Old 99 Farm, week of Feb 15 2015

Just finished a 485 page book, The Third Plate, by well-respected chef/author, Dan Barber. Yes, it’s about food and food production, and it’s provocative.

For example,“At the heart of today’s optimistic farm-to-table food culture is a dark secret: the local food movement has failed to change how we eat. It has also offered a false promise for the future of food. Our concern over factory farms and chemically grown crops might have sparked a social movement, but even the most enlightened eating of today is ultimately detrimental to the environment and to individual health.”

He’s a permaculturist, without using the word, and, judging by the encyclopedic range of quotes and books listed in the bibliography, he hasn’t heard of it. No matter. It’s wonderful when ‘earth care, people care, fare share’ can be invoked without mentioning the ‘p’ word.

Example: “Food production is a disturbance, but the goal is to “disturb feelingly,” to disturb in a way that mimics natural systems. Whether you’re talking about a goose, a fish, or raising wheat, you’ve got to intimately know the environment from which it is coming and mimic nature to produce the best flavor.”

My point? Most people here on this list are interested in healthy food that tastes good. But care less about the systemic consequences of how that food is produced. We should, because if we don’t, one household at a time, we’re just as responsible as Monsanto, laggard politician or any monocrop farmer of ruining the world we live in. And that to such a degree that our children will curse our graves.

The solution, Barber says, lies in the “third plate”: an integrated system of vegetable, grain, and livestock production that is fully supported—in fact, dictated—by what we choose to cook for dinner. The third plate is where good farming and good food intersect. See his TED talks at http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish

And in other news…

In its most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated how much carbon we can emit and still keep a decent chance of limiting warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels. This is known as a carbon budget. Two degrees is the internationally-accepted point beyond which climate change risks become unacceptably high.

As of 2010, we could release a maximum of about 1000 billion more tonnes of carbon dioxide and still have a 50:50 chance of staying below two degrees, according to the IPCC.

A very recent paper (published online in Nature, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7533/full/nature14016.html on Jan 7 2015) compares this allowable carbon budget with scientists’ best estimate of how much oil, gas and coal exist worldwide in economically recoverable form, known as “reserves”.

Were we to burn all the world’s known oil, gas and coal reserves, the greenhouse gases released would blow the budget for two degrees three times over, the paper finds.

The implication is that any fossil fuels that would take us over-budget will have to be left in the ground. Globally, this equates to 88 per cent of the world’s known coal reserves, 52 per cent of gas and 35 per cent of oil, according to the new research.

For us Canadians, that means 75/24/82 percent of oil, gas and coal respectively. Just consider how THAT will affect your standard of living???

Here at the farm, we had the mercury dip to -30dC last night; it’s finally in a range where Celcius sounds a bad as Fahrenheit! Frozen water lines, tractors that won’t start, frozen combs on roosters. Global warming is a misnomer, it should be climate weirding, because even these deep freezes are a consequence of global climate balancing.

Yes we have food. Delicious food, tho perhaps not as good as Dan Barbers. You will enjoy the carrots for sure. Pre cut squash in one kg bags, frozen, celeriac, leeks, and green onions, as well as eggs, flour and meats.

Healthy eating,
Ian and Camelia