Global Crap turns Local

And now, a Public Service announcement from your resident catastrophe seer.
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If you think those food riots in far distant impoverished nations have nothing to do with you, then check this out:

Citing Supply, Sam’s Club and Costco Limit Sales of Rice

From a nutritional point of view, fine with me. We’re overly focused on white rice and corn, to the unfortunate exclusion of all those cool grains that all our ancestors ate.  Spelt, millet, barley, oats, I could go on.  Learn to find them in your stores, learn to cook them, diversity your sources of grain nutrition.  It may not be a luxury for much longer, it may become a necessity.

From a system dynamics point of view, it was inevitable.  We’ve created a very fragile system that relies on only a couple of crops – white rice and corn.  One thing I have against the whole ethanol-from-corn movement is that it in essence forces farmers to stop growing other things because corn pays so well. It is just not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.  Same thing with dynamic systems, and our whole economic/food industry/ agricultural system has become way too focused on corn.  Diversity in products would allow much more robust markets and industries, able to survive say, drastic climate changes that affected crop productivity in certain areas, or some sort of rampant crop-specific disease (didn’t the honey bee die-off scare you enough?).

Learn to broaden what you eat. Eat new grains. Eat different kinds of pasta (try couscous if you haven’t yet).  Try something besides beef, chicken or pork.  The more you buy those other things, the more your stores will demand it from distributors, and eventually the demand makes it back up the supply chain.  But you need to start buying more diverse products if you haven’t already.

And if you think I’m the only one talking like this, look around, I’m not.  Check out nutrition books, check out books like Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food.

Eat Fresh, Eat Local, Eat Variety.

love
Jude