In this post I’d like to move from the specific—eating in Winthrop, Maine—to the general—the spike in food prices worldwide—and call your attention to Andrew Revkin’s January 10^th post in his New York Times blog, Dot Earth. It’s called “Beyond the Eternal Food Fight,” and it examines rising food prices, food shortages, and what kind of diet the planet can provide to feed nine billion people, the projected population for 2050. Revkin brings Vaclav Smil, from the University of Manitoba, and Lester Brown, from the Earth Policy Institute, into the discussion, and the exchange between the three is sobering and thought provoking. It’s a rather long post, but well worth reading. 

I was especially interested in Smil’s “menu of possible food lifestyles for societies in which he identified a level that was bountiful while also easily sustained for 9 billion people seeking decent lives:

1) eating enough to survive with reduced lifespans (Ethiopia),

2) eating enough to have some sensible though limited choices and to live near-full lifespans when considering other (hygienic, health care) circumstances (as in the better parts of India today),

3) having more than enough of overall food energy but still a limited choice of plant foods and only a healthy minimum of animal foods and live close to or just past 70 (China of the late 1980s and 1990s),

4) not wanting more carbohydrates and shifting more crop production and imports to [livestock] feed, not food, to eat more animals products, having overall some 3,000 kcal/capita a day and living full spans (China now),

5) having gross surpluses of everything, total supply at 3,500-3,700 kcal/day, eating too much animal protein, wasting 35-40% of all food, living record life spans, getting sick (U.S. and E.U. today).

The world eating between levels 3-4 would not know what to do with today’s food; the world at 5 is impossible.” 

So basically, the way most of us eat in the U.S. is impossible for the whole world. 

Perhaps we in the U.S. should give some serious thought to eating between levels 3 and 4. I know I am. It’s one of the reasons why I bought Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. It also dovetails nicely with my efforts, which I’ll be writing more about in future posts, to eat organic food on a modest budget.