Food food food food

In the same vein as considering what resources your home demands (environmental, financial, investments of your time and energy,) we've also been thinking about the life cycle of our food products- whether we buy them from Safeway, local businesses or grow them ourselves. 

So it was very encouraging to see this article from the Times online, discussing the back and forth between Michelle Obama (who recently planted an organic garden at the white house) and big agribusiness in the States. It seems that those invested in agribusiness are wary of someone with so much influence advocating organic DIY gardening- but frankly, I think that they have little to fear.

The infrastructure for food in North America is still heavily dependent on factory farming, which in turn relies heavily on chemical processes which prop up the one-sided process. Whether permaculture is a viable alternative on a large scale is yet to be seen. 

Not to mention that (from Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dillemma) large scale organic farming resembles factory farming in many ways- and it remains to be seen if this can in fact be considered to be a significantly more environmentally balanced practice.

Meanwhile, if people start growing their own, it helps build up the food security of the place in which they live. I don't think that we're anywhere near the point where people would give up their banannas and mangoes, shipped in from elsewhere by middlemen. Agribusiness should untangle its' panties, there's a ways to go yet before the bottom will fall out of their market.

Permaculture

http://zeri.org/case_studies_pigs.htm

I love that at the heart of it all is the alcohol industry. :)

Basically:

Waste from a brewery, barley mash, hops, dead yeast, are used as a growth medium (mixed with sawdust or straw) with which to cultivate cultures of edible fungi, which convert the barley/straw material into mycelium, which fruit into edible mushrooms.

The edible mushrooms are harvested, leaving behind root structure and nutritional content which is then fed to pigs.

The pig manure is harvested and used for compost, creating methane which is captured in the process, used for cooking, heating, lighting.

The waste is put through what they call a BioDigester, which essentially isolates the waste from oxygen, and processes it anaerobically (without oxygen), to turn into usefull fertilizer. The system is 60% efficient in sequestering CO2, but the remaining 40% is processed in shallow pools aerobically(in the presence of oxygen) by algae, which are harvested to feed a large fish population which they in turn harvest.

The rich biodiversity of the ponds and fish quarters are partially covered (at the fringes, one assumes) with a substrate which enables hydroponic growing of crops, assisted by waste processed from the pigs.

Basically, insert labor, water, sunshine, and industrial waste, and you have the entire economy of a small village.