“Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish - too much handling will spoil it.” – Lao Tzu
The words edible and eatable
are often used interchangeably but embedded within their respective
definitions is a distinction that makes an important difference. Edible
means “safe to eat,” whereas eatable means “pleasant to eat.” A variant of the word eatable is delicious, commonly defined as “highlypleasant
to eat.” Delicious certainly sounds more enticing than highly eatable, a
phrase nobody would use to compliment an exquisite meal crafted by a
professional chef. We find such linguistic nuances pleasing.
Whether
the balance of calories a person consumes is edible, eatable, or
delicious depends on where they sit on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a
concept we covered at length in a piece we wrote last July called Why Are Cows Sacred?
For those at the base of the pyramid, the struggle to consume enough
edible food just to see another sunrise defines much of their existence.
At the top of the pyramid sit those fortunate souls who can afford to
cook delicious meals with fresh ingredients, eat at fine restaurants, or
even hire a personal chef to tend to their every dietary indulgence.
At
the molecular level, the distinction between edible and inedible can be
subtle. The rearrangement of a few atoms within an otherwise similar
chemical structure can make the difference between satiation and a trip
to the emergency room. Prior to the advent of the modern chemical and
energy industries, humanity leveraged animal and plant byproducts to
create many of the functional materials used in daily life, making the
tradeoff between food and other needs a more visceral one than it is
today. The edible parts were eaten, and the
inedible stuff – presumably identified through an unfortunate series of
trial and error experiments – was converted into other useful things or
burned to create energy.
Armed with humanity’s mastery of
chemistry, we can now rearrange atoms with astonishing specificity at an
unimaginable scale, pushing billions of people further up Maslow’s
hierarchy than they would otherwise be. In addition to using fossil
fuels to create
most of the materials that surround us, we leverage them to produce
fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, and other inputs into the farming
process, boosting crop yields to levels once thought impossible. We also
synthesize mountains of edible ingredients directly from oil and gas.
Touring a modern food processing factory would seem almost
indistinguishable from a specialty chemical plant, mostly because they
aren’t all that different.
*****
While it makes perfect sense to leverage our bounty of fossil fuels
and ability to manipulate them at the molecular level to increase global
food abundance, going through the effort to grow food only to turn
around and burn it for energy seems less than ideal. In a controversial piece we wrote in January titled “In Praise of Corn Ethanol,” we put forth a theory that the adoption of corn ethanol as a mandated additive to gasoline
was a scheme to coverup one of the greatest environmental scandals of
the past century: the use of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock agent.
While some readers interpreted our piece as supporting this policy –
undoubtedly because of the title – our primary purpose was to highlight
the ugly history that got us to the current situation, and how it was
predominantly a dirty political compromise. In hindsight, “Why Corn Ethanol is a Thing” might have been a better title.
No such compromise underpins the decision to use foodstuffs as replacements for diesel, a policy that will make the unfolding global food crisis substantially worse if it is not soon overturned.
When
a barrel of oil is refined, it is separated into various products using
the different boiling points of its components. Gasoline boils at a
lower temperature than diesel and represents about 43% of each barrel of
oil. Diesel makes up approximately 27%, with the other 30% destined to
become heating oil, jet fuel, asphalt, and other important materials.
Because of its higher energy density per gallon and the efficiency of
engines designed to use it, diesel is a desirable fuel, especially for
long-haul trucking....
Way back in April 2008, the U.S. was still in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya and Morsi in Egypt had not yet been overthrown, the Maidan coup in Ukraine was six years in the future and the Russian invasion was fourteen years ahead, the price of oil was going parabolic on the charts, on its way to the record futures print, $147+, and I was thinking about substitution and pseudo-fungibility:
If I recall correctly it takes about five gallons of fuel to plant and harvest an acre of corn (I just spent 60 seconds trying to remember if that was conservation tillage or traditional. Then I realized that farm management was not the focus of this post, I'll go with 5 gal./acre), so the argument that rising input prices is a factor has merit....
Remember, the rule of thumb is it takes around 10 crude oil calories to produce 1 row crop (mainly corn and soybeans) calorie.
Most other foodprices are similarly dependent on their input costs.
One oft-cited bit of nuttines is the fact it takes 127 calories of
aviation fuel to get a head of lettuce from California to London....
