"For breakfast I ate oatmeal with bananas. Being somewhat health conscious, I am well aware of the benefits of oatmeal and fresh fruit. My oatmeal as usual, originates from the US Midwest, grain capital of the world, via Chicago. Today’s bananas were Panamanian. While the oatmeal was probably trucked over here, bananas were flown in. Not counting the sugar I sprinkled on, breakfast traveled 5500 miles to get to my plate.......So all in all, [totalling Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner] I ate food from eight countries that traveled a whopping 35,675 collective miles to my plate via truck, train, boat and plane before being picked up and driven home by me in a personal vehicle.
While this arrangement makes perfect sense economically, it is utterly insane from an energetic standpoint and ultimately not sustainable."
[...]
"Once the supply of cheap energy dries up, the global supermarket will become a thing of the past. The implication of this change is very disturbing and extends far beyond whether or not a shopper in Topeka will still be able get fresh strawberries in January. The problem is unfortunately much more fundamental than that. In an energy-deprived future the more fundamental question has to be asked: will we have any reliable form of food distribution at all? With large tracts of the world engaged in one form of monoculture or another, what will we all end up having for dinner, absent a coherent transition to localized cultivation of produce and grains?
...In all likelihood, the regions that survive the Great Unraveling will be those areas that mastered the switch from the industrialized model of corporate agriculture to a labor intensive cultivation of whatever that needs to be consumed locally by their residents. Those that fail to adapt will die off. It’s that easy."
Originally published in: http://deconsumption.typepad.com/