Welcome back. In this lecture we will be talking about food as it relates to the topics of
this course. Humans as a species are very good planners, and one of the main kinds of
planning that we do is to allow for the production of more and more food. One of the main ways
we do this is through agriculture. Agriculture certainly allows for the production of a lot
more food than for example we had when we were hunter-gatherers as a species. It has also
been proposed that one of the reasons why we may have begun agriculture is to produce
grain in order to make alcohol, that the idea of having enough grain to ferment into beer
as a surplus was very desirable to humans. I'm not sure if the jury has determined whether
or not that is exactly why it evolved, but it has been proposed by researchers. There
are a lot of IT techniques that are brought to bear in terms of modern agriculture. Measuring
impacts of different agricultural systems, allowing for more precise control over the
inputs and outputs, enabling supply chain management, how food once it has been grown
moves through the industrial infrastructure, allowing for more informed eating knowing
about the caloric count and the nutrition, and also allowing potentially for social networks
to manage and distribute local food supplies that are produced as well, things like community-supported
agriculture. In this course if sustainability is a focus you might think what is the information
that we currently have when we look at a piece of food that allows us to know about what
the sustainability implications of that food is? We have a lot of nutrition information
on the back of each package but not that much sustainability information. What kinds of
information should be on that food packaging? Should there be a carbon footprint, should
there be a water footprint? That's an interesting topic I think, what information we would want.
Instead of nutrition facts we have sustainability facts. Also, what thought should be put into
packaging itself? What materials should be used and how should it be shipped that allow
for there to be less packaging per unit of food produced? An interesting photo essay
that was done on modern food that shed some light on modern food is called "37 Ingredients
in a Twinkie." Apparently, there are 37 ingredients in a Twinkie, and at a site linked in to the
canvas class website you can see pictures of the 37 different ingredients. While there
are some things you would recognize like wheat flour and water and three or four different
things that are basically sugar so sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, I think
there's fructose and maybe one other one, glucose I think, there are dozens of other
ingredients that would fit more in a chemistry textbook than on a farm. I encourage you to
go take a look at that and see what the ingredients are in a Twinkie and what they look like.
The ingredients in a Twinkie are very different from the kinds of food stuffs we had on the
evolutionary landscape. When humans were evolving we ate very different things than what we
find in a Twinkie. Modern agriculture is very different from what we evolved to, the kinds
of food gathering that we evolved to be good at, and agriculture also has a lot of other
environmental indications. Agriculture is heavily intertwined with water. There is an
article from years ago in Science Magazine called "Is Agriculture Sucking Fresh Water
Dry?" In this article it talks about a variety of different aspects of water consumption
around the world. It points out that the U.S. leads the world in per capita water consumption,
more than twice the global average. Areas of the statistics in this article are striking
similar to the idea that we have more than twice the global average of water, but also
it points to some of the complexity that there is in calculating the water. Should you count
the water used to produce food? They certainly do and they in fact suggest that 92% of all
of the water consumed is used to support modern agriculture. They suggest it takes 5300 liters
of water to grow and process a dollar's worth of grain. That's a pretty dramatic figure
considering that a box of Corn Flakes is only a couple of dollars. It represents a huge
amount of water that went into all of the processes. The article also uses a saying
that I really kind of like whish is "Grain is the currency by which we trade water."
What this is suggesting is that in international commerce it would be very hard to move water
around, but water is ultimately very valuable, but since grain is a representation of how
much water was put into that grain it allows us to do exchanges without having to ship
all the water around. It allows us to ship the grain around instead. It also talks about
virtual water which it says is 1/5 of all water use. It defines this as "The water needed
to produce a commodity, such as meat or electronics, if the ultimate consumers were to make it
themselves rather than to outsource its growth or manufacture." This points to another piece
of this complexity, the fact that when you have a product there is a lot of embodied
water. Just as there is embodied energy there is a lot of water that was used to make that
thing, and that needs to be taken into account at some point in the way we understand the
global flows of water. Here we see a map that shows some of these global flows. It shows
which countries are importing and exporting to which other countries, and it's interesting
to see some of the ways in which the U.S. factors into these imports and exports. The
article also says to reduce water usage they encourage people to eat less meat or to switch
from grain-fed beef, which as we mentioned before requires 5300 liters of water for each
dollar's worth of grain fed to a cow, to grass-fed beef which typically requires only the water,
the rainwater falling on a pasture. Here in California we face some major water issues.
Some of these are tied up in the idea of meat because if you've ever driven up the 5 Freeway
you can see that there are a lot of cows there. Water in Southern California is typically
piped in from lots of other parts of the state as well as from other states, and there are
lots of different ways to reduce water usage. For example, reducing lawn watering since
the water used to water lawns is not reclaimed unlike the water used for sewage. Back on
the topic of eating habits, thinking about the calories of fossil fuels that are used
for each calorie of protein with beef it's a 35:1 ratio, but the amount of energy that
you need to produce 1 calorie of beef protein is 35 calories of fossil fuel. For tofu, though,
the ratio is only 2:1, that it only requires twice as much energy which still seems like
a reasonable amount but not nearly as much as with beef. So, between these two the idea
that water is being used heavily for the production of meat and also that there is energy being
used abundantly for the production of meat provides some suggestion that a vegan or a
vegetarian diet might have some significant environmental benefits, as well as there being
health and moral arguments for that as well. In previous offerings of this class a number
of students have looked at the question of vegan and vegetarian diets for their final
projects. I imagine some of you in this class are looking in that direction as well. This
lecture has provided a basic introduction of some of the ideas around food as they relate
to the topics of this class. Thanks very much.