Light Reading: Searching For A Sustainable Future

Over the weekend, the NYTimes ran an editorial by Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. She’s a smart lady, and she travels a lot and thinks about global culture and other narrow topics. The piece was about food recycling in China - basically, that hundreds of millions of people there eat food that was grown, raised or caught nearby, consume it immediately, and then use the waste for animal feed and fertilizer and what have you. She doesn’t come to any grand conclusions, but basically, her findings about this system are as follows:

1) It’s much better for the environment, and the resulting food tastes better, too

2) It’s incredibly labor-intensive, and rather difficult to implement in cold climates

3) As China urbanizes and becomes wealthier, it’s falling by the wayside and beginning to look more like the system in the United States

So unless we depopulate our cities, give up on modern life as we know it, and establish a global gentleman-farmer culture in its stead, we’re going to have a hard time pulling it off. After all, Ms. Slaughter herself employs a round-the-clock maid to purchase, cook and clean all the food she eats. A commenter points out that


the only way for this to happen is with the support of a vast underclass of servants, maids, ayis, etc. whose sole purpose is to feed the upper-class in pre-approved, “sustainable” ways. The poor and even most of the middle class will not be able to afford employing these servants… and creating a food movement rooted in the existence of a subservient food-preparation class to satisfy the guilt of the upper classes seems rather morally repugnant.

Over the weekend, the NYTimes ran an editorial by Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. She’s a smart lady, and she travels a lot and thinks about global culture and other narrow topics. The piece was about food recycling in China - basically, that hundreds of millions of people there eat food that was grown, raised or caught nearby, consume it immediately, and then use the waste for animal feed and fertilizer and what have you. She doesn’t come to any grand conclusions, but basically, her findings about this system are as follows:

1) It’s much better for the environment, and the resulting food tastes better, too

2) It’s incredibly labor-intensive, and rather difficult to implement in cold climates

3) As China urbanizes and becomes wealthier, it’s falling by the wayside and beginning to look more like the system in the United States

So unless we depopulate our cities, give up on modern life as we know it, and establish a global gentleman-farmer culture in its stead, we’re going to have a hard time pulling it off. After all, Ms. Slaughter herself employs a round-the-clock maid to purchase, cook and clean all the food she eats. A commenter points out that

[Photo: not too much food grows in the desert. Martin Baran/flickr]

Light Reading: Searching For A Sustainable Future