Rapeseed in early Spring, Hunan

Food is reason enough to live in China.  I can eat dynamite soup dumplings right in my neighborhood and then get a chocolate filled croissant for dessert.  What a world!  Less wonderful is what the inescapable effect of China’s economic development, massive population, and never ending migration of young people to cities (the largest migration in human history!) is having on the environment and food systems on which we depend on here.  If you have read books such as Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma or seen the recent documentary Food Inc., then you know that America’s food systems are killing us and the earth we live on, while also endangering workers’ lives and making agriculture a mundane and economically in-viable enterprise.  There’s no question that we have our problems back in the States.

More worrying is the fact that China, a country about 4 times the size of ours, is willingly emulating our disastrous practices.  You see it in the faces of Chinese kids begging their parents to take them to a packed KFC for some fried chicken, you can see it in the rural towns populated with only grandparents and babies where vegetables are grown using chemical pesticides and fertilizers on ancient fields that cover every available space (the young adults are all off working in factories and cities on the coast), you can even see it in the supermarkets of Shanghai, which are filled with expensive processed foods, endless shelves of soda and fruits imported from far away countries.  Now, America still has a monopoly on having the unhealthiest, fattest, most environmentally degrading food systems on the planet, but the pace of change in China seems to be causing a whole lot of problems over here, many which may never be rectified.

Speaking of the utter destruction of the environment from which we will never recover, you simply MUST check out the amazing photography of Lu Guang.  Lu has been documenting the effects of the rape of mother nature happening everyday in China, while keeping a keen eye on how environmental destruction affects people’s lives.  Lu also won this year’s $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography from the Asia Society in New York and has been getting a bit of press because of this (hello New York Times!).  Dear reader, take a minute and look at these pictures and feel horrible for the rest of your day, especially if you live in China.  By the way, the water of both the Yellow and Yangtze rivers is now too polluted to even be used for agricultural irrigation, but I just got a plastic Hello Kitty toy in my box of cereal today, so no worries!  Bostonians are welcome to go drink a cup of the Charles river while they ponder such environmental issues.

Now lets take a 180 and talk about something that doesn’t want to make you vomit and worry about your unborn child’s future: organic gardening.  I recently read an article on the China Study Group about a host of new organic community supported agriculture programs in China, though the article mostly focuses on one based in a village outside the city of Chengdu (I gotta thank Danwei for the heads up on this).  There seven families in Anyang village are growing vegetables organically (though they are unregistered, apparently it’s hard to get that in China) and they then market these vegetables to urban residents.  This project was started by the efforts of a Chinese NGO, as the article says:

This project was first initiated by the Chengdu Urban Rivers Association – an NGO spun off of the Chengdu government’s 10 year project to clean up the rivers in 2003. CURA discovered that 60% of the remaining pollution was coming from agro-chemicals, so it embarked on a project to promote organic farming in the villages upstream from Chengdu, starting with Anlong village in Pi County as a pilot site. In 2005 CURA met with the villagers and began to work out a project, starting with 20 volunteer households. Originally they didn’t focus on marketing or certification, since these households farmed mainly for use, relying on migrant labor and business for cash income. But several households decided to use their organic-ness as a selling point for marketing their produce, and after a couple years of experimentation, worked out an arrangement that cosmopolitan NGO supporters likened to the North American “CSA” system, but seems to me more like European experiments with “social agriculture,” in that the farmers….are trying to make their relations with consumers more than one-dimensional buyer-seller relations by developing friendships with consumers and periodically organizing open-house events in the village, where the farmers teach the city-slickers how to farm.

While organic community supported agriculture is great, it is a very small part of China’s vast food systems, most of the country eats food that is produced in ways that are not environmentally friendly and that are often not safe or clean.  One thing is for sure though, China does not waste food, or anything for that matter, the way we do in America.  One common example is the way restaurants in China dispose of food scraps and leftovers.  In restaurants all over the country the leftovers and scraps are put into big plastic barrels that are picked up at the end of the day by some poor soul who takes the barrels to farms where the scraps are fed to pigs, at least that’s the explanation I had always heard.  So I was surprised and disgusted to find on ChinaSmack that this is not always the case.

In a story called, “Discarded Food Waste Slop Recycled into Cooking Oil,” a set of completely vomit-worthy photographs shows how some people in the city of Wuhan, in Hubei province, have been dumping food slop into big tanks where they skim off the used oil and lightly filter it for use in cooking.  Don’t worry though, the people doing it say, “Slop oil is safe to eat.”  I’m all for recycling and reusing materials, but this is just disgusting.  There are many cases of food production in China that are less than clean, I’ve personally seen some of them, though for me this one takes the cake.

I guess, even though it wasn’t planned, this post ended up a little one-sided.  While there are good strategies being developed when it comes to food and the environment in China, and though these days you will find a healthy paunch on a chunk of China’s population that makes photographs taken a hundred years ago of China’s working poor look alien, even with all of that the future doesn’t look good.  The expensive gourmet hamburgers and imported Belgian beer I can find in today’s Shanghai feel less like an example of humankind’s path to a better future, but rather more like a shining example of opulence and prosperity that we may never see again, a Pax Romana for our age.

According to a gathering of agronomists and development experts in Rome this month we need to increase food production by 50% over the next 20 years just to make sure people don’t start starving to death and in 4o years we will have to feed 9.1 billion people, a 70% increase in food production (via the NYTimes).  When I look out at the mountains of Hunan and see that every possible inch is being used for agriculture or when after asking my students in Huaihua if they think that the polluted river running through their home city (like rivers in 90% of Chinese cities) will be clean enough for their children to swim in or their children’s children and all I get is a dead silence, I get worried.  The bad thing is its not even China we have to worry about the most, this is after all a country whose population will start to decline after 2050 (if policies stay where they are), but rather all the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.  The famed Green Revolution that brought super-sized rice and wheat to the world has done a lot to end world hunger and allow for the economic growth we’ve seen over the last 60 odd years, but it will only do so much.  Lets not even ponder the myriad human rights, medical and military issues that a starving planet can bring up.  I can’t help but feel that I’m going to see a lot of sad things in my lifetime.