Victory Gardens and Other Topics in Food Security

Shocking. Today there is a Friedman Op-Ed I actually agree with. He writes (yes, it's a paywall. but I've fair-used the most important parts):

What's so disturbing about President Bush and Dick Cheney is that they talk tough about the necessity of invading Iraq, torturing terror suspects and engaging in domestic spying - all to defend our way of life and promote democracy around the globe.

But when it comes to what is actually the most important issue in U.S. foreign and domestic policy today - making ourselves energy efficient and independent, and environmentally green - they ridicule it as something only liberals, tree-huggers and sissies believe is possible or necessary.

Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence - that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad.

Living green is not just a "personal virtue," as Mr. Cheney says. It's a national security imperative.

An interesting tidbit for our readers, especially for those Manhattanites (not mentioning any names, of course) who believe that, since they don't drive cars, there's very little they can do, conservation-wise: you may be able to make a bigger difference in oil consumption by shifting your eating habits than by trading in your car for a hybrid. The food we eat requires enormous amounts of petroleum to grow and ship. Supporting local and, when possible, organic agriculture is not simply food snobbery, nostalgic pastoralism, or anti-corporate. It is necessary to ensure the security of our food supply as oil becomes scarcer.

I buy local, organic produce, in-season, when I can. If I have a choice between a local product (mostly cabbage, this time of year), not organic, and something organic from California, I choose local. I have a plot in a community garden and grow as much of my own produce as I can. I have a small plot in my backyard on some formerly weedy space between my building and the next one, where I grow some other food and also keep a compost bin (which thrills the neighbors no end, but no, it does not stink.) This plot, since it is south-facing and surrounded on three sides by brick walls, sits in a microclimate of warmth that allows me to keep dinosaur kale and a couple other hardy veg growing nearly all year long. Last week I picked the last of my brussels sprouts from my community garden plot.

If you have a terrace, you can grow some food yourself. You can get a worm bin and compost your food scraps under your sink. You can look for the "local" sign at your grocery store, and buy that stuff first.

While it's possible to eat only locally, all year round, I haven't gotten that far yet. But I'm getting closer every year. And it makes a big dent in my energy consumption.

Even without the conservation aspect, there are other good reasons to invest in local agriculture and in growing your own. Our international food supply system is extremely vulnerable to disruptions in transport. Disruptions could be caused by severe oil shortages, but also by, say, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and epidemics, such as, say, bird flu. It is also a highly attractive potential target for terrorist itself, a fact that has been trumpeted by various experts, in vain, for the Administration has done little to protect it, preferring to spy on us instead. Remember when Tommy Thompson retired from DHS? Here's what he said:

Asked what worries him most as he leaves office, Thompson cited the dangers of a pandemic of avian flu, for which there is no vaccine, and the poisoning of U.S. food supplies by terrorists.

"The big one is pandemic flu," Thompson said. He said the avian flu known as H5N1 has such "huge lethality" that the World Health Organization has estimated 30 million to 70 million people could die worldwide if a pandemic breaks out. "And we do not have a vaccine," he said. "We do not have a therapy for H5N1."

He said an arm of HHS, the National Institutes of Health, "is working on a vaccine," but that he remains "very concerned about pandemic flu because we're not prepared for it." He said such an outbreak "is a really huge bomb out there that could adversely impact on the health care of the world."

Thompson said he also worries constantly about food poisoning.

"I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not, you know, attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," he said. "And we are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."

Although inspections of food imports have risen sharply in the past four years, "it still is a very minute amount that we're doing."

So: Worried about terrorism, peak oil, or bird flu? Grow your own food, or buy from your nearest farmer neighbor.