WWW.RIDESIDE.NET

Posted by TheFullCleveland on 2008-05-21 11:27:16 +0000

Visit this site much? (HT Boston Herald) Gas prices aren't affecting these people, either.

Posted by tommy on 2008-05-21 14:36:48 +0000

I'm assuming most of the cost increases are explainable in terms of increased oil prices (not sure how much of it is because of farmland being used for ethanol corn instead of people food). Does anyone have a clue about the relative amount of oil used in producing some piece of food (potato, for example), versus the amount used in shipping that potato to its destination? I have no data, but my guess is that the oil price increase is affecting cost on the transportation side more than it is on the production side. If that's true, then I would expect as oil prices continue to outpace general inflation, we'll have to start obtaining our food a bit differently. This might mean shipping by train instead of by truck. But, it might mean needing to grow food closer to the people that eat it. The problem around here is that suburbia is in the way. I wonder how expensive gas would need to get before suburbia starts to shrink. Clearly, we're nowhere near it yet, but at some point, the cost of shipping food would get so expensive that it would be economically feasible for a farmer to buy a cul-de-sac in Burlington, bulldoze it, and replace it with a farm, yes? Especially if the cost of suburban living (that is, driving every time you leave the house) becomes expensive enough that suburban land values decrease. I just realized I don't really have an argument or even a point; I'm just thinking out loud. I will stop now.

Posted by pamsterdam on 2008-05-21 14:41:03 +0000

I found your musings very interesting. Just fyi.

Posted by G lib on 2008-05-21 14:46:00 +0000

me too.

Posted by G lib on 2008-05-21 14:53:30 +0000

NPR (where I get all my news) has reported that the rising food prices are a result of both producing and shipping food, as well as ethanol. But I don't have time to look up sources to back it up either. Did I also read recently that biodiesel kids have been stealing grease from McDonaldses? (Step right up here and give us an answer, HUMANWINE!) Adding on to your 'growing food near where people live' idea, is the argument that we also need to grow our meat animals near their food sources. NPR has also taught me that, for example, corn is shipped halfway across the country to the pig farm, and then the resulting pig shit from the pigs eating the corn is shipped halfway across the country to the corn farm, not to mention the meat from the pigs being shipped all over the world. This is not as much an argument for vegetarianism as eating local or organic meats, and one of the reasons why meat is so energy-consuming.

Posted by G lib on 2008-05-21 14:56:20 +0000

Let's bulldoze Billerica. In all seriousness, if food prices got too high Americans would first be forced to 1. Start growing crops in place of their (chem)lawns 2. Eat wild pigeons, turkeys and Canada geese. before they bulldozed a neighborhood, as much as I'd like that idea.

Posted by pamsterdam on 2008-05-21 14:56:47 +0000

You might want to read The Omnivore's Dilemma. Covers a lot of this. The author's kind of a dink, though - basically equates vegetarianism with foraging and deems both "impractical". Um... yeah. (PS - does having trail mix for lunch make me a hippie?)

Posted by virtue on 2008-05-21 15:08:53 +0000

So corn is an agricultural product that really, really likes petrochemical fertilizers. Petrochemical fertilizers are made out of--yup, you guessed it, fossil fuels, mostly natural gas. Michael Pollan goes on and on about this. According to the International Fertilizer Industry Association (I so cribbed this footnote from the Wikipedia article on fertilizer), "The entire fertilizer industry uses less than 2% of world energy consumption, and this is overwhelmingly concentrated in the production of ammonia. The ammonia industry used about 5% of natural gas consumption in the mid-1990s." I'm assuming that the IFIA is not an impartial reporter, but I don't have any information to put that number into better context in terms of overall energy use. Also, I think I would be leery of bulldozing a cul de sac in Burlington--I think you'd end up with high levels of ground contamination. You might already know this, but the point at which oil prices escalate beyond practicality (due to that supply/demand graph I vaguely remember from macroeconomics) is loosely known as peak oil. I like to think that we're all totally complicit, and totally fucked.

Posted by virtue on 2008-05-21 15:11:13 +0000

L: Michael Pollan wrote Omnivore's Dilemma.

Posted by virtue on 2008-05-21 15:16:51 +0000

LL: My dad grew up in Southie, and they (presumably some civic minded charitable organization) would ship him and his siblings out to the country to see how farms worked--he very clearly remembers the long bus ride to...Woburn. Of course, he knew where his food came from--it came from the animals in the back yard (my grandparent's house is on a double lot extending all the way to the next street). At least until someone called the health department and they (closely related to, but not exactly the same as the previous they) came and took away the goat, chickens and rabbits (that my father--ever the entrepeneur--collected after Easter, when the little bunnies weren't so cute any more).

Posted by tgl on 2008-05-21 15:21:30 +0000

My musings: * More and more goods are being transported by trains these days. CSX and others are actually spending money to improve railways right now. * Oil prices effect the cost to grow (fertilizers) and the cost to ship. Like tommy, not sure which has a greater impact. * As we divert land for growing food into land for growing biomass for energy, the food supply dwindles. * Bright side: The British were healthiest immediately following WWII as they remained on rations while repaying war debt to the US. Same might hold true for the US once our economy collapses.

Posted by tommy on 2008-05-21 15:23:23 +0000

Actually, I think "peak oil" means the time at which oil production reaches (reached?) its absolute maximum. Which is theoretically a separate thing from how expensive it is.

Posted by tommy on 2008-05-21 15:29:27 +0000

Also, it's not just the fertilizers that use oil in production. Tractors, water pumps, etc. take their share, too. But, again, no idea what the relative numbers here are. Another bright side: once the US economy collapses and unemployment skyrockets, we can replace fossil-fuel burning farm equipment with manual human labor!

Posted by tommy on 2008-05-21 15:47:45 +0000

Re: (1). Very interesting. My parents own a house on Cape Cod (which they rent out during the summer, which pays the mortgage, but that's neither here nor there). In the past, they rented out part of their land to a local dude that grew Christmas trees. He had the same arrangement with a few other people, I guess. So, perhaps we wouldn't see individual suburbanites becoming subsistence farmers, but perhaps they would be renting out their former lawns to farmers. And, each farmer would tend to a collection of individually-rented parcels. Agribusiness 2.0! Let's go IPO with lawnfarmusa.com! Who's with me?

Posted by G lib on 2008-05-21 16:12:48 +0000

Suburbanites couldn't raise enough food to feed themselves entirely, but they certainly could make a dent in consumption by growing food rather than lawns. FWIW: My parents farm their lawn. It keeps them (and their neighbors) in fresh veggies all summer and frozen veggies for most of the winter. tommy I love your idea1! But I have a different twist. We could IPO setting up, weeding, and maintaining vegetable gardens in people's lawns as a replacement/betterment for BostonOrganics. So the mom could come home from work and find a perfect tomato in her yard and cook it for supper. It would be perfect for the rich yoga mom! AND We could sell of the rest of the vegetables that they don't eat when they don't feel like cooking (which will be most of the time). PS-- someone already started a Lawnfarm project: http://www.sfvictorygardens.org/

Posted by virtue on 2008-05-22 14:51:28 +0000

Your right about it being theoretically separate, which is why I used the qualifier "loosely." Most of the times that I've seen "peak oil" discussed, however, the term has been used as a catch all for the whole set of related phenomena, or as a synonym for the apocalypse. Then again, that might just be me reading too much lefty crap.

Posted by tgl on 2008-05-21 17:08:43 +0000

Pray for rocks!

Posted by Miriam on 2008-05-21 17:49:39 +0000

My veggies are coming up all over the place! I'm a huge proponent of the modern victory garden. It just makes sense. Being a suburbanite, I am still have plenty of lawn, but year by year I'm expanding my garden patch. I'm attempting tomatoes, onions, carrots, corn (to eat not sell to the ethanol lobby), watermelons, cucumbers, zucchini, herbs (mint, chives, dill, oregano, bee balm, basil), snap peas, peas, beans and greens (lettuce and arugula). I'm planning on expanding to beets and radishes soon. In addition, I have a plethora of flowers from seed hopefully emerging in the next few weeks. The peonies are finally open by my front steps, and the lavendar is spectacular. I use 1/5 gallon of gas to mow my front and back yards, and I get a good workout. Shovelling compost and spreading peat moss to build my raised beds is even better exercise. I LOVE growing my own food, and I love shopping the farmer's market downtown to suppliment what I don't have the energy or resources to produce myself yet. Grow-your-own is a HUGE stress reducer. I encourage everyone to try it.

Posted by dyedon8 on 2008-05-21 18:05:19 +0000

Not stealing -- restaurants have to *pay* to have that shit taken away. Unless, that is, some band with a converted van volunteers to do it for free. Piebald toured in a converted bus a few years back.

Posted by Corby Trouser Press on 2008-05-21 18:06:11 +0000