From How the World Really Works (Vaclav Siml, 2022) p74-5
Half a century ago, Howard Odum — in his systematic examination of energy and the environment — noted that modern societies “did not understand the energetics involved and the various means by which the energies entering a complex system are fed back as subsidies indirectly into all parts of the network . . . industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.”
Fifty years later, this existential dependence is still insufficiently appreciated— but the readers of this book now understand that our food is partly made not just of oil, but also of coal that was used to produce the coke required for smelting the iron needed for field, transportation, and food processing machinery; of natural gas that serves as both feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers; and of the electricity generated by the combustion of fossil fuels that is indispensable for crop processing, taking care of animals, and food and feed storage and preparation.
Modern agriculture’s higher yields are not produced with a fraction of the labor that was required just a lifetime ago because we have improved the efficiency of photosynthesis, but because we have provided better varieties of crops with better conditions for their growth by supplying them with adequate nutrients and water, by reducing weeds that compete for the same inputs, and by protecting them against pests. Concurrently, our much-increased capture of wild aquatic species has depended on expanding the extent and the intensity of fishing, and the rise of aquaculture could not happen without providing requisite enclosures and high-quality feed. .
All these critical interventions have demanded substantial — and rising — inputs of fossil fuels; and even if we try to change the global food system as fast as is realistically conceivable, we will be eating transformed fossil fuels, be it as loaves of bread or as fishes, for decades to come.
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