[Peakoil] SMH opinion on food security

[Alex Pollard]

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/neglect-of-food-sources-has-the-chooks-coming-home-to-roost-20091227-lg5y.html

Neglect of food sources has the chooks coming home to roost
December 28, 2009


We think the society around us is solid but there is an old political
aphorism: the difference between social order and disorder is 36 hours
without food. Think about that for even a moment and you know it's true.
Food security is the basis of everything we call civilised. This is the
perfect time of year to consider the subject because at this time of
abundance, we need to know that Australia's food security is declining.

With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 came a chicken boom. The
humble, productive backyard chook helped America, and Australia, get
through the greatest financial crisis and highest unemployment of the last
hundred years.

Eighty years later, in an era of factory farming, cheap food and pervasive
obesity, this boom in backyard chicken-raising in America is a telling
detail because the levels of unemployment, debt, foreclosure and political
anger are all far higher in the United States than in Australia.

The world's largest mail-order poultry operation, Murray McMurray Hatchery
in Iowa, is shipping almost 2 million live birds a year and has been
unable to expand production in pace with demand. (McMurray sells about 170
breeds of birds, including black swans.) The online forum
BackyardChickens.com has 40,000 members and is only one of several big
chicken online communities in the US. When the American writer Susan
Orlean decided to buy a chicken coop and keep a few hens, she stumbled
into a social phenomena: ''The chicken movement seems to be expanding
exponentially.''

Even the White House has been caught up in acknowledging the long and
damaging decline of home-grown food. In March, the first lady, Michelle
Obama, became the first occupant of the White House since the Depression
to have a working vegetable garden, the last being Eleanor Roosevelt.

Note the symmetry between economic hardship and backyard food.

The Obama plot is producing vegetables on the South Lawn, a site chosen
for its visibility to outside visitors. Michelle Obama wants to educate
her daughters and the general public about the need for healthy, local,
seasonal food at a time when obesity has become America's No.1 health
problem. She expects every member of the family to participate in the
necessary weeding, including the President, although out of deference to
the Commander-in-Chief, she is not growing beetroot because he doesn't
like it.

There has even been talk of a chicken coop, which would be a wonderful
symbol because every chicken in a backyard is at least one less bird
subjected to the grotesque cruelty of factory farming, which we pretend is
not the real cost behind every cheap chicken breast, wing and pale egg.

The hidden costs of our food system are high. There is the obvious cost in
health as our diets have an abundance of bulk and taste but an increasing
paucity of nutritional value. The energy cost is extremely high, with a
mass-distribution system built on transportation, packaging,
refrigeration, storage and preservation. The moral cost is also high as
food animals, especially chickens, live out their lives in an abject state
of constriction.

The solution is partly within our grasp. One of Australia's sustainability
visionaries, Michael Mobbs, whose famous inner-city house is completely
self-sufficient in energy and water, has developed the embryo of a system
of urban street gardens - communal food production in the spare space on
our footpaths.

His street, Myrtle Street, Chippendale, has multiple but unobtrusive fruit
and vegetable patches, and communal composting bins. If you didn't know,
you might not even realise it. You'd just think the street was unusually
bushy. His scheme has had no problems from City of Sydney council, quite
the contrary. ''The council has taken what we've done in Myrtle Street and
made it draft policy for the whole council area,'' he says. ''That's a
real win.

''I know of a dozen streets that I'm directly involved with that are doing
street gardens,'' Mobbs said. ''I think there must be hundreds more. Food
transcends party politics. Food is the future of politics.''

The council is even considering setting up an urban farm on one of its
green spaces to grow vegetables and produce eggs.

A more advanced variation on this grassroots theme is the Landshare
program set up by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the Devon-based TV chef and
organic food producer. As a food and media impresario,
Fearnley-Whittingstall has not wasted his celebrity on mere fame but
championed self-sufficiency, organic food, and the consumption of local,
seasonal produce.

Landshare uses the internet to match people with spare land and those who
want to grow vegetables. It has become nationwide, with 1300 landowners,
3500 gardeners and 500 helpers across Britain.

Australia, in contrast, is going in the opposite direction. Much of the
rich farmland surrounding Sydney and Melbourne has been replaced by urban
spread. There are just 1050 surviving market gardens around Sydney and
half are in the sights of the developer-dominated NSW Labor Government.

Australia's food security is going backwards. Our lax food-labelling laws
are being exploited by the giant retail chains to import cheap food from
abroad, mix it with Australian product and, if more than 50 per cent of
the value of the mix is Australian, to label it ''Made in Australia''. The
consumer is being duped and the practice is sending some local farmers
broke.

If Australia's population keeps growing at a rate of 1.2 million people
every three years, and the Murray-Darling Basin continues to degrade, and
the arid zone continues to expand, and cheap imported food continues to
out-compete local product, Australia will become a net importer of food
sooner rather than later. Hard to imagine, but inevitable on present
trends.

Food for thought.