Holy Shit: The Secret Behind Creating Truly Sustainable Food. By Makenna GoodmanAlterNet If you’re into food, you’ve got to embrace manure.
Like it or not, the bowel movement after all, is the foundation upon which the sustainable food movement stands. When I moved to a farm in rural Vermont, I knew life would be a far cry from the New York literary world from whence I came. I knew even though plaid shirts, work boots, and waxed canvas coats cover the fashion magazines these days-life on a real farm has nothing to do with image or status. I do have to say, however, when I meet my old city friends on the streets of Brooklyn to hock eggs or pumpkins, I have been known to brag. Shit rules my life-or at least it should, if I were a good farmer. Where do you think rich, delicious soil comes from? Makenna Goodman: You’ve been farming for about 30 years. Gene Logsdon: It would probably be more accurate to say that I have been pitching barn manure for something like 65 years and spreading a lot of bullshit the other 13 years, too. Fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, and farm animals « Say what, Michael Pollan?
Michael Pollan moves on from his brief discussion of wild animal deaths on farms to point out certain environmental challenges of a vegan world.
He argues, The vegan Utopia would also condemn people in many parts of the country to importing all their food from distant places. In New England, for example, the hilliness of the land and rockiness of the soil has dictated an agriculture based on grass and animals since the time of the Puritans. (326) New England has left the time of the Puritans, however.
Tofu and soymilk from Vermont-grown soybeans can now be found in some New England grocery stores. Pollan continues, To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain. This is a very bold claim. Even if we accept the premise that food would need to travel significantly farther in a vegan world, Pollan is wrong to say we’d need more fossil fuels. Like this: Urine could hold secret to crop fertilisation. No longer of use to the body that excretes it, urine is getting a second life in the form of fertiliser thanks in part to Swiss engineers. The Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) has teamed up with specialists in South Africa to convert human urine into fertiliser.
“We treat the urine and extract the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in a powder form. Our idea at the moment is to granulate this powder so that we have granules like normal fertiliser, which can be spread on the fields,” explained Eawag process engineer Kai Udert.The phosphorus found in urine is particularly precious. Plants need it in order to thrive, yet it is becoming rare. Typically, phosphorous is mined, yet experts have predicted that the world supply will run out within the next 50-100 years – making crop fertilisation a challenge.Last month, the Eawag project received $3 million (SFr2.9 million) in grant money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Potty training Humanitarian angle.