There are a lot of people on the planet. And those people eat a lot of food.
But not all food is created equal. The types of food, and the way in which they are grown, effect your life more than you might think.
Conventional farming methods go the laws of nature.
When agricultural land is packed with hundreds or thousands of the same type of plants, it can drain the soil of important nutrients. Farmland is not allowed to work as a natural system would work, so those nutrients do not get replenished.
Because of this, farms dump loads of chemical fertilizers onto their land.
These fertilizers are often made with fossil fuels, which are also not sustainable.
Extra fertilizer runs into nearby water systems, where they can cause significant damage. As these chemicals run down rivers and collect in lakes or bays, they may lead to huge dead zones where nothing can live in the water.
There's a massive one in the Gulf of Mexico.
This often has to do with algal blooms. When fertilizers gather in a body of water, they trigger the algae to grow like crazy. But all that algae sucks the oxygen and stuff out of the water. And when that algae dies, there is nothing left for the other organisms.
The other chemicals used are pesticides: poisons to kill bugs or weeds that could damage the crops.
Except pesticides don't only kill the bad bugs/weeds/ex. They kill anything. Even creatures that could help the farm, like pollinating honeybees.
And if pesticides are used poorly, the pests can actually become immune to them. Which means that farmers go on to use even more toxic stuff.
This is why organic farming is so important. They don't use lots of synthetic chemicals, which would otherwise pollute the soil and water, and damage nearby life.
When new farmland is created, farmers rip out the plants that used to grow there. Including the ground cover, which helps keep the terrain stable. When the ground cover is removed, all of the dirt beneath can wash away. As you might imagine, that makes it hard to grow crops there anymore. And all that dirt might be washing into the rivers and clouding them up (which can cause plenty of problems to the water life, and the quality of the water).
Did you learn about the Dust Bowl in school? Well, that was caused because farms ripped out all of the grasses that held the dirt in place.
Monoculture means to grow only one type of crop. Rows and rows of the same variety of corn, or tomato, or anything else.
This is not how nature works. Species rely on each other for nutrients, shade, stability, ex. In a monoculture setting, farmers need lots of extra chemicals to keep the plants alive.
One of the biggest dangers of monoculture is the lack of genetic diversity. If a disease shows up, it is unlikely that many of the crops will survive since they all have very similar genes. There's less chance that any of them will have a random immunity.
Our society relies almost entirely on a handful of species. So if anything ever happened to one of those species, we would be in a lot of trouble.
Think of the potato famine in Ireland.
So not only is it important to encourage polyculture - growing different types of plants instead of only one - but we also should give more attention to the heirloom species. The more diversity we have, the more stable our food foundation will be.
Now that we've looked at the plant side, let's turn to animals.
Meat takes many times more energy and resources to produce than vegetables do.
If you think about it, it makes sense.
When you grow a cucumber vine, you give it water and nutrients and light, and then you pick the cucumbers and eat them.
But if you raise livestock, those animals are eating food that could otherwise go to feeding humans.
It depends on the animal (chickens don't eat as much as cows, ex) and how they're raised (free range cattle, or those fed on grain, which is not a natural food for them). But it can take around 10 times more resources to raise livestock that to grow crops.
Animals need a lot of water, food, medicine, and land.
And animals also create a lot of waste. There's the obvious waste, which is sometimes flushed into nearby water systems.
But there are less obvious sources of waste too. For example, cows evolved to eat grass. But a lot of places feed them grain, which makes cows gassy. Gassy cows let out methane, which is a greenhouse gas (more powerful than carbon dioxide).
Meat also takes much more land to raise that crops do. Massive amounts of deforestation happen in order to clear ground for farming.
Your burger may have come from recently destroyed rain forest.
It is not efficient to raise meat.
And most of the time, meat production is incredibly cruel.
Those movies you see about animals raised on pastoral farms? Yeah, that almost never happens today.
Most of our meat, milk, and eggs comes from factory farms. Huge facilities where thousands of animals are crammed together in cages so small that they can't turn around. Chickens might have their beaks cut off so they don't peck their neighbors. Baby animals are separated from their parents the moment they're born.
Life is treated like garbage.
There are places that treat their animals better. But it's impossible for all meat to come from places that let animals roam free and eat natural food. We eat so much meat that there is not enough room to raise all of those animals in pastures. Our huge demand for meat means that animals are crammed into filthy, cruel, crowded conditions where they never see the sun.
Does this mean you should never eat meat? No. Meat has good nutrients. But you need to pay attention to where your meat comes from, and you probably need to cut back on the amount of meat you eat.
With so much land, money, time, and resources going into our food, it seems like people should appreciate it.
Except a huge percentage of what we grow/raise never even makes it to the markets. It might not be the right color, or it might have a spot on it.
So much that food we grew ends up getting dumped, although it's perfectly edible.
And markets throw away plenty of stuff that's been sitting around for a while.
And of course, everyone who buys food ends up wasting some of it.
It's a bizarre thing, with so much wasted food here, there are still people all over the planet who are starving.
How Would You Use this Topic in a story?
There could be some chemical disaster from farming. There are plenty of waterways that aren't safe to swim in because of chemical runoff from agriculture. I did a study on one such area.
In the novel Flight Behavior, there is a concern that farming chemicals caused killed someone by giving them cancer.
Maybe some nasty organisms have become immune to all known poisons?
A disease could infect much of the world's food supply.
This happened in the novel "The Windup Girl."
You might want to look into the cruelty of meat production.
Or check out the habitat destruction that happens before farms go up.
Or you could draw from history for ideas.
The Dust Bowl occurred when farmers ripped up the grassland, and all the dirt got blown into the air.
The potato famine happened because Ireland had to rely almost entirely on a single type of crop. When disease hit that crop, it meant mass starvation.
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