The Biggest Challenge in 10,000 Years

Amber, Monday, April 25th, 2011 | Category: Around Town, Green | Permalink | Email this
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By Christopher Koetke, CEC, CCE
Executive Director, Kendall College School of Culinary Arts

Are we heading for a worldwide famine by mid-century? Is our very civilization unsustainable? Is it too late to stop the train and turn it around?  The answers are yes, yes and NO!

Julian Cribb, Australian author of The Coming Famine, paints the picture of a perfect storm in which a number of sustainability issues will reach criticality and come together over the next few decades to portend a worldwide famine that will change the face of our world.

The concept of “peak oil” is something that we’ve all become familiar with over the last decade. Put simply, it’s a situation where demand outpaces the discovery of new reserves of a finite resource, so supply gets scarce and expensive. In Cribb’s estimation, water and agricultural outputs will also reach their peak in the near-term horizon.

In fact, we’re already seeing some evidence. While the United States, Australia and Europe are awash in food, literally throwing half of it away, the rest of the world is not. For the last half century a billion people in the developing world have been going to bed hungry every night. The resulting “food insecurity” has devastating effects.

Food insecurity can result in governmental collapse, conflict and mass migration. It has often been said that war breeds hunger, but Cribb contends that it is exactly the opposite. The Russian and French revolutions started with increased bread prices. And today, the fall of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt started with people in the street protesting the price of bread. Cribb says, “If you scrape away all of the politics, religion and ethnicity on the surface, you’ll find that the true genesis of wars over the last 30 years was related to food, land, and water.”

One of the key issues is management of our fresh water. While the technology is available to clean, recycle and reuse water, most people and governments don’t do it. Instead, they use it, pollute it and throw it away. In the course of a lifetime, each person will consume about 100,000 tons of water, 75 percent of which goes into food production. Grain bowls are running dry and mined sources of water are running out and won’t be available for that food production.

And, of course, there’s oil. One American think tank sees a time in the foreseeable future when oil could hit $200-300 a barrel. Farmers in the developed world wouldn’t be able to pay the $20 a gallon to run their trucks and equipment. In developing nations, where we’ve helped mechanized farming, agriculture would grind to a dead halt.

Add to those factors, overpopulation in developing countries, overconsumption in developed countries, climate change, and soil depletion, and you have your perfect storm. It is a storm that we can fend off, however, if we take immediate action and the key is how we produce food. He and other say that no currently practiced method of agriculture is sustainable. While attempts are being made to “green up” the current system with organics, biodynamics, it’s not enough.

Cribb and many other experts agree that we must do two things: 1) reinvent the way we farm and produce food; and 2) reinvent our diets. It is the biggest challenge to survival that humanity has faced in more than 10,000 years, but Cribb believes it is imminently do-able and that chefs have an important role to play.

Chefs, he says, set “the fashion of food.” The recent trends towards sustainable fish and seafood, the locavore movement, and the growing popularity of heirloom products can all be traced to chefs. As cutting-edge chefs create successful restaurant concepts and menus, other restaurants follow and these trends then flow through to consumer cookbooks and magazines. Cribb says that the intellectual leadership of the world’s diet rests with chefs. As educators of those future chefs, it is our charge to provide the knowledge they will need to do the job.

Julian Cribb will be the international keynoter at the International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium, co-sponsored by Kendall College, May 24-25, 2011 in Chicago.

An Interview with Julian Cribb, Author of “The Coming Famine”

Amber, Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 | Category: Around Town, Featured, Green | Permalink | Email this
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The keynote speaker at next month’s International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium, co-sponsored by Kendall College and the National Restaurant Association, will be Julian Cribb, author of “The Coming Famine.” Christopher Koetke, executive director of the Kendall College School of Culinary Arts, recently sat down with Cribb to discuss how chefs can help to avert a catastrophe in the food supply.

Koetke:  Julian, most chefs grew up in a time when the concept of sustainability didn’t exist. When it came to the concepts of saving water or energy or looking at how we grow and harvest our food, it just wasn’t part of our training, so there’s a huge amount of education to be done. We’ve made some tremendous progress in the last few years, but now I think it’s time to take a deeper dive into the more complex issues, so you are the perfect speaker for this audience.

Cribb: For the last 20 years, I feel that the world has been rather complacent about its food supply and scarcity will sneak up on us if we’re not careful. It’s good to know that the chefs and restaurateurs of the world, who have a tremendous effect on how we eat, have a strong interest in this topic.

Koetke: In reading your book, I would characterize it as both powerful and horrifying. As a brief introduction for those who haven’t read it yet, could you please share its premise and how you came to write it?

Cribb: As an agricultural journalist for about 40 years and now a general science journalist, I’ve always had a strong interest in the food supply, and how it can be produced efficiently and sustainably. In the first decade of this century, I could see the food supply was not keeping up with demand. Grain stocks were going down and down at a time when the population was growing and nearly developed nations like China and India, with a rising middle class, began demanding more food, especially protein. At the same time, almost everything we need to produce food sustainability is running out: fresh water, good farmland, oil and fertilizer, which are all finite resources. Further, agricultural science has been neglected in all of the major developed countries of the world for the last couple decades and the climate is changing profoundly. Our civilization, which was founded on agriculture, is changing profoundly and we don’t know what the ultimate consequence of that change will be on our food supply.

Koetke:  You talk about 2050 as critical for humanity. Why is 2050 such a milestone?

Cribb:  The human population is still growing by about 100 million per year and people are living longer in developing countries. That means that sometime between 2030 and the end of the century, assuming there’s no awful war or devastating pandemic, we’ll have to be feeding 9 to 11 billion people until the population slowly begins to decline after the 2060s or 2070s; that’s roughly double the current population. Feeding this number of people is a very large challenge and we need to think about how we’re going to do it now, before the issue becomes critical. We’re already seeing some of the consequences in rising food prices because supply is not keeping up with demand worldwide.

Koetke: As chefs, we don’t typically think about water; we use it with abandon and the reality is there’s a price for that water and we don’t pay that fair price. Books like yours bring home the reality that you may not see them, but they’re still very real and they will be impacting our future so we need to do something about it.

Cribb: Many countries, like Australia, are beginning to acknowledge that they’re not paying the right price for food. Farmers need to get paid better or the economic signal for them to produce won’t be there… It may seem expensive to the consumer, but today we’re paying for the food but not the landscape destruction that results from the growing process. It’s a short-sighted policy and our grandchildren will pay for it.