Stepping Into Me: Part Three
Ten Dollar Spinach
The one thing I won’t do is be a vegan thumper. I prefer to be a role model and allow rational people to make their own decisions. At the time of writing, I’m down thirty-two pounds from July 2015 and my resting heart rate is seventy-two. I’ve achieved this with exercise and a vegan diet. I’m never hungry and I have not had any sickness since day one of this life change. The resting heart rate is not ideal but it’s down from eight-eight just ten months ago. My goal is to wake in the morning with a resting heart rate of sixty-five. At my age, that’s a great rate and given the condition I’ve been labeled with, sixty-five will be very impressive.
Veganism during summer months and early fall is not very difficult nor is it expensive. There is an abundance of veggies, roots, herbs and the like thus increasing your recipe choices. The same is not true during winter and spring. Supply is minimal in comparison to July and August and as a result your wallet will take a hit. For example, a head of cauliflower in January, 2016, was selling for almost five dollars in my local grocery store. A stalk of celery was selling for three dollars. That’s crazy expensive and the same scary sticker prices applied to all other vegetables and most fruits.
Aside from cost, other concerns I had were the freshness of the fruits and vegetables as well as something that popped into my head when I pushed my grocery cart towards some peppers from Chile. How did these brightly coloured fruits that we prefer to think of as vegetables get from Chile to my shopping cart? As far as questions go…not a bad question and unfortunately not an easy question to get answers to.
A direct route from Santiago, Chile to Toronto, Ontario is over 5,800 miles or 8,782 kilometers. The food is picked early and put into cold storage or sprayed with chemicals and waxed. How else could they appear fresh at your local grocery after the three to four week journey to get there? The expression food mile has gathered steam over the last decade. The estimated carbon footprint stands at around eighteen percent average for all western countries importing and exporting food. In brief, this means the carbon fuels needed to export and import food versus all other transport and industry needs is eighteen percent, i.e., eighteen percent of pollution is due to exporting and importing food. That is significant and a strong argument for the push towards local economies and of course, the evolution of vertical farms.
Vertical farms are our future and there is no viable argument against this. One striking fact for vertical farms is that our soil is depleted and nowhere near the nutritional value of the vegetables that our parents grew up with. The April 27, 2011 edition of Scientific America gives us the following: Organic Consumers Association cites several other studies with similar findings: A Kushi Institute analysis of nutrient data from 1975 to 1997 found that average calcium levels in 12 fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels 21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal, found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent. Yet another study concluded that one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one.
Building vertical farms (VF) could create a local economy that will endure the fall and winter seasons and help eliminate the food mile footprint. Good, nutritious food all year around, free of pesticides and little or no carbon footprint. Sounds like a plan, right?
A near death experience brought me to this point and after several highs I realized that as it stands now, there is little opportunity for success. Our knowledge of VF’s at the moment is limited and we can only grow, for the most part, green vegetables. Until we learn to measure humidity in order to grow foreign fruits or plants, our diet will be fairly limited. Happily, this is possible and I foresee this happening in the next decade. Actual tree hot houses growing banana’s, pineapples and oranges is not that far away if we allow it.
But like everything else that breathes hope for the future, there is an elephant in the room. You can call it success or you can call it greed but it is the primary reason why we are doomed to healthy alternatives for the rich and genetically modified soy and corn products for the poor.
Vertical farms are the future but unfortunately, they won’t work. In our present economic structure, vertical farms are not feasible no matter how much we slice and dice. Everything produced and sold in our society is done for excessive profit, therefore, manufacturing vertical farms, recuperating the costs of building and growing food is too costly. This is apparent in the price of VF food in grocery stores. Vertical farms will be built and only the rich will benefit. If they choose not to buy, then VF’s will be shut down once sales diminish. Someone earning thirty-thousand dollars can barely afford a box pizza let alone afford a ten dollar bag of VF spinach.
So, that being said, are we spinning our wheels?
No, there’s a way to make it work. There a few steps but in the end, any person that chooses to be healthy, can do so without emptying their wallet. All that it will take is some gutsy legislation.
And that’s where you come in.