Leonie Joubert
A few years ago I read this fabulous little factoid: it takes something like 66 calories of energy to ship every one calorie of carrot from South Africa to the European supermarket. Okay, I’m a bit rusty on the exact figure (was it 66 or 86?) but the point is that it took a lot more energy to get our root crop onto a northern plate than the person eating it actually got from the food itself.
Let’s take that a step further—those 66-odd calories of energy correlate to grams of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Makes you think, huh?
I was reminded of this during one of the many post-mortems that happened in the wake of the Copenhagen climate summit (and haven’t we had those up to the gills by now!). During the discussion, a prominent activist made the point that civil society needs to lobby the public to start viewing the climate crisis in terms of energy.
This raises some interesting questions in the context of our carrot story—imagine how differently we’d view the meat-and-three-veg on our plate if we saw it as more than just a tasty ensemble of nutrients, more than just a social occasion, more than a full tummy and generally satisfied disposition.
What if we saw it as so-many grams of carbon shunted up into the atmosphere from all the energy needed to farm, ship, process or chill before you got to eat it? Would we start to use food differently?
The vast majority of energy used up by our cars every time we drive goes into just moving around the sheer bulk of the vehicle and only a fraction into moving us around. My (relatively small) car weighs 1.3 tons, I weigh 60-cough-cough kgs—there’s a lot of metal and rubber that needs propulsion before my flesh and bones get to move from A to B.
Equate those calories “wasted” on moving the car around to grams of carbon, then equate that to the eventual link with a drought that pinches off rain to our staple crops, or a heat wave that stalls a city for a week, or a storm surge that swamps the local harbour.
We probably need to make all these connections (think waste, transport, food, lighting and heating, you name it) if we’re to impact how society responds to the climate crisis: it’s no longer a distant threat from a slightly unfathomable atmospheric system. Rather, it’s an immediate and real concern, linked to our daily decisions around how we use and abuse energy. Until we’ve made that link in the public imagination, the disconnect between how we talk about climate change and how we act on it is going to remain cavernous. Even as we sit through yet another analysis of why we keep failing in our global efforts to breathe into being an international climate law.
Food for thought
Since we’re on the topic of food, here are some interesting observations from a discussion on food that happened this week, courtesy of the think tank, the Cambridge Resilience Forum.
Speaking on the issue of food security, Dr Gina Ziervogel from the University of Cape Town’s Climate Systems Analysis Group pointed out that keeping a society “food secure” was about so much more than just securing the production and shipment of food. Yet it’s this that most of us latch on to when we think about whether or not a community goes to bed hungry or full.
It’s also about how people access that food (think cost and allocation). Remember that dreadful famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s? It wasn’t that there was no food around, but that the poor people couldn’t afford to buy it.
Food security is also about the value people ascribe to food. South African palates have been weaned off sorghum and millet, for instance, and people have forgotten how to prepare it. Now they prefer the taste of maize even though it’s less drought resistant. Food safety is another issue—and rising temperatures and more extreme heat events are expected to increase the incidence of salmonella in foods, making the cold chain more critical than ever in shipping certain foods.
Understanding what drives food security is particularly relevant now since more than half the world’s population live in cities today—and that’s expected to swell to 75 percent by 2050 of a nine billion-strong global population count.
We’re going to have to keep this mass sufficiently well fed. And this will likely have to happen in a world where there’s no more cheap oil to ship food halfway across the globe to reach the markets, and where the atmosphere can’t afford to absorb any more of the emissions needed to get it between one hemisphere’s farm and another’s table.
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