If you
take an honest look at The Future, I think you have to conclude that it
stinks. Most of the stuff in The Future is just plain idiotic.
I'm
not talking about the real future. I'm talking about The Future -- our
collective image of what we supposedly want things to be like in our dreams.
The
Future was Big Big Big in the 1920-1970 period. Since about 1970, we have
become a little tired with The Future. We already know it stinks. Flying
cars? Who needs it. Betcha the insurance is ridiculous. But, we haven't
replaced The Future yet with something better. We need a new vision of The
Future. Right now, we are living in the mental rubble of an old, worn-out
Future.
Let's
take a look at The Future. Here's a splendid website that documents The
Future, as it was imagined in the mid-20th century.
Tales of
Future Past
Food: Food
in The Future is a chemical concoction made by scientists. It might even take
the form of a pill! One uniform, scientific, factory-made product that
provides everything your body needs. How simple! How clean! How convenient!
In The
Future, humans eat dogfood.
Pill
food from the 1930s.
Science
Diet dogfood. You know, I bet this stuff isn't even good for dogs. What did dogs eat
before dogfood?
Mmmm ... Tasty!
No
more stoves and ovens ... no more pots and pans ... no more vegetables or
meat or spices ... no more cooking
with food.
Now our meals come out of our own private factory! With a conveyor belt --
just like a real factory!
When
you don't cook
anymore then you too can be a Super Chef!
Let's
see: chemical food that comes from a factory, made by scientists, that
doesn't involve any real cooking but merely pressing a button on the machine.
That doesn't describe the situation today at
all.
Microwave
dinner.
A
Classic Favorite! Where's my conveyor belt?
PowerBar
Gel Step 2 Refuel 2x Caffeine with C2 Max higher-octane carb blend. Tangerine
flavor.
The electrolytes of a sports drink! You can read about the science at
Powerbar.com.
WTF is this?
Does
it really contain more octane? (Octane is
the primary hydrocarbon in gasoline.)
Bigger
than a pill, admittedly. Gotta leave something for future generations to do.
For a
while, I was road biking with a club in Connecticut. Some people brought
stuff like this. After reading the ingredients, I figured out that apple
juice would accomplish basically the same thing, was much better for your
body, tasted better, and was a lot cheaper too. So, I put apple
juice in my water bottle.
Future
Food needs Future Farming. In The Future, farming needs to be done with giant
robots.
Here,
we are growing corn underground. Which is where you should grow corn.
Because, a regular, traditional farmer in a regular, traditional above-ground
cornfield is soooo
not The Future.
Are
the guard towers to keep the corn from escaping?
In The
Future, we grow food in
space. Because, you know, vegetables don't grow on the Earth, on
the farm just down the street. Vegetables only grow in space.
It makes perfect sense. When you think about it.
Today's
factory farming and factory food are a total horror. It didn't happen by
accident. It happened, at least in part, because people wanted it that way.
It was The Future. You can't stop progress.
When
you think about it, this is utterly bizarre. It's not like people didn't have
good food in 1910 or 1925. The food then was fine -- vastly better than
today. But ... they were dreaming of food pills and food factories and corn
grown by underground robots.
Eating
is one of humans' most basic pleasures. Especially eating well. Like sex, but
three times a day. In my future, we eat really,
really well. Here's a different vision of the future.
Jean
Georges Vibert. The
Marvelous Sauce. 1890.
A
marvelous sauce. Isn't that a more relevant accomplishment than growing corn
underground? Tastes
better, anyway.
Who
needs a conveyor belt.
Food
is supposed to be fun.
This
is a dinner in Kyrgyzstan. We should be eating at least as well as the Kyrgyz.
At least, I think so.
So,
who cooks all this food?
Basically,
women do. As they have, in every culture, for the last 790,000 years, since
the discovery of fire.
Women
like to cook! Who do you think is buying Gourmet,
Bon Appetit,
Food and Wine,
watching cooking shows on TV, and all that? What they don't like is working
from 8-6 in the salt mines, going shopping, and then cooking. Ugh. We need
more free time. (Of course my fabulous future includes much more free time,
especially for women.)
Food
circa 1910 is fine by me. Slow food. This is not exactly a novel idea. But,
we have to embrace it, and consequently drop The Future -- forever. No more
pill food. No more factory food. No more genetically modified crapola grown
by robots.
Along
with Real Food comes some Real Farming. I like to kick around the
sustainability types at every opportunity, but this is something they've done
really well. Between the permaculturists, Natural Farmers (Fukuoka-style),
the Michael Pollan local-foodies, and so forth, we have a pretty good idea of
the Future of Food.
However,
as I've said in the past, it is an incomplete picture.
April 19, 2009: Let's Kick Around The Sustainability Types
Since
we've gotten a little tired of The Future, and its factory chemical robot
food, there has been a corresponding reaction to return to The Past. The Past
is a bit of a fantasy, just like The Future. In the U.S., The Past is mostly
the Little House on the Prairie Fantasy of the self-sufficient pioneer farm. That did exist,
but that wasn't all.
Was
this The Past? (The
Gleaners, Jean-Francois Millet, 1857)
Or
this? (Holyday,
James Jacques Tissot, 1876)
To be
honest, I'm about as tired of The Past as I am of The Future. First of all,
I'm not at all convinced that The Past is a good agrarian format. Indeed, it
is rather a lot like our system today, just minus the machines -- the
forcible extortion of fertility from the land, via crop monoculture. Fukuoka
seems like an old-time farmer at first glance, but it soon becomes apparent
that what he was doing was nothing like farming of old. For example, he grew
rice in a dry field, without weeding or cultivation. Other farmers thought he
was nuts. Even after he started pulling in the highest rice yields in the world,
with three days of work per year and no mechanical devices, they still thought he was
nuts. Only in the last few years have I seen people start to catch on to this
"no cultivation" idea. Also, he mixed seeds to encourage vegetables
to grow "like weeds," which is the complete opposite of the
neatly-organized "kitchen garden."
Another
idea I've been toying with is the notion of having no domesticated meat
animals. This was the situation in Japan until the mid-19th century, when
they adopted meat production as a form of "westernization."
Japanese people ate meat, but it was all wild meat -- fish, mostly, with some
wild boar, deer, fowl and so forth. Nature is fantastically productive of
meat when left alone, to an extent that is practically unimaginable today.
When the European explorers first visited Chesapeake Bay, they found sturgeon
(a freshwater fish) in superabundance, and in sizes up to 18 feet long and
weighing 1800 lbs. And cod, of course. Here is a description of herring found
in Virginia in 1728:
When
they spawn, all streams and waters are completely filled with them, and one
might believe, when he sees such terrible amounts of them, that there was as
great a supply of herring as there is water. In a word, it is unbelievable,
indeed, indescribable, as also incomprehensible, what quantity is found
there. One must behold oneself.
You
can find similar descriptions of salmon, or of buffalo upon the plains. When
you think about it briefly, it makes perfect sense that the greatest
abundance of meat is possible from unmolested nature, as the conversion of
solar energy into meat is most direct. Scientific studies have confirmed this
-- that it was a far more efficienct process to have buffalo eat grasses upon
the Great Plains, than it is for people to grow corn and then feed it to cows
stuffed in warehouses as we do today. And so much less work. And -- to the
degree that hunting is fun, and fishing for 1800 lb. sturgeon is really fun -- so much
more fun! Of course, wild meat is much better than the hideously degraded
garbage you find in stores today.
Some
people around here like to go up to the Saint Lawrence Seaway during salmon
season. In a few days, they can get a couple hundred pounds of salmon, which
is not too hard at 50lbs each. Or, for the deer hunters, a single deer will
produce 100 lbs of meat. Two deer and a few fish per year -- about four
weekends of playing in the woods with your buddies -- is a lot of meat. In the
olden days of superabundance, it was a lot easier than that. How much meat is
in a buffalo? Maybe we could hunt for our meat ourselves.
Thus,
in my fabulous future, vegetables and grains are grown Fukuoka-style, but
meats are harvested from the wild. In the past, no European culture has been
able to manage their interactions with nature effectively. Overharvesting and
destruction of the habitat quickly follows. But this is my fantasy future,
and I think this is a much more sensible fantasy than growing tomatoes in
orbit.
Thus,
as far as food production goes, we end up with something that is nothing like
the present, not at all like The Future, but also nothing at all like The
Past.
We
didn't get past food:
today. We will spend more time investigating the old, worn-out Future, and
also our new, much better future, in the future.
* * *
Time
for national newspapers: Recent statistics on U.S.
newspaper circulation are horrible. These reflect a simple fact: most
newspapers stink. USA
Today? Gimme a break. But, it's still better than 80% of what's
out there.
The
heyday of newspapers was before 1930. In those days, the newspaper was the
only source of news available. The business naturally lent itself to
atomization because of the reality of printing a daily publication: you had
to be within one day of the printing press, and there was no way to move the
formatting and layout from one press to another quickly. In those days, a
newspaper was literally made of hot lead, melted down again each day to
reform the printing plates.
Thus,
we had city papers, each of which had an effective monopoly, or at least
didn't have to compete against papers from other cities. Also, they didn't
compete against radio, TV or the Internet. A weekly or monthly periodical
could be a national publication, since it could reach everyone via the mail.
Radio
and TV changed things somewhat. You could follow a sports game in real time,
rather than having the choice of either buying a ticket at the stadium or
reading about it the next day. However, neither radio nor TV could transmit
as much information as a newspaper.
Today,
we can easily transfer the layout and contents to a printing press anywhere.
This enables national newspapers. Newspapers in most countries are national.
Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun
has 14 million subscribers, compared to 2.1 million for the Wall Street Journal
and 1.0 million for the New
York Times. Korea's
Joongang Ilbo has 2.1 million subscribers. Even Thailand's Thai Rath has more
readers than the New
York Times, at 1.2 million.
The
logical next step for U.S. newspapers, it seems to me, is to aggregate into
national papers. In the U.S., I would suggest the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,
the Washington Post,
and maybe one more -- not including the already-national Wall Street Journal.
These papers are actually readable and interesting, as opposed to the
direct-to-birdcage San
Francisco Chronicle for example.
The New York Times should
start this trend by scuttling the Boston
Globe, which it already owns. Existing Boston Globe readers get
the New York Times
delivered, with a big Metro Boston section added. Keep 20 or so reporters and
some advertising salespeople for the Metro Boston section, and the rest take
a hike.
Then,
the New York Times
should do the same with the 15 other regional newspapers it owns.
After
a while, people in Boston and elsewhere are going to get irritated by reading
a newspaper with "New York" in the title every day. Ugh. At that
point, the New York
Times would change its name to something less
regionally-specific. I'd suggest the Times.
What
about all those laid-off reporters? There is still a great demand for
information and insight, which people will pay for. However, I think it would
be very specific and focused -- more like investment newsletters. For
example, a former Boston
Globe reporter could publish a monthly Boston Commercial Real Estate
Report from his home office, and charge $150 a year. If it had
real "can't get it from a newspaper or blog" insight -- which is
not too difficult for a person focused on the sector full time -- it would be
worth every penny and more. A "who is doing what to whom" version
of local Boston politics called The
Action in the Backroom could be a lot of fun. A more adventurous
character could do a newsletter called The
Real Afghanistan. Mabye the Emerging
Diseases and Pandemic Watch would find an audience. Since there
are no advertisers to please, and they don't have to dumb-down the content to
the community average, they could be very saucy and interesting.
Nathan
Lewis
Nathan
Lewis was formerly the chief international economist of a leading economic
forecasting firm. He now works in asset management. Lewis has written for the
Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal Asia, the Japan Times, Pravda, and
other publications. He has appeared on financial television in the United
States, Japan, and the Middle East. About the Book: Gold: The Once and Future
Money (Wiley, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-470-04766-8, $27.95) is available at
bookstores nationwide, from all major online booksellers, and direct from the
publisher at www.wileyfinance.com or 800-225-5945. In Canada, call
800-567-4797.
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