Quotes About Sustainability

Agriculture—which consists mainly of growing edible grasses like wheat, corn, and rice—is our term for this revolutionary new approach to getting food from the soil and the sun.

To eat corn directly is to consume all the energy in the corn, but when you feed that corn to an animal, 90% of its energy is lost... what this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and that behind the 4,510 calories in our meal, tens of thousand corn calories could have been used to feed many more people.

All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby.

Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income (10%), than any other industrialized nation... meaning that we could afford to spend more on food if we chose to.

Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of chewing and digestion and performed it for us outside of the body, using outside sources of energy.

You are what you eat" is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.

De fapt, chiar È™i cei mai fervenÈ›i adepÈ›i ai alimentelor locale spun c? este în regul? o "cump?n? a alimentelor" (un termen specific unui lanÈ› trofic local, care face o analogie cu "cump?na apelor"), fiind permis? achiziÈ›ia bunurilor care nu se pot produce local - cafea, ceai, zah?r, ciocolat? -, o practic? ce precede globalizarea hranei noastre cu câteva mii de ani. (Fir-ar s? fie!)

an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel.

whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.

Eat Your View!

It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, . . that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends.

Si yo fuese un dictador dispuesto a controlar la prensa nacional, Organic Gardening sería la primera publicación que acallaría, porque es la más subversiva. Creo que los horticultores orgánicos encabezan un esfuerzo serio por salvar el mundo, cambiando la disposición del hombre hacia él para alejarse del estado colectivo, centralista y superindustrial y alcanzar una relación más sencilla, real y de tú a tú con la propia tierra.

A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food. (These figures would be about 4 percent higher if the salad were grown conventionally.) I

always living on less than you have and more lightly than you need to.

Los abonos artificiales conducen inevitablemente a la nutrición artificial, a la comida artificial, a los animales artificiales y, finalmente, a los hombres y mujeres artificiales».

If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970's, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level- at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds.

For though we may be the earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role—that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

Consider all we've done on this plant's behalf: allotted it more than 27 million acres of new habitat, assigned 25 million humans to carefully tend it, and bid up its price until it became one of the most precious crops on earth.

If we're only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals, we're going to have to raise & kill a great many more of them. And indeed, this has become the rule with disastrous results for both the animals & the land... If we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little as we possibly can. Something that the humble cook-pot allows us to do.

Michael Pollan

A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors.

Wes Jackson calls our species "homo the homogenizer.")

Worldwide, the prospects for coffee production in a changing climate are, according to the agronomists, dismal. By one estimate, roughly half the world's coffee-growing acreage—and an even greater proportion in Latin America—will be unable to support the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immediately endangered by climate change. Capitalism, having benefited enormously from its symbiotic relationship with coffee, now threatens to kill the golden goose.

We feed animals a high-energy diet of grain to make them grow quickly, even in the case of ruminants that have evolved to eat grass. But even food animals that can tolerate grain are much healthier when they have access to green plants—and so, it turns out, are their meat and eggs. The food from these animals will contain much healthier types of fat (more omega-3s, less omega-6s) as well as appreciably higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants.