So let’s talk for a bit about what “sustainable” means. But before talking about sustainable at the level of food and food production, we should first consider the sustainability of ideas.
One thing that is not really sustainable is fear mongering. That is why faddists are nomadic. They stay camping on one fear fad until their cattle have grazed it out, and then they move on to the next one. In the 19th century, for example, there was this thing called Fletcherism — the practice of learning how to masticate your food, and I mean mashticate it. Overweight people often bolt their food, and we shouldn’t do that, and besides the reason God gave us 32 teeth was because each bite needs to be chewed at least 32 times. Sounds like something you could learn on the Internet, but they didn’t have that back then, so we are left wondering where it came from. Everybody is all about it for a while, but then something happens, like facts coming out, and rather than stay and deal with the facts, it is time for those who love their gypsy ways to move on.
In the nomadic lifestyle, the location is not sustainable, although the practice of moving from place to place can be carried on (at least by some) for quite a while. Part of the trick is to be able to get the true believers to not remember that you are trying to get them to drop the very thing that they picked up ten years ago because you demanded it. Butter, no, margarine, no, no margarine, butter again! The chicken skin is fatty, fatty, fatty, and what are you eating all that industrial skinless chicken for, you doof? Split wood, not atoms, but turns out that wood fires make lots of smoke. The coming ice age is coming, the globe is warming, and the science is settled, no, wait. Turns out the globe got so hot it cooked the books.
This is not about food directly, but allow me to make a prediction here, because it illustrates this mindset wonderfully. Right now, wind power is sexy and cool, and every visual image of the modern wind generators is propaganda designed to make you think majestic and sustainable thoughts. Kind of like the British Israelites who thought the smoke stacks of the Industrial Revolution were belching forth the Shekinah glory. But anybody who drives down the Columbia basin with eyes open should be able to tell you what a blot on the landscape they are (an impressive blot, but a blot nonetheless). However, currently it is a most cool blot. But here’s my prediction — that impression will turn within ten years or so, and wind generators all over tarnation will become a silent and perfidious testimony of the avarice of American industry. The nomads have short attention spans.
You can tell that the gypsies are going to have to move soon when the townspeople (who liked them for as long as they can make a buck trading with them) start to make fun of them.
Now let’s talk (briefly) about the real issue behind sustainability in food and food production. It is popular to point to short-sighted activities in the private sector as examples of non-sustainability. And the stupidity of man certainly can produce such examples — whether clear-cutting, strip-mining, passenger pigeon shooting, bleaching and burning the soil with fertilizers, and so on. But in the world God made, all such dumb activities have a price tag. The real threat, the real danger, is that someone will develop an apparatus designed to keep those who incurred the cost from paying the price.
That apparatus is called the regulative state, and those who call for that apparatus to be expanded are those who are therefore the chief enemies of sustainability. In the long run we know (by definition) that that which cannot be sustained will not be sustained. But if we shuffle the costs off onto that poor mutt, the taxpayer, to the tune of katrillions, it will not be long before we won’t know who did what, who owns what, or who pillaged what. The whole thing is unsustainable. Government with a thyroid condition is unsustainable. Every enviro, every foodist, every faddist, who therefore cries out to their savior (the one with the thyroid condition) to “do something” is a central, driving contributor to the myth that we can sustain an unsustainable lifestyle. If you want the best and most recent example of true unsustainability, take a look at Obama’s budget.