Getting a healthy meal into yourself and your family can be challenging enough. Try multiplying that by seven billion. Now we've got issues every step of the way -- what food we produce, how we produce it, how we distribute it, what we eat and how we waste it. By 2050, our population is predicted to grow by two billion more. That's nine billion people on the planet and all of us hungry. The planet will not be getting any bigger. Or any more fertile. So it's up to us to be smarter about growing, sharing, eating and preserving our food.
Worldwatch Institute and the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition are working together to grapple with these grand scale issues. At "Eating Planet," a recent symposium in New York, they gathered sustainable farming and food policy experts to share their findings along with some other sobering stats.
Among the seven billion of us, one billion are overfed and obese and suffering all the attendant miseries -- cancer, diabetes, heart disease, rocketing medical costs, plus impacts on the family and the workplace which are distinctly not fun. On the other side of the continuum, the world has one billion underfed people, those struggling with poverty, food insecurity and outright hunger. Also not fun.
Here's what's amazing -- these two problems have a single solution. "Agriculture is the answer," as Danielle Nierenberg, director of Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet project, put it. Growing indigenous crops empowers the people who need it most. The foods that best sustain the planet, with the highest yield and the lowest carbon footprint are the same foods that best sustain us -- vegetables, fruit, whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds -- your plant-based diet greatest hits.
The prime contributor to obesity and obesity-related illnesses is the same one that sucks up land and water and grain -- grain that could feed us. We're talking meat. As Nierenberg and Edible Manhattan publisher Brian Halweil said in a recent New York Times op-ed, "Meat remains the most energy- and resource-intensive ingredient in our collective diets." So rather than raising more beef that will make more people more obese at a cost to the environment, how about we dedicate that precious land and water to benefit another precious resource -- us?
"Produce is the most important thing to grow and eat," said Ellen Gustafson, of Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition's advisory board and founder of 30 Project, the sustainable food nonprofit.
Eating Planet's numbers are staggering, but what really moved all the members of the panel are people, from an African woman who put aside her dignity to pick up a few grains of maize to feed her family to the women of SEWA, who organized their own labor force, giving voice and power to India's vast numbers of impoverished, self-employed women.
We take abundant food for granted here. We take our own power for granted, too. We shouldn't. As the One Campaign's sustainable agriculture and food aid policymaker Kelly Hauser said, when you call your congressman or even e-mail, Washington pays attention. Your voice makes a difference.
I'll add what you choose to eat makes a difference, too. All seven to nine billion of us deserve to be nourished. If just a fraction of the seven billion of us speak up more and eat meat less, we can save -- and nourish -- the world. It all starts with you -- your plate, your voice, your choice.
Missed the "Eating Planet" symposium? Read the book -- Eating Planet 2012.
Feed the Planet Pasta with Celery, Kale and Walnut GremolataGremolata is a mess of chopped herbs, lemon zest, olive oil, breadcrumbs or nuts, with a nubbly texture somewhere between a relish and sauce. Here it's tossed with nutrient-rich kale, celery and whole wheat angel hair for a summer dish bright with flavor, color and crunch.
7 ounces whole wheat angel hair pasta (approximately half of a 13.25-ounce package)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 pinch red pepper flakes (about 1/8th teaspoon)
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 bunch flatleaf parsley, chopped (about 1 cup, loosely packed)
1/2 cup walnuts chopped
zest of 1 lemon plus 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1-1/2 cups celery -- stalks and leaves -- sliced thin
1 bunch kale, chopped into skinny ribbons
sea salt and freshly ground pepper to tasteIn a small bowl, mix together the chopped garlic, walnuts, grated lemon zest and chopped parsley.
Bring water to boil in a large pot. Add angel hair and cook according to package directions until just al dente -- not al mushy -- approximately 5 to 7 minutes. Reserve 1 cup of cooking water from the pasta -- it gets starchy and silky and helps thicken the sauce. Drain the rest of the pasta.
In the same pot, heat olive oil over medium-high heat. Add red pepper flakes and the garlic-parsley-lemon zest-walnut mixture, stir until it sizzles and smells toasty and terrific, about 3 minutes. Add the pasta and chopped kale. Remove from heat and toss. The heat from the pasta and gremolata will make the kale tender without additional cooking.
Add the quarter cup of lemon juice, the cup of pasta water and celery. Toss again to combine. Season generously with sea salt and pepper.
Serve warm, room temperature or slightly chilled. Simple but sturdy enough for a pot luck.
Serves 4 to 6. May be doubled, tripled, or do the math and feed 7 billion.
Follow Ellen Kanner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/edgyveggie1
"It's not that the laws of physics are subject to revision; it's that they don't tell you anything about HOW the body uses calories or WHY people get fat. Weight gain results from fewer calories being expended than are consumed, yes; but that tells you nothing we don't already know. Obesity is a disorder of fat storage, and fat storage is regulated by a complex system of hormones, most notably insulin, in response to food intake, and different foods have different effects on the amount of circulating insulin. It's no coincidence that a leading cause of non-compliance with insulin therapy among diabetics is the desire to avoid weight gain. I'm not questioning the fact that people get fat because they consume too much and don't burn off enough calories. But WHY do they eat too much, and WHY don't they burn off enough calories? We can go the puritanical route and chalk it up to the sins of gluttony and sloth. Or we can go the rational route and look at how certain foods create persistant hunger, and how those foods encourage fat storage rather than fat burning, so that laziness is the result of obesity, not the cause. When you can administer insulin to a patient and the pounds pack on with no conscious effort to eat more, and you can administer metformin and the pounds drop off with no effort to eat less, there's obviously more to obesity than just being a lazy pig."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20592131
http://www.ajcn.org/content/81/6/1267.abstract
http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v33/n6/abs/ijo200945a.html
http://www.ajcn.org/content/91/5/1525S.short (This finds that plant-based diets, because of their association with leaner body mass, should be encouraged to curb childhood obesity.)
http://www.jcdr.net/article_fulltext.asp?issn=0973-709x&year=2012&volume=6&issue=3&page=441&issn=0973-709x&id=1933
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3310004/
This is an excellent article on the Haber-Bosch Process.
http://lauradutoit.hubpages.com/hub/Artificial-Nitrogen-Dangers-Of-Mankind-Playing-God
You commented on a post of mine that growing plants uses more water than growing livestock (particularly cattle)
Anything to back that up?
From David Pimentel at Cornel:
"Animal agriculture is a leading consumer of water resources in the United States, Pimentel noted. Grain-fed beef production takes 100,000 liters of water for every kilogram of food. Raising broiler chickens takes 3,500 liters of water to make a kilogram of meat. In comparison, soybean production uses 2,000 liters for kilogram of food produced; rice, 1,912; wheat, 900; and potatoes, 500 liters. "Water shortages already are severe in the Western and Southern United States and the situation is quickly becoming worse because of a rapidly growing U.S. population that requires more water for all of its needs, especially agriculture," Pimentel observed
If the author believes that the "prime contributor to obesity and obesity-related illnesses" is meat, she is in serious need of some "refresher courses" in biochemistry, endocrinology, and metabolism (assuming she ever had any training in those subjects to begin with, which I seriously doubt). For a start, she might look at the results of the "A-to-Z" study conducted at Stanford University, which showed that the Atkins diet (mainly meat, fish, eggs, and vegetables), compared to the LEARN, Zone, and Ornish diets resulted in greater weight loss and better improvement for the risk factors for cardiovascular disease than the other three. http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/297/9/969.full The lead researcher on this study was a long-time vegetarian who has stated publicly that the results of the study were "a bitter pill" for him to swallow.
http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e4026
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120627092206.htm
What most people confuse are healthy carbohydrates (whole grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables) with refined carbohydrates (donuts, Snickers, potato chips). Additionally, what the poster to whom you are responding confuses is a vegan or vegetarian diet with a high-carbohydrate diet.
His article also talks about how carbohydrate intensive meals are "propelling the epidemic of obesity and diabetes in America."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/healthy-eating_b_629422.html
In reality, there is no legitimate basis for Kanner's fallacious claim, but there is a mountain of evidence that carb based meals, such as the one that Kanner recommends above, can lead to obesity and a number of other health-related illness. In fact, in the China study cited by vegan health crusader Colin Campbell, wheat had a vastly higher correlation with cancer and other diseases than meat.
And in fact, study after study comparing people on diets high in animal protein to people on low-fat diets low in animal protein have shown favorable results for the meat eaters! Here is one such study:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/08/03/128958420/low-carb-diet-matches-low-fat-diet-results----with-a-heart-bonus
In other words, not only is meat not the cause of obesity, it can be a very important part of a diet to prevent it. Pasta on the other hand, tasty as it is, always puts you at risk.
We're just beginning to feel the effects. That little thing called global warming, which is whipping our a$$es more and more, is mostly due to meat eating: www.worldwatch.org/node/6294
The universe must be kept balanced in all things.
Someone has to do it.
On the other hand, if we quit raising animals for meat, we would dramatically raise the carrying capacity for humans on earth and solve most of our environmental problems simply by stopping the horrific violence of animal slaughter. How can anyone object to this?