The thing that cannot be changed is the fact that there's going to be more demand for things, or that we have a food system that's operated by businesses seeking to maximize their profits and efficiency and all these. These things are non-negotiable. People have to live in the fucking desert in Arizona and in the southwest, right? Those things can't change. So we have to figure out how to get water to them. And it just reminds me again, of, and I've talked about this on this podcast too much -- But, you know, the thing that probably broke my brain for the final unrecoverable time is when I was watching Jeff Bezos' presentation when he launched his stupid space company where he's like laying out the logic of the challenges we understand. You know, of energy being so critical to human society and that we're hitting limits with energy, even limits to efficiency gains and all this stuff. Just laying out the challenge. And then he's like, we're presented with only two options. One is to use less, which he calls rationing. And the others to go harvest the fucking moon and put a trillion people into space, you know. And that's like this absurd representation, illustration, of the same logic that I see in these articles. Which is like, it is inconceivable that we would change how we eat and how we grow food --
Jason Bradford
And where we live.
Asher Miller
And where we live. So instead, we're gonna have to do all this other stuff, and of course, it's gonna be industrial, right>
Rob Dietz
One thing that was really interesting to me in the Grunwald article is the artwork that accompanied it. There's this illustration by this guy, Sam Whitney, and it's got a skyscraper, basically a barn extruded into a skyscraper on this farm field. And there's cow heads hanging out the windows as you go up into the sky in this really tall barn. And what I'm trying to figure out is, is this illustrator on our side or on their side? Because it's kind of ridiculous, obviously, sort of ecomodernist. You know, cows are gonna be enjoying themselves, leaning out the 10th floor of the building, having a good time.
Jason Bradford
There's never any kind of big picture look at the system. It's like making a few simplifying assumptions and then hammering a certain track. And this guy, he's constantly, you know, talking about on this farm, on this farm, this technology. And honestly, that's like not where the major problems are. I mean, farms have got major problems, obviously, with erosion and stuff. But in terms of energy and material use, it's off the farm that is actually a bigger deal.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, let's go back to your book, Jason, "The Future is Rural," which had the best editor of all time. Yours truly.
Jason Bradford
I wonder where he is now. He must be famous and busy.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, incredible.
Asher Miller
I'm gonna have to leave. There's no room for me with the egos that you have.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I know. Here's the book I wrote. Here's the book I edited. What the hell did you do, Asher? You read it, right? You're the best reader of all time. Well, so there's a, you put a nice chart together in there, Jason.
Asher Miller
Actually, I did the charts, the visuals.
Rob Dietz
There we go, then. I'm actually praising you.
Jason Bradford
He did. They're beautiful.
Rob Dietz
So this chart is looking at how much energy is required to produce and deliver food versus the calories that we obtain from eating that food. And it's roughly 13 calories of energy to produce one calorie of food. Or if you eliminate all the food waste, it would be something more like eight calories of energy input to get one calorie of food. I don't see us eliminating food waste anytime soon, but let's be optimistic. And what the ecomodernists in this whole series of articles don't seem to understand is that that energy input is characteristic of this industrial food system. So what you're talking about, Jason, like, you know, it's not just how you grow it, it's what are you packaging it in. What kind of trucks are you loading it on to. You know, let's say that we did pipe water from the Great Lakes down to the deserts in California and Texas and Arizona, wherever. I mean, how much energy is that going to take, first of all? And then, once you've grown the food there, you've got to send it back to the people that live in the Great Lakes region. You know, how are you doing that? Are you going to use a transporter beam and just transport it directly into people's stomachs?
Jason Bradford
Yeah. What are the roads made out of? Anyone know?
Rob Dietz
Well, they're made out of that electrified concrete, right, that we've solved.
Jason Bradford
Right. So this is the thing. It's like, you know, you've got an oil refinery, and it has these hydrocrackers and these refractions and stuff. And there's stuff at the bottom that's heavy, the tar, the bitumen. I mean, do you know much of that we use? And so this is what's crazy, is no one talks about the system at all, and it just floors me that they're this ignorant. And so sure, make a fossil fuel free, emissions completely free farm, and I don't care, we'll make zero difference for the problem of getting highly processed factory food to the mega store in the city where everyone's showing up in a car on asphalt. I don't care if they're electric, or anything. It makes no freaking difference. So this is a structural problem that they don't talk about, like he's saying, Asher.
Asher Miller
Yes, there's a structural problem there. There's a systems thinking problem there, but ultimately, I think there's a psychological problem here. And that is, you know, we live, and we've talked about this a lot. we live in a system that the physical infrastructure of how we exist, right? People living in cities really divorced from the source of their sustenance, right? The very thing that they need to actually exist, more than anything else, they're as divorced from it as humans have ever been anywhere on Earth in kind of the modern environments that we have. And that shapes what we think of as possible and necessary, right? So imagining something different in a real way means that we have to actually imagine us living differently. And maybe we actually can't live in a high rise building in, you know, a dense urban city, not having to be engaged at all with how food was grown. And that's scary, right? It's scary. And maybe it even raises, you know, the fear of death. Like, I don't know how to do any of that stuff. I mean, I relate to that. I couldn't possibly sustain myself right now, even if I had a farm to go do it, you know, on.
Jason Bradford
You do, but
Asher Miller
I have access to, I'm fortunate. But I wouldn't know how to do that, right?
Jason Bradford
We're working towards that together.
Asher Miller
I know we are. Thank God. But so many people are not, right?
Jason Bradford
Right. It's terrifying. I get it.
Asher Miller
And so it's like we've now constrained what we can see as possible or required because of those conditions.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, and that constraint is a real set of blinders that we wear. Our good friend and colleague here at Post Carbon Institute, Richard Heinberg, gave a presentation recently, and his his final slide in that presentation laid out our choices. He said that we have three choices. One is, we could support policies that would work but are political non-starters. We could have, the second choice is we could have policies that are politically acceptable but don't work. And then he's kind of left this third choice of what if there is no third category.
Jason Bradford
Nice.
Rob Dietz
And it really fits well with this discussion of ecomodernism and food, because I think what the three of us are saying is we should support policies that would work, but they're political non-starters for the psychological reasons you just laid out, Asher. For the, you know, the infrastructure around the food system that you laid out, Jason. And so, what we're doing are policies that are politically acceptable but don't work. I mean, in the case of the groundwater, we're not tracking how much is being depleted. We're just going at it like it's this awesome free resource, which it has been, but we're in trouble and it's not gonna work.
Jason Bradford
And we're talking about the stupidest things, like, okay, let's get water from the Great Lakes, or turn on some giant spigot from Canada. And so, this is the thing, okay? The third category is this. I'm going to try to answer the third category.
Asher Miller
Oh, okay.
Jason Bradford
We, in families and communities, are basically going to be on our own. By that, I mean, there's no politician, okay? We heard from one this episode. I don't think we've got a solution. There's no professor. We heard from professors. I don't think they have any real solutions. Or technologists. None of them are going to come to our rescue. And so, I think we have to kind of figure this out on our own, and that is pretty scary, honestly.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, and it can be really tough for those of us, unlike you who live on a farm and are trying to do right by the land and grow food.
Jason Bradford
It's scary here, too.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, but here in the city, it's even tougher, but there are things you can do. I mean, I've actually embarked on a little experiment here this year with whole foods plant-based diet. You know, trying to get a little smaller in the footprint. And you know, it comes with the added bonus of being healthier as well. You know, there are other options available too. Getting to know the farmers that are nearby, participating in farmers markets, subscribing to community supported agriculture, CSA. I mean, they're small things, but it does help get you outside of that space that you're talking about, Jason, of there's no technology driven savior coming down to fix all this. So the more you can kind of be in relationship with those who are producing food, and the more of that you can do on your own, the better off you are.
Asher Miller
I mean, if you break this down into sort of different version of categories, you know, you're talking about some things you can do, Rob as a consumer, as an eater, right, trying to source things differently, changing diet, all that stuff. Yeah, I think there's also things that we can do, each of us, in our own ways, and under our own circumstances to be part of the production of food a little bit more. So building skills, whether that's trying to have your own garden if you have a small plot of land. You know, learning how to even grow food. I mean, we don't in my house, we live in trees, we don't have a great situation to grow our own food. And thankfully, we have a relationship with a farmer, some schmuck.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, he's not very good, but he's there.
Asher Miller
And we're part of this farming club where we can go and learn skills and help grow some food that we also get. And not everyone's in a situation where they know a farmer and they can go do that, but there are things you could definitely do to build your skill set. And then there's kind of the, maybe call it the infrastructure of supporting more bio-regional and sustainable food systems around you. And that could be partly through the purchasing, like you said in a CSA, Rob. But it could also be supporting organizations that are trying to build that infrastructure. You know, there are food hubs that have been created in different places and other organizations that are trying to rebuild these more sustainable localized food systems. So supporting them through donations or volunteering, or whatever it is. Or pushing for some local policy. I know you said no politicians are going to solve this, Jason, but if we have any recourse politically, it's probably more on the local level.
Jason Bradford
Yeah local, sure. I agree with the local. That can have some impact. Now, let me take it from the perspective of somebody who is a farmer. Just an okay one, just kind of mediocre, but at least I try to farm and help farm. And I have land that I rent out to other farmers. So if you happen to be one of these people that is managing farm properties, there are a lot of things you can do. And one of them is, I want to first say something about this idea that there's places that protect biodiversity, and there's farms which just basically obliterate it, which is the attitude that this guy in the article, you know, was was getting at. And that's completely bogus as well. There's plenty of farmers who actually farm that way. Most of the big industrial farmers I know don't care at all about what they're doing on the farm in terms of biodiversity. But if you do, and if you make an effort, it's incredible what will happen. The soil life feeds, you know, the fact that we have good healthy soil, and I've compared the soil here to the neighboring farm, like, literally 100 feet away. There's a whole ecosystem below ground that, you know, feeds animals, that are feeding all this bird life and insects. You know, the bees are having, you know, burying themselves down there, the ground dwelling bees. There's whole hedgerows and stuff like that where there's insects that are making homes in that. There's birds that are perching and finding shelter. And in terms of birding, this farm here was the second most species rich bird location as a private yard in the entire state of Oregon last year.
Asher Miller
This is only reason you do farming at all in this level, right? It's because you want to get your bird numbers up. Well, I do find it fascinating. It's a different form of efficiency.
Jason Bradford
I do find it fascinating. I think that this place, the way we're managing it, with a lot of diversity and care for the soil and using all these edge spaces as habitat isa way to support biodiversity. And I think there's research to support this from other locations. This not a one off, I'm saying. And so, I do not believe in this sort of separation between human managed ecosystems and completely natural ecosystems. There's gradations.
Asher Miller
By the way, for 10's of 1000's of years, humans didn't either, right?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, exactly. So this is a weird thing that ecomodernist, you know, urbanites, have no comprehension of. And when you're out here observing this, you can see the difference in how properties are managed, and what that means for other living creatures. And so, providing a place for other species, thinking of an ecosystem, thinking of a landscape that's diverse, and then if you own property, trying to figure out a way to have relationships with small farmers to give them an opportunity to do the things they will do. Because I don't think these big mega farms are gonna survive what's coming. And we need to have this huge uprising of small farms in the future. And so, anyway, I think we covered it from a number of different angles. And I feel better now.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, you guys have inspired me. In fact, Asher, your building skills like, I've put a paw paw patch in the postage stamp of my backyard. I've got six paw paws, two of which are almost, you could call them little trees, and they're five years old. So over the last five years, I've produced exactly zero paw paws. But I promise you, this year, whatever paw paws I get, I'm bringing them down to the farm. I'm sharing them with you guys. My skill level might be zero paw paw, but you will benefit. You'll get as much paw paw as I get.
Jason Bradford
You know what, Rob? I'm making you the paw paw man. And you're gonna come down here and we're gonna plant a big roll paw paws. And we're gonna be eating so many paw paws in 20 years.
Rob Dietz
Hey, make some plans for the future, people, alright?
Jason Bradford
Think ahead. Think like a paw paw tree.
Melody Allison
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app, or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much-needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.
Jason Bradford
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