Let’s Eat!sustainable food for a hungry planet

kimberle y veness

All the food you eat, whether it’s an apple or a steak or a chocolate-covered

cricket, has a story. By exploring alternative, sometimes bizarre farm technologies and touring corporate rooftop and subterranean bunker gardens, Let’s Eat uncovers the secret life of the food on our tables.

f ro n t c ov e r i m ag e s by g e t t y i m ag e s a n d s h a r i na k ag awa b ac k c ov e r i m ag e s (t o p l e f t t o r i g h t) : i s t o c k . c o m , a e r o fa r m s ,

g e t t y i m ag e s . (b o t t o m l e f t t o r i g h t) : g e t t y i m ag e s ,

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jac k e t d e s i g n by t e r e s a b u b e l a a n d j e n n p l ay f o r d

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kimberley venessspent four years of her childhood on a ninety-acre farm in Saskatchewan, and many years later the smell of manure still brings her back to those crisp autumn mornings spent mucking out the barn with her mom. She didn’t know it then, but she had fallen in love with farming—the land, the animals and the food. Kimberley lives in Adams Lake, British Columbia, with her partner and two children. Let’s Eat is her first book. For more information, visit www.kimberleybveness.com.

Check out these and other titles in theFootprints series at www.orcafootprints.com.

What is lasagna gardening?

When was the can opener invented?

How does aeroponic farming work?

Where is the world’s largest cattle ranch?

What would your groceries say if they could talk?

As new technologies create alternatives to traditional food,

it’s wise to know where your meals come from.

Small steps toward big changes.

For more books in this series, visitwww.OrcaFootprints.com

$19.95

Let's Eat!sustainable food for a hungry planet

kimberle y veness

2

Text copyright © 2017 Kimberley Veness

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage

and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Veness, Kimberley, 1989-, author Let's eat : sustainable food for a hungry planet / Kimberley Veness.

(Orca footprints)

Includes bibliographical references and index.Issued in print and electronic formats.

isbn 978-1-4598-0939-0 (hardcover).—isbn 978-1-4598-0940-6 (pdf).— isbn 978-1-4598-0941-3 (epub)

1. Sustainable agriculture—Juvenile literature. 2. Food supply—Juvenile literature. I. Title. II. Series: Orca footprints

s494.5.s86v46 2017 j630 c2016-904462-9c2016-904463-7

First published in the United States, 2017Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949028

Summary: Part of the nonfiction Footprints series for middle readers. Illustrated with many color photographs, this book explores where the food

we eat comes from and what the future of farming looks like.

Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies:

the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Cover images by Getty Images, Shari NakagawaBack cover images (top left to right): Fallen Fruit (David Burns and Austin Young), Kiva, Helder Ramos; (bottom left to right):

William Neumann Photography, Katie Stagliano, William Neumann Photography

orca book publisherswww.orcabook.com

Printed and bound in Canada.

20 19 18 17 • 4 3 2 1

A boy selling watermelon at a market in the capital city of Managua, Nicaragua. S jorS737/dre amStime.com

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For my children, Landon and Sawyer

ContentsIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

A Veggie Marathon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

In Excess We Trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Full Circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Our Daily Meat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Cheap Now, Costly Later . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Aquaculture: A Fish for Everyone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

What’s Your Food Really Saying? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

On the Homestead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Work It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

New Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Permaculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

The “No-Till” Zone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Rice-Duck Farming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Organic or Bust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Pasteurized vs . Raw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

From Farm to Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

chapter one:Let's Eat!

chapter two:small is beautiful

Do You Live in a Food Desert? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Gardening Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Food Forests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Commercial Urban Farms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Urban Homesteading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Food Truck Fever . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Dinner’s in the Fish Tank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Insects…Yum! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Green Eggs and Jellyfish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Lab Burger, Anyone? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Milk: Beyond the Cereal Bowl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Revolutionary Rice? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

Bee Biz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Farming in Space! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Bringing It Back to the Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

chapter three:urban foodscapes

chapter four:A farm for the future

Do you ever wonder what your groceries would tell you if they could talk? When I realized that the bananas, avocados and mandarin oranges I loved had traveled

across more countries than I ever had, I decided to pay closer attention to where my food came from. I discovered that every-thing you buy, whether it’s an apple or a pair of shoes, has a story. I found out my salmon fillet came from a fish that had never swum in the ocean, my orange juice was previously brown, and some ingredients in my favorite packaged foods had originated from plants conceived under a microscope! This book unlocks the mysterious secret lives of our groceries, explores alternative—and sometimes bizarre—farm technology, and tours gardens up high on corporate rooftops to down low in military-style bunkers beneath city streets.

My son Landon and I picking apples at an orchard in Kelowna, British Columbia. One of his first foods was applesauce I made with apples from this orchard. Now he will happily devour a whole apple in one sitting, core and all! L aur a c arbonne au

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Introduction

77

Few children in North America are growing up to become farmers like their parents and grandparents before them. SuSan H. SmitH/iStock.com

When I was a child, my family lived on a farm in Saskatchewan. I loved planting, watering and harvesting veggies, helping my mom make jams and pies from Saskatoon berries, collecting chicken eggs and drinking milk fresh from our cow, Daisy, and goat, Pixie. Now that I’m a mom, I try to find the healthiest foods for my family and make as much as I can from scratch with whatever’s in the fridge or pantry.

This is me herding our three goats and cow, led by the rope, up to the barn.

kimberLe y veneSS

Introduction

From Farm to Table

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When you push the cart around the grocery store with your mom or dad, do you ever stop and think about where all the food comes from? The answer may

surprise you.

A Veggie Marathon

If you’re shopping in North America, your groceries may travel between 2,400 and 4,000 kilometers (1,500 and 2,500 miles) before you actually eat them. Getting food from another country seems like an outlandish idea when you could find fresh options closer to home, but products grown in other countries are often cheaper because of lower labor costs and fewer environmental regulations. Farm workers are often under-paid and forced to live and work in poor conditions. Buying local reduces transport time and supports the local economy, but farmers in cooler climates can’t grow heat-loving crops like strawberries year-round. So what do you do? Do you add a box of imported strawberries to your cart or wait for local straw-berries to come back in season?

Seasonal produce is available year-round atmost grocery stores. toLgaiLdun/dreamStime.com

Let's Eat

chapter one

In Excess We Trust

Imagine you’re walking down a gravel road in the Canadian prai-ries. Canola (a crop that is processed into canola oil and used worldwide in cooking) grows on both sides of the road, covering the land in a bright yellow blanket as far as the eye can see. It’s beautiful, but it comes at a price. Agriculture has come a long way from the postcard picture of a cozy farmhouse, a red barn and fields planted with a variety of crops. Few of our foods origi-nate from farms like these. Most of the berries, fruit, veggies and grains we eat come from monocultures—single crops grown on large areas of land. Growing just one crop makes harvest and pest management much easier for farmers who grow on a large scale.

Before the Industrial Revolution, when machines started to replace human labor, farmers relied on planting and harvesting with the aid of horses or oxen, and sometimes help from family members and neighbors. School even let out earlier in the after-noon around harvest time so children could lend a hand. Prior to 1834, when the first reaper (a machine for cutting down grain) hit the market, grain crops were harvested by hand with a sickle (a handheld tool with a curved blade), and it could take weeks for one farmer to harvest his field of grain, even with extra help.

Workers picked these beans in the morning, and customers will pick them up in the afternoon. SoL k auffman

Locals peruse the produce at this market in Ahmedabad, India. mananSHaH1008/ wikipedia .org

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FArminG FACT: Did you

know that digging your hands into

a garden bed has been scientifical-

ly proven to increase happiness?

Gardeners touch and breathe in a

soil bacterium called Mycobacterium

vaccae, which stimulates the feel-

good sensors in the brain.

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Now, almost two hundred years later, it takes only hours. The first combine (grain-harvesting machine) was created in 1835 and came into use in the United States around 1900, and its successors can seed fields, add fertilizer and pesticides, and harvest crops with unparalleled efficiency. But does speed and efficiency produce the best possible food, and how has speeding up food production changed what we know about what we eat?

FULL CIRCLE

When I was a child, I used to think the thirty-minute drive that separated my town from the nearest city meant the two places were completely unconnected. I learned later that the entire Earth is one giant ecosystem connected by wind and water. The chemical fertilizers and pesticides sprayed on huge monoculture farms accumulate in clouds and fall elsewhere in rain. They run off fields into streams and contaminate waterways and plants and animals—the same ones we may harvest or hunt. These chemicals can take a long time to break down in the environment, accumu-lating in our bodies and in the atmosphere. Agricultural emis-sions alone add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all of the planes, trains and motor vehicles in the world combined. That McDonald’s burger-and-fries combo you may enjoy once a week could be worse for Earth’s air quality than the exhaust from your parents’ car on the drive to buy your burger.

Our Daily Meat

If you were living in Mesopotamia (modern-day Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria) about 8,000 years ago, you might have been one of the first people to domesticate farm animals. The newly settled nomads, who had started cultivating crops a few thou-sand years earlier, fenced off large portions of land and captured wild herds of goats, sheep and, later, pigs and cattle. Farmers

Farmers harvesting by hand.Lc-dig-matpc-14346/L ibr ary of congreSS

Before machines, farmers used plows to break up the soil on their fields. Horses had to be specially trained for the job, and it was slow, exhausting work.75-rbd-560/nationaL arcHiveS

FArminG FACT: in 1988,

the United states produced nearly

5 million bushels of corn, harvest-

ing about 85 bushels per acre from

58,250 acres of cropland. Think

that’s a lot of corn? in the 2010

to 2011 harvest year, the United

states produced nearly 12.5 million

bushels of corn, harvesting about

155 bushels per acre from 81.4

million acres of cropland. increased

fertilizer and pesticide use and

expansion of cropland has made

yields skyrocket.

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could better predict how much meat they would have to eat, trade or sell if they were able to keep track of all the animals. Settling down and raising livestock provided more security than hunting, leaving more time to expand farms and families.

All livestock in today's Concentrated Animal Feeding

Operations (CAFOs), where the majority of meat sold in grocery stores comes from, are descendants of those first domesticated animals. Ninety-nine percent of livestock in the United States is CAFO-raised. Over the decades, costs for livestock, feed, anti-biotics and veterinary care have increased by leaps and bounds, and the meat industry has had to expand to cut costs. Like monocultures, CAFOs focus on getting the product from start to store as fast as possible. Many CAFO-raised animals seldom see the light of day, and some never do. A chicken may spend its entire life in a cage smaller than a microwave.

Cows fed grass their whole lives can take up to twenty-four months to reach slaughter weight, while cows in feedlots (CAFOs for cows raised for beef) reach that weight as early as fourteen months, gaining one to two kilograms (two to four pounds) a day. The efficiency with which feedlot cows gain weight is the number one reason why 95 percent of cows raised for beef in the United States spend the final months of their lives in feedlots.

Many of the 1.5 billion domesticated cows on earth spend their first six months at pasture before being transported to feedlots, the cattle version of a CAFO. david HugHeS/ iStock.com

Farmers in Maryland, threshing grain from the chaff. The bags of grain will then be taken to the mill to be ground. Locke, edwin/L ibr ary of congreSS

Cheap Now, Costly Later

When compared to the price of meat from an animal raised at pasture, the meat from a CAFO animal is less expensive in the store. But while the price tag to the consumer—you and me—may be low, the environmental cost, in the form of the massive amount of land and water required to grow the feed for the animals, and the toxic sewage that often seeps out of a feedlot into nearby lakes, streams and rivers, is high.

Imagine arriving at your favorite lake for a swim. You see a sign that says high levels of chemicals in the lake now make it unsafe for swimmers. The next time you visit the lake you may see another advisory sign that says the fish in the lake are not safe to eat. Water contamination is a real problem, but, thank-fully, environmental groups and committed citizens work hard to protect these fragile ecosystems.

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Most animals love to socialize and forage in open spaces. If they can't act on these natural instincts, they can become stressed and develop harmful behaviors. SoL k auffman

A satellite orbiting earth snapped this photo of a Texas feedlot. Each rectangular area holds hundreds of cows. Their waste pools in the center of the feedlot. miSHk a Henner, courteSy bruce SiLverStein gaLLery, ny

FArminG FACT: eating

krill (a tiny shrimp-like crustacean)

turns the flesh of wild salmon

bright pink-orange. Farmed salmon

are fed a synthetic enzyme that

dyes their flesh a pinkish hue. it

still isn’t as bright as wild salmon,

but without it farmed salmon would

look gray.