Hm… I don’t understand what’s “wrong” with thinking about how capitalism has shaped our consuming habits, and how things might change after the end of capitalism? 
Maybe it seems silly to focus on something like bananas, but focusing on a single commodity can reveal a lot about what the entire system looks like, the damage it’s done, and possible alternatives to it…
10 Likes
If imported bananas cost $10, then indoor agriculture is going to grow in a big way. Solar power is the cheapest on the grid, <5 cents/kWh at utility scale for new solar farms, and we’re starting to get highly efficient wavelength-specific LEDs optimized for the frequencies plants can actually used. Growing bananas indoors in Ohio is ridiculous today, but would already cost way less than $10 a piece. Capitalism can innovate around a lot of challenges. Not all. But it can figure this one out.
5 Likes
Blech. In my New Fruitopian World Order the bananas will be the first against the wall
until they are overripe and suitable for banana bread.
9 Likes
Indoor gardening takes more resources than a plant that can grow by itself outside without our help. And by resources i mean you still have to manufacture those solar panels, LED bulbs, etc vs something that’s already suited to grow in the area.
5 Likes
Yes, I’m very well aware that that’s how it currently works and has always worked and will continue to work for quite a while. (For most crops. It’s not like humans haven’t already used greenhouses forever where it makes economic sense). That doesn’t mean it necessarily takes more resources than shipping it around the world. And it doesn’t tell us how much those resources cost.
It also doesn’t mean there aren’t feasible technology paths to changing that. Plants only capture a few percent of incident light, while the combination of current PV+LEDs can already give 10-15% efficient conversion to the specific frequencies needed for growth, and rising, meaning a field has enough light to support far more plants than can actually grow there. If you need heat, well, air source heat pumps are several times more energy efficient than direct solar heating, which you still get anyway. Water can be recycled and reused with hydroponics in a way it can’t outdoors. I can’t say all of those will work out, but it would be really weird if none of them did, given how much progress we’ve been making on advances in energy and water efficiency in so many other industries. Plus indoors you get fewer pests and a year-long growing season. If nothing else, if transparent perovskite solar cells work out cost-wise the way I think they will, agrivoltaics could take off in a big way for regular outdoor farming (over the next 10-20 years), shading plants in ways that increase yield, cut water use, and generate power at net profit all at once.
Sorry for the wall of text, but this is all related to my day job, so it’s the kind of thing I spend a lot of time thinking about.
4 Likes
I agree that a variety of advances makes it easier to do this sort of thing in a way that’s less wasteful, i mainly wanted to point out the hidden cost of certain things that might be taken for granted otherwise. If i had the means i would 100% act on my lifelong dream of having a kick ass green house.
3 Likes
Sooner or later we’ll be able to grow our own.
5 Likes
Awesome. I have quite the brown thumb, unfortunately.
Well, in a few more years you’ll be able to get a self-powered one made with transparent perovskite photovoltaic glass. Also, I recently talked to a company designing gasifiers that are <1m3 in size and consume basically anything organic (ag waste, plastic, paper, wood, etc.) and output 3-7kW of electricity. They see small farms as a target audience (there are other companies making large-scale ones too).
I like to point these kinds of things out whenever I can, because there are real solutions emerging to a lot of problems that are showing we can stop using fossil fuels without causing a global economic collapse while continuing to enhance human well-being on a reasonable timescale. That tends to get a lot less coverage, and what coverage there is gets so mixed in with overhyped nonsense that it’s really hard to pick through.
5 Likes
There’s food waste regardless though. That’s the nature of agriculture. You plant a crop today to be harvested at some point in the future +/- a couple months with a yield +/- 100%. If everyone’s crop comes in at the same time exceeding what anyone could possibly consume, then there’s waste. If you deliver it at market and no one wants corn that week, then there’s waste.
The only way to avoid food waste is to plant too little and I doubt anyone is going to be arguing for manufactured famines in the name of eliminating food waste.
The idea that the farming practices themselves are wasteful, compared to the alternatives, confuses me. Modern large monoculture farms in ideal growing locations are extremely efficient compared to growing on small local farms in far less than ideal conditions. Sure, shipping produce all over involves more waste of fuel, but the alternative wastes labor.
I mean, if we wanted to avoid as much waste as possible, we’d switch to eating shelf-stable food pills instead and simply stop growing any low caloric crops altogether.
1 Like
Not really. The way you avoid waste is by building spare capacity in food processing and preservation systems. Whatever can’t be immediately consumed can be canned, frozen, dried, or used as a feedstock for any number of processes. We went through a phase over the last century where our growing ability increased faster than our ability to collect and process all the excess. But there’s a lot of work being done to fix that, and we’re getting smarter and more flexible about it, bit by bit.
6 Likes
We already divert large amounts of excess to food processing and preservation before it even goes to retail. Supply already exceeds demand for it and simply stockpiling it forever is hardly less wasteful than composting it.
The vast majority of food waste happens in homes (43%) and retail/restaurants (40%) where diversions for food processing are incredibly difficult because it happens when the shelf-life has nearly or already expired or it’s been partly eaten.
That’s not to say we couldn’t reduce waste some more, but hitting zero waste is a fantasy.
2 Likes
I agree. We’ll never hit zero waste from households and restaurants, not even close. Especially since a lot of what gets counted as waste at home is stuff that a home can’t really use. Peels, bones, gristle, and spent coffee grounds are all waste in the eyes of the studies I’ve read on the topic. I do think it’s a mistake that we see landfills as an endpoint. All organic material is still valuable with the right infrastructure in place. We’re (very slowly) starting to get (a few) companies and municipalities essentially mining it to turn into fuels and chemicals. This is still a solvable problem, just from a larger systemic perspective.
6 Likes
You’re peeling them from the wrong end!
2 Likes
It’d be cool if someday the 7/11 had local pawpaw instead.
2 Likes
I’m definitely not an expert accountant of the various internalized and externalized costs; or in a position to judge how many small local farms are genuinely different from large farming operations in ways other than size; but (aside from stuff rooted in the peculiar-but-persistent notion that agrarian society is a source of virtue for some reason) the main criticism I’ve seen of large intensive agriculture isn’t its efficiency per unit area or per worker; but suggestions that it’s fantastically good at converting plenty of Haber process nitrogen, some amount of topsoil, and whatever pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are needed to protect the monoculture of choice into mass quantities of it; but…less good…if you are concerned with either the externalized costs or the ongoing availability of those inputs.
4 Likes
Yah, I think the banana is a pretty good framework for a discussion like this. Coffee would be another good choice. Both are globe spanning commodities that depend on a very elaborate, very fragile, and extremely time sensitive transportation system run by giant monopolies. While it is goddam amazing that I can go into my local store in my tiny Canadian town in the dead of winter and buy a flawless banana, it’s well worth thinking about how that happens and what all the social and external costs of that are.
This is something that a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction gets wrong. Like in the late seasons of Walking Dead, they’re still drinking coffee. But oh honeys, the coffee would be gone in the first week, and nobody in North America or Europe would ever see it again. It would take generations to rebuild the infrastructure required for commodities like coffee and bananas. Hell, the British spent hundreds of years building a global blood-soaked empire, in no small part to ensure they could have tea at 4pm every day.
10 Likes
4 Likes
In the American civil war the south ran lost access to coffee, but people tried hard to convince themselves that things like okra or sweet potato somehow tasted the same. 
6 Likes
Max Miller did a video on that recently… and @VeronicaConnor…
4 Likes
