Living Without Oil Part Three - Food and Water

The harvest is in. The colours of the season have changed dramatically, verdant greens and bright reds of summer give way to yellow, orange, rust. Our backyard plots are tall and weedy, pumpkins ripened and carved, onions and apples on the market stalls. Falling leaves and risk of frost remind us that it will be many months before fresh local food is back in season.

Our relationship with food is a joyous one in summer, here in Southern Ontario. We live in the middle of a rich swath of some of the world’s best farm land, rich loam formed by millennia of well watered forests. The past century has seen a near total transformation of the landscape. Large open fields, a network of roads, and sprawling urban areas have replaced the network of rail connected towns, separated by vast forests that characterized 19^th century Ontario.

This wholesale shift has been driven by our most primal needs: food and water. Whether it is the need for level, well drained and tilled soil for crops, open grazing for cattle, or dams and pipes to bring natural water sources into irrigation or municipal systems, we have converted the large majority of our land to sustain human nutritional needs. A steady influx of hungry people (Toronto at the turn of the 20^th century was home to 200,000 people, now it’s closing in on 5 million. Kitchener was a village of less than 8,000) drove the need for more farms, more yield per acre, and distribution and storage systems to feed and water an increasingly urban population. The availability of inexpensive fossil fuels has made all this possible. Try to imagine bringing food and water into your home every day without easy, cheap access to:

• a full tank of fuel in your car

• plastic bags and packaging

• transport trucks, ships, and diesel locomotives

• chemical fertilizers

• fossil fuel supplied electricity to run pumps, lighting, communications, refrigeration, fans, computers, etc.

• asphalt and gravel

• pipes

• tractor fuel

• just about every manufactured product you can imagine, produced using energy from oil, if not the oil itself.

In truth, Southern Ontario farmers supply only a fraction of its people’s caloric needs. The average distance an item of food travels to our table is over 2500 km, roughly the distance between here and Cancun, Mexico. That’s the average, as anyone who has ever eaten a South African apple, New Zealand lamb chop, or Chilean grape should know. The tractor is more than likely the least energy intensive part of the process. By the time you consider the transportation and refrigeration necessary to move fresh food, and the manufacturing and packaging of processed food, it takes an average of 7 to 10 calories of input energy to bring a single calorie into useful contact with your digestive system. That moves upward to 40 calories of input for some foods like grain fed beef. It's easy to imagine that this is not a very sustainable equation. Add to that the fact that almost all synthetic fertilizers are made using natural gas, at a rate of about 20 litres per acre per year. Without inexpensive fossil fuels, we simply could not feed all these people.

Remove fossil fuels from the picture, or even reduce their availability significantly, and the most immediately noticeable effect (aside from your daily car commute) will be what happens to the food supply chain. It is primarily a question of land use. Reduce the radius of food procurement to 150km (aka. The Hundred Mile Diet), and everything changes. But how can we make such a fundamental transition?

Relocalizing is a term coined to describe moving back to an economic and land use model more familiar to those living a century ago: small towns and cities, surrounded by farmland, with a reliable source of water and enough storage capacity to carry them through the long non-growing seasons. This is not so different from where we live today, and as mentioned, we in K-W are quite fortunate compared to those in the GTA or the greater Los Angeles area. Our primary failing has been the conversion of much of that prime farm belt, the land closest to the city centre, to low density suburbs. The toxic fallout from decades of suburban sprawl is difficult to quantify, but one only need consider the mortgage meltdown in America to realize that the vicious cycle of cheap resource consumption, consumerism and debt that has fueled the suburbs is not sustainable for much longer. The main casualty of this massive planning error looks to be the economy, the lasting legacy will be what has happened to our food and water.

How can we change? Thankfully, things are already happening. The local food movement is strong and gaining momentum every year. I doubt any of us has not heard of either the Slow Food movement or the 100 Mile Diet. Closer to home, the Buy Local Buy Fresh campaign, 100 Mile Challenge, Bailey's food buying club, local food chalkboards outside many restaurants, and places like Seven Shores Café are leading the drive to positive change. The Region of Waterloo has implemented many water conservation measures, begun public education about the perils of bottled water, and continues to advocate and plan for denser, less sprawling development. Considering that in the urbanized desert called Los Angeles there are still millions of people watering their lawns, we are at least moving in the right direction when it comes to planning for resource scarcity. Still, there are endless complaints about not having the right to dump thousands of litres of clean drinking water onto our lawns.

What can you do in your daily life? Foremost would be to educate yourself about where your food and water comes from, and how pervasive our use of oil is in everything we do. Consider any product in your cupboard at home, and try to imagine the system that brougt it there. To take a more active role, support the transition to local economic resilience. Think about preserving food without refrigeration, buying food without driving, using water sources that do not come from a magical chlorinated pipe in the ground. Support initiatives, governments, and local business that choose to move towards sustainable practices, and practice what they preach. In your own home, try to buy and eat in season, try your hand at preserving fresh food through the long winter, and try to reduce your fossil fuel dependence, whether it be through driving less, using less disposable packaging, storing food without a dependence on electricity, or using rainwater and compost to grow your own vegetables. The results? A healthier you, a stronger local economy, and a transition to a world which might just survive the next century.