Root Cellars, so [s]Hot[/s] Cool right Now

[Hugh Conway]

Indeed.

 

Every single person who works in the health-care industry in any capacity should raise a glass to last year's health care bill for abolishing any hope of introducing price transparency or competition into that sector.

 

I'm thanking them for producing new heights of hyperbole instead.

[tvashtarkatena]

The funny thing about locavores is that preparing food at home consumes vastly more energy than anything else in the journey from food to table. The energy inputs from commercial production and transport are completely trivial by comparison.

 

Having said that - if you're willing to invest the time and money in a particular boutique food fetish - knock yourself out. There are plenty of people who will be happy to take your money in exchange for producing food that's consistent with whatever set of values and practices that you believe in.

 

 

It's called living.

[tvashtarkatena]

I grow most of my own vegetables and fertilize them with the compost from garden waste. I also use organic nitrogen fertilizer that is made locally. I notice almost no change in my water bill. This year I picked nearly 100 ears of corn, fresh lettuce and spinach for 7 months, 12 months worth of green beans, dozens of Jalapenos, dozens of Bell peppers, and 6 100 pound pumpkins (the kids wanted the giant breed for Halloween, normally we grow Cinderellas).

 

Store bought produce flat sucks compared to my fresh home grown veggies. Plus I find gardening relaxing.

 

 

 

We (my wife) grow stuff in the yard too - but when you factor in the cost of hauling topsoil to the yard, irrigating with water piped in through a municipal treatment and distribution network, the trips to buy seeds, etc, etc, the process is a gajilliion times more expensive and resource-intensive than the production processes used by even the word's worst production-farmer. Organic or otherwise. Were it otherwise, there'd be no commercial farms.

 

Hell - when we were living in the middle of nowhere in NZ at virtually every meal we were eating produce grown in our backyard, out of a garden that was fertilized by the innards and other non-filet worthy bits of the large wild-trout I was catching...out of gin clear spring-fed water that had been percolating through volcanic layers that had purified it to optical perfection, on single-barbles hooks via flies that I'd tied with my own hands. Locavore perfection.

 

Of course - our plane tickets alone cost a fortune, we burned enough fuel to fuel an African village for years just getting there, I was driving at least 50 miles round-trip to get to the said trout, and I probably spent at least $300 dollars on tying supplies alone - so the entire enterprise behind every "locavore" meal was really a shameless orgy of unnecessary consumption motivated by nothing other than our desire to enjoy life as much as possible before we go to our entropic rewards.

 

All of the dispassionate analysis out there confirms the same for the entire "locavore" phenomenon. Eat local and/or grow your own stuff if that makes you happy. That should be enough.

 

 

UM...you just don't know how to garden. Make your own compost. Employ low water use techniques. Mail order your seeds. Your objections are based on your shitty practices.

 

NOT HARD.

 

Small family plots have consistently been proven to be the most cost effective environmentally sustainable way, in terms of the inputs required, to produce vegetables. With environmentally unsustainable practices - the factory farming the JayB loves so much, the cost of irreparable topsoil loss, soil/waterway/ocean pollution, health risks, and permanent fossil aquifer depletion will be either a) paid for by future generations or b) paid for by the public sector in subsidies, health services, and environmental mitigation. As with so many conservative darling causes, it's not cheaper - it's just that someone else picks up the tab. This is a form of lying...no surprise there.

[prole]

Externalities.

[jordansahls]

I think the more important question is, don't any of you have jobs?

[Off_White]

Whatever. As long as "low, low prices" hide the true costs that are hidden by externalizing pollution, rapid resource depletion, environmental degradation, dependency on corporate intellectual property, and all the myriad real costs associated with a failing model your math might work.

 

Don't forget the medical cartel that funds his family!

 

Indeed.

 

Every single person who works in the health-care industry in any capacity should raise a glass to last year's health care bill for abolishing any hope of introducing price transparency or competition into that sector.

 

 

I just think those people are overpaid for the contributions they make to society, and it's time to re-examine their union protected salary and pension benefits, and slash those slacker's compensation down to convenience store clerk standards. Then health care will be affordable (though the care perhaps less effective).

[JayB]

I grow most of my own vegetables and fertilize them with the compost from garden waste. I also use organic nitrogen fertilizer that is made locally. I notice almost no change in my water bill. This year I picked nearly 100 ears of corn, fresh lettuce and spinach for 7 months, 12 months worth of green beans, dozens of Jalapenos, dozens of Bell peppers, and 6 100 pound pumpkins (the kids wanted the giant breed for Halloween, normally we grow Cinderellas).

 

Store bought produce flat sucks compared to my fresh home grown veggies. Plus I find gardening relaxing.

 

 

 

We (my wife) grow stuff in the yard too - but when you factor in the cost of hauling topsoil to the yard, irrigating with water piped in through a municipal treatment and distribution network, the trips to buy seeds, etc, etc, the process is a gajilliion times more expensive and resource-intensive than the production processes used by even the word's worst production-farmer. Organic or otherwise. Were it otherwise, there'd be no commercial farms.

 

Hell - when we were living in the middle of nowhere in NZ at virtually every meal we were eating produce grown in our backyard, out of a garden that was fertilized by the innards and other non-filet worthy bits of the large wild-trout I was catching...out of gin clear spring-fed water that had been percolating through volcanic layers that had purified it to optical perfection, on single-barbles hooks via flies that I'd tied with my own hands. Locavore perfection.

 

Of course - our plane tickets alone cost a fortune, we burned enough fuel to fuel an African village for years just getting there, I was driving at least 50 miles round-trip to get to the said trout, and I probably spent at least $300 dollars on tying supplies alone - so the entire enterprise behind every "locavore" meal was really a shameless orgy of unnecessary consumption motivated by nothing other than our desire to enjoy life as much as possible before we go to our entropic rewards.

 

All of the dispassionate analysis out there confirms the same for the entire "locavore" phenomenon. Eat local and/or grow your own stuff if that makes you happy. That should be enough.

 

 

UM...you just don't know how to garden. Make your own compost. Employ low water use techniques. Mail order your seeds. Your objections are based on your shitty practices.

 

NOT HARD.

 

Small family plots have consistently been proven to be the most cost effective environmentally sustainable way, in terms of the inputs required, to produce vegetables. With environmentally unsustainable practices - the factory farming the JayB loves so much, the cost of irreparable topsoil loss, soil/waterway/ocean pollution, health risks, and permanent fossil aquifer depletion will be either a) paid for by future generations or b) paid for by the public sector in subsidies, health services, and environmental mitigation. As with so many conservative darling causes, it's not cheaper - it's just that someone else picks up the tab. This is a form of lying...no surprise there.

 

This is yet one more data point that suggests that the primary things being cultivated in hobby-gardens are narcissism and bizarre conceits about their ecological significance.

[tvashtarkatena]

Gardening = Narcissism. Wutev, Jay!

[tvashtarkatena]

And, no, it doesn't really matter how each of us lives his or her life in the aggregate. No, none of it really matters at all.

[Hugh Conway]

This is yet one more data point that suggests that the primary things being cultivated in hobby-gardens are narcissism and bizarre conceits about their ecological significance.

 

unlike free market circle jerks

 

I realize your ideology is predicated on irrational assertions of fungibility but surely you aren't blind enough to realize their are quantifiable differences between vegetables and foodstuffs and that a realistic like for like comparison suggests there are economic benefits to self production?

 

As it's 5 O'clock somewhere, an example: I could buy many, many cases of Hamms for the money it cost for a homebrew setup and ingredients (number of batches to breakeven ~=10); if I brew a nice Barleywine with the setup the payoff is a couple of batches (n=2.5)

[olyclimber]

LETS BUILD A STRAWMAN BITCHES

 

[prole]

 

This is a homemade car, dudes! Would You Drive This? No! No, you wouldn't. Then why in heaven's name would you put the equivalent of this car into your body?

 

[JayB]

Whatever. As long as "low, low prices" hide the true costs that are hidden by externalizing pollution, rapid resource depletion, environmental degradation, dependency on corporate intellectual property, and all the myriad real costs associated with a failing model your math might work.

 

Don't forget the medical cartel that funds his family!

 

Indeed.

 

Every single person who works in the health-care industry in any capacity should raise a glass to last year's health care bill for abolishing any hope of introducing price transparency or competition into that sector.

 

 

I just think those people are overpaid for the contributions they make to society, and it's time to re-examine their union protected salary and pension benefits, and slash those slacker's compensation down to convenience store clerk standards. Then health care will be affordable (though the care perhaps less effective).

 

If it turns out that you can't staff the local fire-departments, for example, without a total comp in excess of 6 figures for a 1st year fireman - then that's what the public should pay.

 

The fact that there are thousands of applicants for every vacancy in good times and bad suggests that the public could pay less without any reduction in the quantity or quality of the services that they deliver.

 

You could then use the money not spent on salaries that are more generous than necessary to attract and retain qualified people on various other public priorities - particularly those targeted towards people who who are way more helpless and vulnerable than your average public sector employee.

 

It's really astonishing to me that this is such a controversial proposition.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------

1'm actually *all* for completely liberalizing health care.

 

The irony here is that that price transparency and competition helped keep prices, and by extension, doctor's incomes in check until Uncle Sugar started paying doctor's directly out of his own pocket.

 

Once that started, it was only a matter of time until this very influential constituency engaged in the same sort of self-serving rent-seeking that characterizes pretty much every trade-group's interaction with the government.

 

Now, in addition to retarded soviet-style pricing mechanisms like the RBRVS that make it impossible to coordinate supply and demand, we have panels of doctors that sit together and decide what a "fair and reasonable" payment is for everything that they do. It's no mystery what would happen to grain prices if we had panels of farmers deciding how much the government should pay for barley, corn, and soy based on their subjective assessment of how much their time is worth and the price of fertilizer, tractors, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

[JayB]

Gardening = Narcissism. Wutev, Jay!

 

For some, yes.

 

 

[JayB]

This is yet one more data point that suggests that the primary things being cultivated in hobby-gardens are narcissism and bizarre conceits about their ecological significance.

 

unlike free market circle jerks

 

I realize your ideology is predicated on irrational assertions of fungibility but surely you aren't blind enough to realize their are quantifiable differences between vegetables and foodstuffs and that a realistic like for like comparison suggests there are economic benefits to self production?

 

As it's 5 O'clock somewhere, an example: I could buy many, many cases of Hamms for the money it cost for a homebrew setup and ingredients (number of batches to breakeven ~=10); if I brew a nice Barleywine with the setup the payoff is a couple of batches (n=2.5)

 

Thank god people that brew their own beer don't seem to have the same bizarre compulsion to endlessly solicit applause for all of the higher virtues and larger social benefits that derive from them brewing up a batch of pumpkin-stout in their basement.

 

Saving a bit of money with the home brew/garden, enjoying the process, etc, etc, - sure. Saving the planet - nope.

[prole]

I'm not sure if people engaging in this kind of activity are trying to save the world. Perhaps they're just trying not to gang-rape it to death for a quick turnaround on their investment...

[tvashtarkatena]

This is a homemade car, dudes! Would You Drive This? No! No, you wouldn't. Then why in heaven's name would you put the equivalent of this car into your body?

 

 

I'd gladly trade up to that car.

[lazyalpinist]

What I've learned from this thread so far:

 

1) It is far worse for the environment for me to walk into my back yard and clip a head of broccoli and walk back into my kitchen than...

 

A farm hand drives an internal combustion vehicle into a field to clip heads of broccoli. The broccoli is driven by that same vehicle to a cold (refrigerated) storage facility at the farm awaiting pickup by yet another internal combustion vehicle (with refrigerated trailer) to transport it to a refrigerated distribution facility where it awaits yet another vehicle. That refrigerated internal combustion vehicle then transports the broccoli to a store where it is kept refrigerated until I drive yet another internal combustion vehicle to go purchase it and bring it into my kitchen.

 

2) The $1.50 I spend on a packet of seeds to have broccoli 1-3 times a week for 12 weeks of the year is more costly than...

 

Driving to the grocery store to purchase a head (or 2 or 3)of organic broccoli for at least $0.99/lb. each for twelve weeks.

 

3) That the electricity I use (~90% hydro) to heat said broccoli puts more CO2 into the air than...

 

A farm hand drives an internal combustion vehicle into a field to clip a heads of broccoli. The broccoli is driven by that same vehicle to a cold (refrigerated) storage facility at the farm awaiting pickup by yet another internal combustion vehicle (with refrigerated trailer) to transport it to a refrigerated distribution facility where it awaits yet another vehicle. That refrigerated internal combustion vehicle then transports the broccoli to a store where it is kept refrigerated until I drive yet another internal combustion vehicle to go purchase it and bring it into my kitchen.

 

4) Root vegetables are boutique cuisine.

 

6) Studies done in Europe using their supply chain, cooking methods and electric grid can be directly applied to the US.

 

Did I miss anything?

[tvashtarkatena]

I'm not sure if people engaging in this kind of activity are trying to save the world. Perhaps they're just trying not to gang-rape it to death for a quick turnaround on their investment...

 

Actually, they are saving it. Personal example and action, in addition to just being a more satisfying way to live, are everything. It all adds up eventually if a few people start giving a fuck. The conservative rhetoric argument to trust someone else to do the change because the individual doesn't matter is as bankrupt at the rest of its big corporate cock-in-mouth propanda.

 

The American suburban convenience fetish - that someone else should always do the heavy lifting - is as boring and unsatisfying as fuck. It has produced a nation of people who don't know how to actually do anything creative, useful, or interesting.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

4) Root vegetables are boutique cuisine.

 

Yeah, beets, parsnips, carrots, turnips... all elitist fare. ;-)

[Lucky Larry]

JayB

"If it turns out that you can't staff the local fire-departments, for example, without a total comp in excess of 6 figures for a 1st year fireman - then that's what the public should pay."

ME

I have always been jealous of their package. wish everyone could get paid to drive around, shop, stand around. don't be mad at them just because they got it better than you; it's not their fault they can actually live a middle class life style.

[Hugh Conway]

I have always been jealous of their package. wish everyone could get paid to drive around, shop, stand around.

 

poor dumb fucks. they could be Jay_B's idols on Wall Street, do that, and get him to laud them for being bailed out!

[Skeezix]

This thread ...three thumbs up!

[olyclimber]

three green thumbs!

[JayB]

'Math Lessons for Locavores

By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY

Published: August 19, 2010

 

 

Leesburg, Va.

 

IT’S 42 steps from my back door to the garden that keeps my family supplied nine months of the year with a modest cornucopia of lettuce, beets, spinach, beans, tomatoes, basil, corn, squash, brussels sprouts, the occasional celeriac and, once when I was feeling particularly energetic, a couple of small but undeniable artichokes. You’ll get no argument from me about the pleasures and advantages to the palate and the spirit of eating what’s local, fresh and in season.

 

But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.

 

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.

 

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

 

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

 

It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of energy. If it goes by truck, it’s about 300 calories, still a negligible amount in the overall picture. (For those checking the calculations at home, these are “large calories,” or kilocalories, the units used for food value.) Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system.

 

Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy use is even lower, about 8 percent.

 

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

 

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.

 

Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our nation’s energy usage; that energy is mainly devoted to running farm machinery and manufacturing fertilizer. In return for that quite modest energy investment, we have fed hundreds of millions of people, liberated tens of millions from backbreaking manual labor and spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves, forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow.

 

Don’t forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910.

 

The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica.

 

Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being. "