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Peak-Oil Prophet James Howard Kunstler on Food, Fuel and Why He Became an
Almost Vegan
http://www.alternet.org/environment/139877/peak-oil_prophet_james_howard_kun
stler_on_food%2C_fuel_and_why_he_became_an_almost_vegan_/
By Kerry Trueman, AlterNet. Posted May 7, 2009.

Kunstler dishes on the collapse of our institutions, why "recovery" may
never come and how to survive the fall of farming as we know it. 

I grew up in Woodland Hills, Calif., a nominally pastoral, petrocentric Los
Angeles suburb, so peak oil prognosticator James Howard Kunstler's dim view
of our car-crazed culture really resonates with me.

Kunstler's relentless skewering of suburbia, and his penchant for
apocalyptic predictions have landed him a reputation as a cranky Cassandra.
But as Ben McGrath observed while strolling around Saratoga Springs with
Kunstler for a recent New Yorker piece, "Far from the image of the
stereotypical Chicken Little, he was more like an amiable town crier whom
the citizenry regarded fondly, if a bit skeptically."

So, when a friend and I found ourselves headed to Kunstler's neck of the
woods for a conference recently, we arranged to have dinner with Saratoga
Springs' resident soothsayer. Contrary to his contrarian reputation,
Kunstler proved to be an affable, upbeat guy.

We chatted about food, politics, urban planning, gardening and a dozen
other topics, but I'm not much of a note-taker; I'd rather eat than tweet.
So our dinner conversation was off the record, including, mercifully, his
ribald remarks about Alice Waters and Martha Stewart, which decency should
preclude me from even alluding to.

However, he graciously agreed to answer my questions via e-mail about his
conversion from carnivore to (mostly) vegan and other foodish and fuelish
topics.

Kerry Trueman: Let's get right to the meat of the matter -- or, rather, the
lack thereof. You used to enjoy eating "lots of meat, duck fat, butter by
the firkin." What made you decide to go more or less vegan in recent
months? Was it hard to make the transition to a plant-based diet?

James Howard Kunstler: It was as simple as a trip to the doctor's office.
My cholesterol and blood pressure were too high. I had to take some radical
action. I've enjoyed the challenge of cooking with a very different range
of ingredients. But I like cooking and am pretty good at it -- I worked in
many restaurant kitchens when I was a starving bohemian -- and I figured a
lot of things out.

For instance, that you can make stocks and sauces by braising onions and
aromatics without oil or butter. The only thing I really miss is making
really bravura dishes for company, like chicken pie with a butter-saturated
crust, duck-and-sausage gumbo, brownies ... you get the picture. ... I'm
still excited by the challenge of vegan (or nearly vegan -- I use skim
milk) cookery.

There are some excellent cookbooks out there, by the way, like Vegan With a
Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, The Accidental Vegan by Devra
Gartenstein, and the Candle Cafe Cookbook by Joy Pierson and Bart Potenza.

KT: A study has just come out showing that although the French spend two
hours eating each day -- roughly twice as long as we do -- they're among
the slimmest of the 18 nations in the study. Americans were the fattest,
with more than 1 in 3 Americans qualifying as obese. How would you explain
this phenomenon? What compels Americans to eat so many of our meals in our
cars?

JHK: Americans eat so many meals in cars because: 1) The infrastructure of
daily life is engineered for extreme car dependency, and 2) because the
paucity of decent quality public space and so-called third places
(gathering places) for the working classes (and lower) -- and remember, it
is the working classes and poor who are way disproportionately obese. The
people portrayed in Vanity Fair magazine are not fat. I suspect that the
amount of time Americans spend in their cars is roughly proportionate to
the amount of time French people spend at the table.

Fast food is not a new phenomenon in the USA, however. Frances Trollope's
sensational travel book of the 1830s, The Domestic Manners of the Americans
dwells on the horrifying spectacle of our hotel dining rooms, where people
bolted their food with disgusting manners. Americans have been in a tearing
rush for 200 years.

KT: In The Long Emergency, published in 2005, you predicted with astounding
accuracy how the subprime mortgage meltdown would unfold. Your latest
novel, World Made By Hand, takes place in the near future after a massive
flu outbreak that originated in Mexico. Um, what should we start worrying
about next?

JHK: Worry about the "recovery" that never comes and the insidious collapse
of our institutions and arrangements that will proceed from this. Worry
about lost incomes and vocations that will never come back (e.g. marketing
exec for Target, Inc.) and the need to find new ways to be useful to your
fellow human beings (and incidentally perhaps earn a living). Worry about
finding a community to live in that is cohesive enough to stave off anarchy
at the local level. Worry about building the best garden you can and making
good compost. Worry about how difficult it is to learn how to play a
musical instrument at age 47.

KT: You recently wrote "there's no way we can continue the
petro-agriculture system of farming and the Cheez Doodle and Pepsi Cola
diet that it services. The public is absolutely zombified in the face of
this problem -- perhaps a result of the diet itself." OK, so how will we
stock our post-peak-oil pantries? Do we really need to start hoarding rice
and beans?

JHK: Get some kind of a hand-cranked home grain mill. Personally, I think
it is indeed a good idea to lay in a supply of beans, lentils, rice, oats,
other grains and don't forget salt, boullion (soups can sustain us with any
number of ingredients), dried onion flakes, spices (chilies and curries
especially). Our just-in-time, three-day's-worth-of-inventory supermarket
system is very susceptible to disruption. And we're very far from
establishing workable local food networks in this country.

The fragility of petro-ag is being aggravated by the collapse of bank
lending now. Farmers need borrowed money desperately. Capital is as
important an "input" as methane-based fertilizers. I think we could see
problems with food production and distribution anytime from here on.

KT: You're an avid gardener -- do you grow much of your own food? Do you
worry that you'll have to guard your greens with a gun if our collapsing
economy sends the mall rats outdoors to forage after the food courts run
out of pretzel nuggets?

JHK: I don't grow any grains. I have successfully grown potatoes, but won't
this year (I'm renting my current house and its accompanying property).
This year, I'll be planting mostly leafy greens -- collards, kale, chard,
lettuces, plus some peppers and tomatoes (pure frivolity). It is not hard
to imagine that food theft will become a problem. The trouble, though, is
that the sort of people liable to do the thieving are exactly those with
the poorest skills in cooking. You have to know what to do with kale to
make it worth stealing. It may be more like kitchen theft: "... what's that
you got on the stove, pal?"

KT: You evidently enjoy cooking and entertaining. Who would your dream
dinner guests be (limiting your guest list to those folks who are currently
among the living)?

JHK: I have a pretty good revolving cast of characters among my friends
locally who make regular visits to my table. This week, a farming couple
who are renting 20 acres off a wealthy land-truster (and doing a great job
of market gardening) are coming over, along with the Rolling Stone
environmental reporter and his wife, who is writing a gardening book. I
don't need no steenkin' outatown celebrities.