Back to the 'Old Normal' of Domesticity

This year I decided to learn how to garden.

My resolve wasn’t just a notion for a new pastime or a move toward hip liberalism. Rather, it was my response to global warming and in particular, the depletion of fossil fuels, which has a direct effect on our food system.

The crops we grow and the way we grow them is determined by oil and oil by-products. Artificial fertilizers and chemical pesticides are made from oil just as farm equipment and irrigation systems are powered by it. Trucks transport our food an average 1,500 miles while fruit and other perishables travel in airplanes. Refrigeration provides storage for dairy, meat and produce that require electricity made from fossil fuels. Processed foods, which account for three-quarters of global food sales by price, are manufactured with oil.

The industrial food system consumes ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced (www.oildepletionprotocol.org). Such inefficiency hasn’t mattered before because cheap fuel has freed us from the “drudgery” of growing and cooking our own food. Nevertheless, the pervasive use of oil not only makes life on earth unsustainable, its low-cost, convenience and accessibility have led us to assume that someone is always there to feed us. This is the height of dependency, which disconnects us from our food, says Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton in their new book, A Nation of Farmers.

The days of high-priced oil appear to be dormant right now, considering that it was almost thrice the cost last summer. Oil prices are down now because the world economy is stalled. But prices are bound to go back up as the cheap easy-to-get oil becomes more difficult and more expensive to extract. Prices will also rise because less oil is being produced.

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