“The primary mode of cognition that the practitioners of science have used during the past century – Analytic, Linear, Reductionist, Deterministic, Mechanical – has begun to reach the limits of its assumptions. For this particular mode of cognition and the system to which that mode has given rise, can only maintain coherence by leaving out or ignoring a great many [obvious things] that did not fit and do not fit within the neat system it created. Stephen Buhner – The Sacred Teachings of Plants.”
Assumptions are amazing things. We make them based on Faulty logic and never revisit them for soundness. As many comedians have pointed out – when we assume something, we are too often prone to make an ‘ASS out of U and ME.’ Our modern industrial farming systems are replete with assumptions – many based on presuppositions about wealth and society. Monetary wealth is an interesting phenomenon. While you exist with the specific economic system we currently live within, it can confer some benefits. Unfortunately, once you step, even for a short while, outside that system, all benefits quickly evaporate like fog on a cool morning in summer. For instance, if you wander off into a wilderness with a $1000 in your pocket but no food, you will quickly realize at the end of that first day that the $1000 is useless and your belly complains because it wants food. You might assume that you can run into people in that wilderness so you can buy food from them, but people rarely carry more food than they intend to use for themselves on these kinds of trips. Now imagine you have been thrust into that wilderness unwillingly (e.g. plane crash) having that $1000 is worthless and food is not to be found nearby unless you hunt for it. My point here is that we use a lot of monetary wealth for produce our food and do not think about the assumptions and presuppositions inherent with the bountiful food system we live within. What happens when (and I mean when, not if) the economic system fails for whatever reason? This is the reality of our fragile and complicated food system economics that the corporate systems and hierarchy would rather you not recognize. What has this to do with the energetics of farming? Allow me to lead you down the industrial farming rabbit hole.
Plants do an amazing thing – they take in carbon from the atmosphere using the energy of the sun (photosynthesis) to power the biochemical transformations and then pull up minerals from the substrate in which they are anchored to build (metabolism – the sum total of the chemical processes that occur in living organisms, resulting in growth, production of energy, elimination of waste material, etc. anabolism, basal metabolism, catabolism – Collins Dict) the macromolecules that form the structure of the plant. As far as plants are concerned we animals are just predators and parasites that live off of all their work.
I’m going to keep this simple, so it is the ideas I am presenting here and not the actual details that are crucial to know and understand – so all numbers are relative to make a point about an idea. When we talk about food we are talking about two major things – the actual energy contained within the food (captured via photosynthesis) and the atomic structure we absorb through digestion that we use to transform molecules within our bodies (metabolism). ALL life is predicated upon the acquisition of required atoms and energy.
Before farming, we hunted and gathered. If you didn’t hunt well enough or gather enough, you dwindled and died – quite simple really. Fortunately for us, our ancestors obviously did a good job at this. They wandered around a lot looking for places that made hunting and gathering easy, to the point that a tribe that did well at this work (food capture/gathering and preservation/storage were pretty much the work) might only have to work 1-2 days a week. It was quite a leisurely life really as opposed to the notion that they lived on the edge of extirpation everyday. Once farming began, it must have conferred benefits in that you didn’t have to wander around anymore looking for the food – it was there waiting for you wherever you planted it or kept animals in a penned in area. Whatever the logic was in staying put in one area, it must have conferred energetic benefits – that is the amount of food energy must have been considerably better than hunter-gathering, and that coupled with a new type of social system that drove a new worldview. I’ve covered this a little in previous posts about food and food security.
Food choices = energy choices. One of the first things to realize about the energetics of food is based on the physics second law of thermodynamics. All conversions of energy are subject to a principle called entropy – the tendency of a system to move towards a random and disordered state. Don’t worry, I’m not about to get all complex on you here – the principles are straight forward enough. The process of photosynthesis is amazing because it temporarily reverses entropy. A plant takes diffuse energy, captures it, and concentrates it in the chemical structure (glucose) within the plant. Take the energy within a plant as 100% of total energy available for use. When an animal eats that plant it doesn’t get all that 100% – indeed, as a broad general rule, this law states, because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that the animal only gets 10% of the energy (the 10% rule). Because of the universal inefficiency of energy moving from one form to another (recall that the 1st law of thermodynamics says that energy is never lost). So, if another animal comes along and eats the animal that ate the plant, it only gets 10% of the available energy from that animal’s body. Note now that the second animal only gets 1% of the energy of the original plant. (Obviously it is all a dynamic system, but the idea is correct.) So if you grow a field of grass, the sheep that eats the grass only gets 10% of the grass’s energy, and we humans only get 1% of that grass’s energy when we eat the sheep. For the scientifically inclined, these levels of predation are called trophic levels. It’s what ecologists use to describe how food chains/webs utilize the limited amount of energy in an ecosystem. As you move up the trophic levels with higher predators you see only a few predators compared to lots of grazing animals, and lots of vegetation even compared to grazing animals. The message: eating lower on the trophic levels allows for more energy to be shared with more animals. I’ll come back too this.
Now, here’s the kicker. As countries gain in monetary affluence the people tend to want more meat in their diets. Therefore, the industry to raise more animals increases, and so does the need to feed these farmed animals. Now think of what I said above that when we eat meat, we only get 1% of the energy from the original photosynthesis. And that is in an ideal setting where we go from grazing the animal directly to that juicy steak. In the next post I will explain how the reality of raising animals for a meat diet get energetically ridiculous and economically preposterous – yet we justify it to satisfy our taste buds. Some ecologists have stated that increasing meat eating is possibly one of the most destructive human activities on the planet. TBC…
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