What would you grow on your piece of land?

Out of curiousity I divided what was grown and produced on the arable land in the world 2012 and divided it with 7 billion (the number of us), to see how much is grown for each one of us. Below you see the result. Each one of us has around 1,800 square meters and on that land just above a ton of crops is produced. This includes the production of animal feed and industrial crops, seeds etc, so you will not get to eat the whole lot.

You would grow wheat, maize, rice and soybeans on half of the land.On 50 square meters you would have tubers and you would use the same area for your cotton farm. A few oil palms would tower over your plot, two coconut trees and a cashew, a mango and an apple tree. Probably you would grow your  five coffee trees and the two cocoa trees under their shade. And don't forget a rubber tree, for your wheels or condoms. Bananas, tobacco, onions and tomato will fight for the same space. You need a lot of space for the not so productive oil crops, rape seed and sunflower.

In terms of harvest, sugar cane is the heaviest load, one fourth of your output is cane, which you can process to your sugar, or perhaps make ethanol to your car - but it will not drive you far. You would only get some 20 liter of ethanol even if you diverted all your cane to ethanol and nothing for your candy. From all that cotton you would only get some three-four kg of cotton lint. How much do your clothes weigh?

You would have some 4,800 square meters for keeping a cow or some goats. And probably you would raise a pig together with your neighbor on crop residues and some of the maize. Perhaps you like chicken in which case you would convert a big part of the maize and soybeans to raise chicken. If you are a vegan, you would eat a considerable part of the soybeans and perhaps convert 100 kg of the maize also to ethanol, giving you another 35-40 liters to drive. Enjoy your share.

Crop	M2 in my plot	Production kg
Wheat	308	96
Maize	253	125
Rice, paddy	233	103
Soybeans	150	35
Barley	71	19
Sorghum	55	8
Seed cotton	50	11
Rapeseed	49	9
Millet	45	4
Beans, dry	42	3
Sugar cane	37	262
Sunflower seed	35	5
Groundnuts, with shell	35	6
Cassava	29	38
Potatoes	27	52
Vegetables, fresh nes	27	39
Oil, palm fruit	25	36
Chick peas	18	2
Coconuts	17	9
Cow peas, dry	16	1
Olives	15	2
Coffee, green	14	1
Cocoa, beans	14	1
Rubber, natural	14	2
Oats	14	3
Sweet potatoes	12	15
Sesame seed	11	1
Grapes	10	10
Peas, dry	9	1
Pulses, other	8	1
Rye	8	2
Plantains	8	5
Pigeon peas	8	1
Cashew nuts, with shell	8	1
Mangoes, mangosteens, guavas	7	6
Yams	7	8
Bananas	7	15
Sugar beet	7	39
Fruit, fresh other	7	4
Apples	7	11
Tomatoes	7	23
Tobacco, unmanufactured	6	1
Lentils	6	1
Onions, dry	6	12
Cereals, other	6	1
Oranges	5	10
Triticale	5	2
Watermelons	5	15
Tea	5	1
Fruit, tropical fresh other	4	3
Plums and sloes	4	2
Buckwheat	4	0
Broad beans, horse beans, dry	4	1
Linseed	4	0
Cabbages and other brassicas	3	10
Tangerines, mandarins, clementines, satsumas	3	4
Peas, green	3	3
Cucumbers and gherkins	3	9
Chillies and peppers, dry	3	0
The rest	86	10-20 kg
SUM	1888	1100

How increased labour efficiency drives resource consumption

If we compare efficiency on various systems, e.g. in farming or food processing, it will in most cases show that the bigger and more technological advanced system is more efficient. Larger crop farms perform better financially, on average, than smaller farms. The larger farms don’t have higher revenue or yields per acre, but they simply have lower costs. As expressed by the report (Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming) from USDA: “larger farms appear to be able to realize more production per unit of labor and capital. These financial advantages have persisted over time, which suggests that shifts of production to larger crop farms will likely continue in the future.” Their yield per acres is mostly the same as on smaller farms but the research shows that farms with more than 2,000 acres spend 2.7 hours of work per acre of corn and have cost for equipment of $432, while a farmer with 100-249 acres will spend more than four times as much labor and double the amount for equipment per acre. In that sense the larger farms are more “efficient” or “productive”

The same goes for a farmer who drives his pickup to the farmer market compared to the lorries supplying the supermarkets; she will use more fuel and more machine capital per kg of goods. And embedded in the machine capital are many other resources, metals, more energy and other peoples’ work. But despite all this efficiency our society neither reduce the number of hours worked nor the resources used, not in total and not per capita. This is not even the case for societies that have moved towards more services, as agriculture and manufacturing declines. How come? 

Try this discussion: If we compare the resource use of big, highly mechanized farmer with a small scale farmer, we have ascertained that per kg harvested yield, the labor efficiency of the bigger farm is higher. This is also the case for use of most other resources for area unit. But what happens if we look at resource use per labor-hour? Then it is clear that the big farmer in his 400 hp tractor use an awful lot more resources than the farmer with a small tractor, or oxen, not to speak about the half a billion farmers still working with their own labor as the main resource. The same goes for the driver of the delivery truck to Walmart, he uses a lot more resources per hour than the farmer loading her pickup to drive to the market. 

Now, you could say that nature doesn’t care about this discussion, if we are efficient per hour, per kg or per acre; nature only cares about the absolute use of resources or the total emissions. That is correct. But almost all people have a job of some kind, and in each job the same logic applies, i.e. that the more efficient each person is, he or she uses less resources per produced unit but more resources per hour of labor[1]. The total resource use in society is thus bound to increase despite of, or perhaps because of, increased labor efficiency. After all, as long as we all continue to work so much, our total resource use is determined by how much resources we use at work and how much we use as consumers together. 

This is a summary of a longer article I published a while ago, and which I now revised. Read the full article here: Jevons paradox - why efficiency is a liar word 

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[1] It is likely that there are some exceptions to this, but I believe that they are just that, exceptions.

What we eat and what we don't

When she realize that her mythic childhood Soviet kotleta was the result of a Soviet emissary's investigations in United States in the 1930s,  food writer Anya von Bremzen exclaims, “That’s what it was? an ersatz burger that mislaid its bun?” We often maintain a romantic view of food and many of the dishes or habits we consider being genuine or local are creations in the same way as the hot dog or the hamburger. Most “traditional” foods are late comers in the same way as most “traditional” farming systems. 

Food historian Rachel Laudan explains that a number of dishes may not be as local as we believe. In Hawaii people eat lomilomi salmon, a salted salmon rubbed with tomatoes and spring onions. There are no salmon off the coast of Hawaii and spring onions and tomatoes were brought there quite late. The baguette? Spread in France after World War II. Fish and Chips emerged in the late 19^th century and Tequila is a product of the Mexican movie industry[i]. Even modern processed foods can become “traditional and national food”, Tim Horton’s donuts in Canada and Marmite in England are such foods. It is all the better if “other” people don’t like them; “Like it or hate it”? is a popular Marmite slogan. As I write Kalles Kaviar[1] even use this in a current TV commercial where they serve bread with Kalles in streets in Tokyo to unsurprising Japanese that almost vomit when the try it (but politely nod their head in appreciation). The final voice over is “Kalles Kaviar, a very Swedish taste.  

What we think is “our” food is a strong marker and there is often a lot of discrimination implicit, and sometimes explicit in who are “we” when food is discussed. In a study of the four most popular American Food magazines, the researchers[2] found that the magazines were clearly written for white- middle class people, they were the “we” when iconic holidays such as Thanksgiving or Independence Day was featured. The range of people at show is much more narrow than the population composition of United States. The introduction of “foreign” components is phrased in context of cosmopolitanism and diversity, rather then a representation of the already existing joint American heritage. Bon Apetit writes. “Italian and French [already “foreign”, my note] may be perennial faves, but these other cuisines draws you out and into their restaurant”. Identity is also created by what “we” don’t eat; not eating dog joins many Westerners[3] in disgust for China and Vietnam.

It is under the threat of competition from something else that we start to appreciate the local or traditional (whatever that is). “If nobody was attracted by the foreign, the local would be in no danger and there would be no need to protect it. The only reasons to make noise about the normal daily bread on the table is if it appears to be replaced by rice, noodles or corn flakes” concludes anthropologist Richard Wilk from Indiana University[ii]. Many of the national cuisines we think of today are social and cultural creations being part of a nationalist project. As late as in the 1980s the first pan-Indian cookbooks emerged. In the 1920s, Greek intellectuals were concerned about the effects of cosmopolitanism on Greek culture; this threat from the outside was the impetus to write the first pan-Hellenic cookbook for the still young Greek republic[iii]. Politics enter food in many different ways. People object to American imperialism by not eating hamburgers while the Americans dumped the British controlled tea into the Boston harbor, and turned to coffee instead. Most readers might remember the (rather pathetic) efforts in the United States to rebrand French fries into “freedom fries” as a protest of lack of French support for the second was in Iraq. This was reportedly inspired by similar actions against Germany in World War I, when sauerkraut was called "liberty cabbage", and frankfurters were renamed "hot dogs"[iv]. Hot dogs stuck, however.

People demonstrate a strange mix of neophobia and neophilia when it comes to food. Mostly we need to domesticate food from other cultures. So by pouring ketchup on an unfamiliar food it becomes American, by salting more, adding sugar and a flavorless cheese it can be Swedish;  with curry a dish is Indian. An interesting story is what happened with macaroni shipped by the Italian government Salvadorian refugees in camps in Honduras. Macaroni? What? thought the Salvadorians and set out domesticating it instead of making an Italian style dish with cheese and tomatoes (which they didn’t have in the first place). Deep fried macaroni made a nice snack; toasted and pulverized mixed with cinnamon, sugar and water and you got a nice drink and by grinding it to flour it could be baked into bread[v]. 

These are some of the political and cultural reasons for why we eat one thing and not another. Others are found in the local and economic conditions under which our food systems and diets developed. The post is raw material for my upcoming book Global Eating Disorder: the cost of cheap food.  

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[1] Kalles kaviar is a Swedish brand of fish roe spread with the picture of the boy Kalle, the son of an ex CEO of the company owning the brand, Abba.

[2] Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann and Kate Cairns from University of Toronto.

[3] For the record, I have eaten dog as well as whale and grasshoppers as well as crayfish (a Swedish national dish) and I do eat mushrooms, but not Kalles Kaviar or surströmming.

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[i] A Plea for Culinary Modernism, food historian Rachel Laudan

[ii] Wilk, Richard 2009, Difference on the Menu: Neophilia, Neophobia and Globalization, in Inglis, David and Debra Giimlin (eds) (2009), The Globalization of Food, Berg

[iii] Inglis, David and Debra Giimlin (eds) (2009), The Globalization of Food, Berg

[iv] Fox News 2003  "Americans Just Say 'Non' to French Products". Fox News Channel. February 19, 2003.

[v] Fieldhouse, Paul, Food and Nutrition, 1998, Customs and Culture, Stanley Thornes Ltd