GRUB: the Real Energy Dilemma

Restaurateur and Chef Jose Andreas of 'Julio' in Bethesda, Maryland was interviewed recently on NPR radio and made the most profound energy statement I have heard in years.

"But I think the most important is to remind everyone that the most important source of energy is not gas. The most important source of energy is food, because food is what keeps us - the humans - with energy. So we need to start thinking about food as the most important source of energy, because it's the energy that keeps moving us, the people - the people of America, the people of world.
... I hope that we're going to start taking seriously where our food comes from. Because right now I don't think we do. And we need to start making sure that our politicians understand that the most important thing is our food, period. And food should be un-negotiable..."

This basic fact of life has escaped the attention of nearly all the pundits and talking heads. I am neither but I am equally guilty. How simple his message. How profound. And how far we have all drifted from reality. David Suzuki said "We must reinvent a future free of blinders so that we can choose from real options." That ever so true, now.

I have read and written endlessly about Peak Oil, pro and con; King Koal, mostly con but currently indispensable, Solar, Wind, Tidal, Global Warming, the list is endless. Never, until today, has that simple concept of food as THE single most vital form of energy blasted through the noise and chaos attending the energy discussion.

The page six chatter we are given about the Gulf fishery loss from the oil gusher; the precipitous dropping of the Ogallala Aquifer level supporting dry land grain harvest in the American West, the failure of Salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest, or Chesapeake Bay and North Atlantic dwindling seafood harvest, is not sufficient to remind us these failures are the real deal in the energy picture. Unfortunately, Piggly Wiggly, Safeway or Gristides' fully stocked grocery shelves are a treated as a given and marginalized from the principal debate.

We seem to be riddled with tertiary technophilia, the lot of us. Always looking for the most complicated solution to the complicated solutions that started the mess in the first place. Too many generations raised on concrete perhaps. A hundred years of happy motoring doesn't help any. Maybe we, most of us, have become voyeuristic samplers, viewers of reality, not participants any longer.

Thus our worldly-wise take on basic reality, "Oh that's just food", has damaged our sure instinct of what matters most i.e., chow, victuals, staff of life, loaves and fishes, breakfast of champions...our daily grub. Why this matters the most, by far, gets a very low priority in the current dialogue.

Chef Andreas again: "In Spain, only two, three years ago, we had the same thing in the northern part of Spain, in Galicia, the same thing. It's the biggest producer of seafood in Spain, one of the biggest producers in Europe. We had an entire ship that broke in half. Oh, my God, was a disaster again. But this keeps happening, keep happening, keep happening. And I think, like, my God, we need to start fixing and finding solutions to make sure that this never happens again."