 | | Joel Salatin | How many times have you heard that the world is running out of food? How many times have you heard that the world is overpopulated? Behold the opener to a full-page ad from Enbridge, an energy infrastructure company, that ran in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal (emphasis mine)... | Nearly 10% of global [greenhouse gas] emissions come from a surprising source: wasted food. According to Divert Inc., the United States generates over 63 million tons of wasted food annually. In the state of Washington, more than 2.7 million tons of wasted food are produced yearly, with an estimated 47% of it still edible. | | | Let's put this into perspective. The population of America is 330 million. That means the average American wastes 381 pounds of food per year... or more than 1 pound of food per day. Enbridge's angle here? The company is building a $1 billion facility in Longview, Washington, to convert this food waste into renewable natural gas (RNG). [Wall Street PROJECTS $30 Energy Stock Will Rise to $280 in 18 Months! ] Get used to that abbreviation... because it's one of the new darlings of the green agenda. According to the ad, the facility will offset the CO2 emissions of 5,000 gas-powered cars. For perspective, that means the new facility will cost $200,000 per car it offsets. If I were a betting man, I'd wager this facility is receiving substantial taxpayer-funded subsidies... because it would never be affordable in the free market. Meanwhile, we're being told by the talking heads that if we didn't have Latinos harvesting our food, we'd all starve. Or at least food costs would escalate so much that we might not be able to buy $1,042 Taylor Swift concert tickets by the hundreds of thousands. Isn't it interesting that no one seems to ask why we have all this wasted food? Keep It Simple, Stupid The fact is, food production has never been like this in the history of the world. Since commercial agriculture damages the environment, you'd think someone would connect the dots and say, "How about we produce exactly as much as we need to eat and no more." But no, we'd rather destroy the soil, complain about how expensive chemical fertilizers have gotten since Putin invaded Ukraine, and subsidize boondoggle biogas plants that depend on the overproduction of food. When you look at Enbridge's plan this way, it's clear how idiotic it is. It's like creating a program to help bank robbers spend the money they stole. A much better solution would be to eliminate bank robberies. The truth is, the world dramatically overproduces food. This completely destroys the overpopulation narrative. The world has never been so awash in food. Think about it. We buy Russia's chemical fertilizer and Saudi Arabia's oil so we can produce an excess of food so we can create a $1 billion facility to make biogas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If that isn't one of the most ridiculous sentences I've ever seen, I don't know what is. At the same time, the conventional narrative is that if we used compost instead of chemical fertilizers, we'd all starve. The fact is, we could reduce world food production by nearly 50%, and everyone would still have enough to eat. Folks go hungry because of geopolitical issues that displace food. The planet has plenty of food. People go hungry because a warlord (a developing country's equivalent of an entrepreneur) won't let a truck get past a checkpoint... or because they can't grow food because they're fleeing ethnic cleansing. Waste Not The wastefulness in centralized, bureaucratic food systems with long supply chains creates unprecedented mountains of rotting and unusable food. These mountains of wasted food aren't coming from farmers markets or local food sources. Those of us in that space watch our supply and demand levels carefully. A short supply chain doesn't have nearly as much slop in it. And when we're close to food, we don't like to see it wasted. We actually value it. Historically, food waste has gone to animals... which were then eaten by humans. The pictures in the Wall Street Journal ad focus on plants. You don't see meat or milk in this initiative. Our forebears fed excess food to animals, turning it into eggs, chicken and pork. Today, we can't imagine such an integrated system. No, we must segregate everything to keep the animals from being beneficial. If all this excess food were diverted to animals, it wouldn't cost a penny to dispose of - it would actually be valuable, and farmers would pay for it. Instead, corporate food businesses overproduce and then throw away... and then build mega-plants to turn the waste into fuel. If we wanted to use biomass to keep our lights on, you'd think someone would suggest using dead trees so they don't burn in forest fires. The lumber from those trees could generate energy, and food waste could be used to feed chickens and pigs. We'd prevent fires, produce protein and generate energy... all through a reasonable, integrated approach. But reasonableness isn't in the cards anymore. The gross dysfunction of our systems is beyond obvious. And just think... so-called green investors will buy into this claptrap thinking they're doing a wonderful thing for the planet. It's like towing a car that doesn't have tires or an engine to a body shop and giving it a paint job, then admiring how beautiful it looks. Whether it's coming from biogas on factory farms or from Enbridge's food waste outfit... anytime you see RNG, you can be sure its creation involved a major assault on the ecosystem. Sincerely, Joel Want more content like this? | | | | | Joel Salatin Joel Salatin calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Those who don't like him call him a bioterrorist, Typhoid Mary, a charlatan and a starvation advocate. He draws on a lifetime of food, farming and fantasy to entertain and inspire audiences around the world. | | | | 
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