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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] What's Eating America, by Michael Pollan
  • Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:20:22 -0600


"It may take more work, but it's entirely possible to nourish the soil,
and ourselves, without dumping so much nitrogen into the environment. The key
to reducing our dependence on synthetic nitrogen is to build a more
diversified agriculture--rotating crops and using animals to recycle
nutrients on farms--and give up our vast, nitrogen-guzzling monocultures of
corn. Especially as the price of fossil fuels climbs, even the world's most
industrialized farmers will need to take a second look at how nature, and
those who imitate her, go about creating fertility without diminishing our
world." - Michael Pollan


What's Eating America, by Michael Pollan
June 15, 2006
http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=81

Corn is one of the plant kingdom's biggest successes. That's not necessarily
good for the United States.


Descendants of the Maya living in Mexico still sometimes refer to themselves
as "the corn people." The phrase is not intended as metaphor. Rather, it's
meant to acknowledge their abiding dependence on this miraculous grass, the
staple of their diet for almost 9,000 years.

For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain,
yet one that is also rooted in corn, not to think of himself as a corn person
suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.

Or perhaps a little of both. For the great edifice of variety and choice that
is an American supermarket rests on a remarkably narrow biological
foundation: corn. It's not merely the feed that the steers and the chickens
and the pigs and the turkeys ate; it's not just the source of the flour and
the oil and the leavenings, the glycerides and coloring in the processed
foods; it's not just sweetening the soft drinks or lending a shine to the
magazine cover over by the checkout. The supermarket itself--the wallboard
and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which
the building itself has been built--is in no small measure a manifestation of
corn.

There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more
than a quarter of them contain corn. At the same time, the food industry has
done a good job of persuading us that the 45,000 different items or SKUs
(stock keeping units) represent genuine variety rather than the clever
rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.

How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old
World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of
the plant world's greatest success stories. I say the plant world's success
story because it is no longer clear that corn's triumph is such a boon to the
rest of the world.

At its most basic, the story of life on earth is the competition among
species to capture and store as much energy as possible--either directly from
the sun, in the case of plants, or, in the case of animals, by eating plants
and plant eaters. The energy is stored in the form of carbon molecules and
measured in calories: the calories we eat, whether in an ear of corn or a
steak, represent packets of energy once captured by a plant. Few plants can
manufacture quite as much organic matter (and calories) from the same
quantities of sunlight and water and basic elements as corn.

The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a
key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with
some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle
Shoals, Alabama, switched over from making explosives to making chemical
fertilizer. After World War II, the government had found itself with a
tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the
making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source
of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America's
forests with the surplus chemical, to help the timber industry. But
agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: spread the
ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry
(along with that of pesticides, which are based on the poison gases developed
for war) is the product of the government's effort to convert its war machine
to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in
her speeches, "We're still eating the leftovers of World War II."

F1 hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any
other crop. Though F1 hybrids were introduced in the 1930s, it wasn't until
they made the acquaintance of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s that corn
yields exploded. The discovery of synthetic nitrogen changed everything--not
just for the corn plant and the farm, not just for the food system, but also
for the way life on earth is conducted.

All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature
assembles amino acids, proteins and nucleic acid; the genetic information
that orders and perpetuates life is written in nitrogen ink. But the supply
of usable nitrogen on earth is limited. Although earth's atmosphere is about
80 percent nitrogen, all those atoms are tightly paired, nonreactive and
therefore useless; the 19th-century chemist Justus von Liebig spoke of
atmospheric nitrogen's "indifference to all other substances." To be of any
value to plants and animals, these self-involved nitrogen atoms must be split
and then joined to atoms of hydrogen.

Chemists call this process of taking atoms from the atmosphere and combining
them into molecules useful to living things "fixing" that element. Until a
German Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to turn this trick in
1909, all the usable nitrogen on earth had at one time been fixed by soil
bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants (such as peas or alfalfa or
locust trees) or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical lightning, which
can break nitrogen bonds in the air, releasing a light rain of fertility.

In his book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the
Transformation of World Food Production, Vaclav Smil pointed out that "there
is no way to grow crops and human bodies without nitrogen." Before Haber's
invention, the sheer amount of life earth could support--the size of crops
and therefore the number of human bodies--was limited by the amount of
nitrogen that bacteria and lightning could fix. By 1900, European scientists
had recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally
occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a
very painful halt. The same recognition by Chinese scientists a few decades
later is probably what compelled China's opening to the West: after Nixon's
1972 trip, the first major order the Chinese government placed was for 13
massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have starved.

This is why it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the
Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen (Bosch gets the credit for
commercializing Haber's idea) is the most important invention of the 20th
century. He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not
be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention. We can easily imagine a world
without computers or electricity, Smil points out, but without synthetic
fertilizer billions of people would never have been born. Though, as these
numbers suggest, humans may have struck a Faustian bargain with nature when
Fritz Haber gave us the power to fix nitrogen.

Fritz Haber? No, I'd never heard of him either, even though he was awarded
the Nobel Prize in 1918 for "improving the standards of agriculture and the
well-being of mankind." But the reason for his obscurity has less to do with
the importance of his work than an ugly twist of his biography, which recalls
the dubious links between modern warfare and industrial agriculture: during
World War I, Haber threw himself into the German war effort, and his
chemistry kept alive Germany's hopes for victory, by allowing it to make
bombs from synthetic nitrate. Later, Haber put his genius for chemistry to
work developing poison gases--ammonia, then chlorine. (He subsequently
developed Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler's concentration camps.) His wife,
a chemist sickened by her husband's contribution to the war effort, used his
army pistol to kill herself; Haber died, broken and in flight from Nazi
Germany, in a Basel hotel room in 1934.

His story has been all but written out of the 20th century. But it embodies
the paradoxes of science, the double edge to our manipulations of nature, the
good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but from the same
knowledge. Even Haber's agricultural benefaction has proved to be a decidedly
mixed blessing.

When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil
fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new
reliance on fossil fuel. That's because the Haber-Bosch process works by
combining nitrogen and hydrogen gases under immense heat and pressure in the
presence of a catalyst. The heat and pressure are supplied by prodigious
amounts of electricity, and the hydrogen is supplied by oil, coal or, most
commonly today, natural gas. True, these fossil fuels were created by the
sun, billions of years ago, but they are not renewable in the same way that
the fertility created by a legume nourished by sunlight is. (That nitrogen is
fixed by a bacterium living on the roots of the legume, which trades a tiny
drip of sugar for the nitrogen the plant needs.)

Liberated from the old biological constraints, the farm could now be managed
on industrial principles, as a factory transforming inputs of raw
material--chemical fertilizer--into outputs of corn. And corn adapted
brilliantly to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities of
fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more prodigious quantities of food
energy. Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a
process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure
become a process of converting fossil fuels into food. More than half of all
the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn.

>From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't simply
>drink petroleum directly, because there's a lot less energy in a bushel of
>corn (measured in calories) than there is in the half-gallon of oil required
>to produce it. Ecologically, this is a fabulously expensive way to produce
>food--but "ecologically" is no longer the operative standard. In the
>factory, time is money, and yield is everything.

One problem with factories, as opposed to biological systems, is that they
tend to pollute. Hungry for fossil fuel as hybrid corn is, farmers still feed
it far more than it can possibly eat, wasting most of the fertilizer they
buy. And what happens to that synthetic nitrogen the plants don't take up?
Some of it evaporates into the air, where it acidifies the rain and
contributes to global warming. Some seeps down to the water table, whence it
may come out of the tap. The nitrates in water bind to hemoglobin,
compromising the blood's ability to carry oxygen to the brain. (I guess I was
wrong to suggest we don't sip fossil fuels directly; sometimes we do.)

It has been less than a century since Fritz Haber's invention, yet already it
has changed earth's ecology. More than half of the world's supply of usable
nitrogen is now man-made. (Unless you grew up on organic food, most of the
kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch process.)
"We have perturbed the global nitrogen cycle," Smil wrote, "more than any
other, even carbon." The effects may be harder to predict than the effects of
the global warming caused by our disturbance of the carbon cycle, but they
are no less momentous.

The flood of synthetic nitrogen has fertilized not just the farm fields but
the forests and oceans, too, to the benefit of some species (corn and algae
being two of the biggest beneficiaries) and to the detriment of countless
others. The ultimate fate of the nitrates spread in Iowa or Indiana is to
flow down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where their deadly
fertility poisons the marine ecosystem. The nitrogen tide stimulates the wild
growth of algae, and the algae smother the fish, creating a "hypoxic," or
dead, zone as big as New Jersey--and still growing. By fertilizing the world,
we alter the planet's composition of species and shrink its biodiversity.

And yet, as organic farmers (who don't use synthetic fertilizer) prove every
day, the sun still shines, plants and their bacterial associates still fix
nitrogen, and farm animals still produce vast quantities of nitrogen in their
"waste," so-called. It may take more work, but it's entirely possible to
nourish the soil, and ourselves, without dumping so much nitrogen into the
environment. The key to reducing our dependence on synthetic nitrogen is to
build a more diversified agriculture--rotating crops and using animals to
recycle nutrients on farms--and give up our vast, nitrogen-guzzling
monocultures of corn. Especially as the price of fossil fuels climbs, even
the world's most industrialized farmers will need to take a second look at
how nature, and those who imitate her, go about creating fertility without
diminishing our world.





  • [Livingontheland] What's Eating America, by Michael Pollan, Tradingpost, 04/03/2008

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