It's a fine hobby if you enjoy gardening and find satisfaction in the honest simplicity and hard work of digging over soil, weeding, and spreading manure.
But the truth is: supermarket food is incredibly cheap, and you'll be putting in 50 hours of labour to grow $20 worth of vegetables.
If you enjoy the process and don't mind not getting much output, by all means enjoy it as a hobby. But as a way to feed the nation? I'm skeptical.
Therefore, I’m not saying we should copy the Victory Garden from WWII verbatim, but use it as a model for how every person can use their backyard to combat climate change.
The point is not to replace all of agriculture, but find ways that, collectively, individuals can make a dent in the problem. Even if it’s as simple as planting more oak trees and fruit trees.
But, some of the comments here lack imagination (to speak kindly of the some of the negativity and snark in some of the other replies) in how we could take a 20th century idea and update it for today. We have more technology available, and more knowledge.
My wife and I have been mostly vegan for a year for health reasons and it’s surprisingly easy. Throw on the eco benefit and it’s a very good feeling. Very worth it.
Surprisingly little about vegan promotional stuff gives practical advice. It's mostly talking about how wasteful meat is and how foolish meat-eaters are.
Where is practical material about daily eating habits? Like, what should an athletic teenager eat, how much, and how often? Preferably with pictures of actual normal daily food, not "here's an arcane recipe requiring twelve ingredients and ten steps that you will eat once and forget about". And preferably with approximate nutritional value.
For adults it's probably pretty easy simply because adults don't need a lot of food to be healthy, and can skip meals without much downside. Adults are also in many ways less busy. A teenager needs food in the morning rushing to school, and probably needs to pack lunch also because there probably isn't a real vegan meal available at school to buy.
If you do a cursory search of vegan material, or only pay attention to stuff that pops up on your Facebook/Reddit/HackerNews/Twitter feed, you'll definitely get a lot of "meat = bad"-type material. However, if you put in a little more effort there's a lot of good material available - from recipes, to nutrition advice, to guides on what products are vegan/are not.
Hint: I've found appending the term "vegan" to my Google searches for recipes tends to work quite well and yield healthy, reasonable, scalable meals. By putting in the work, I've gotten a bunch of YouTube channels, saved recipes I like, and nutrition advice.
More importantly, a recipe doesn't tell you how much or how often you should eat it in your diet.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1...
> The present paper argues that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics ignores or gives short shrift to direct and indirect evidence that vegetarianism may be associated with serious risks for brain and body development in fetuses and children. Regular supplementation with iron, zinc, and B12 will not mitigate all of these risks. Consequently, we cannot say decisively that vegetarianism or veganism is safe for children.
I seriously recommend you read the entire review. I do not think it's something that can be trivially solved with supplementation. Eg:
> The AND says that “[v]egans must regularly consume…B-12-fortified foods or B-12-containing supplements,” and “[m]ost vegetarians should” do the same (Melina, Craig, and Levin 2016). The results of Herrmann et al. (2003) suggest that even with supplementation vegans may still tend to cluster in the deficient-to-borderline-deficient range. Vegetarians can achieve adequate B12 levels with supplementation, but some are still in the deficient and borderline-deficient range. Whether it is realistic for vegetarians/vegans to maintain adequate B12 levels throughout their entire childhood via supplementation is an open question.
> The consequences of B12 deficiency in childhood for brain and body development are extensive, severe, and can be irreversible. Potential consequences include (among many others) impaired cognitive development/school performance, depression, weakness, fatigue, nerve damage, and failure to thrive (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Rasmussen, Fernhoff, and Scanlon 2001). Breastfeeding infants whose mothers are vegetarian/vegan are also known to be at risk for B12 deficiency (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Kühne, Bubl, and Baumgartner 1991; Roschitz et al. 2005; von Schenck, Bender-Götze, and Koletzko 1997).
Not only that, he is against vegetarianism on the base of it being a thing liberals do.
Using regenerative farming, cows can even be net carbon negative, meanwhile a lot of human feed uses artificial fertilizer which is a big contributor to carbon emissions.
See White Oak Pastures for an example (verified by third parties): https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019...
The fact is, our current system not only ignores the negative externalities of (animal intensive) agriculture — we subsidize it. That’s why I think a carbon tax is a good idea. It would mean meat would become more expensive. This angers a lot of people. But if we get serious about measuring the actual environmental effects of agriculture, it needs to be reflected in the cost. To me, if we solve this problem the world would eat a lot more plants, and the meat that is consumed would be produced by carbon negative, regenerative practices.
Land that is capable of storing carbon is generally great farmland since the process in carbon sinks is what leads to humus.
1: https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains/control-green-bridge-pest...
I suspect there's zero chance that this type of sentiment could be harnessed for "Hey, let's offset carbon emissions [of whom the #1 emitter is our chief political rival, China]"
In fact that's the biggest problem with broadening support for decarbonization in general. The largest share of global carbon is emitted by countries like India and China, which billionaires exported thousands of American jobs to, profiting from looser environmental regulations in the process. Of course the average American outside of the SF ivory tower is skeptical about changing his or her own habits to clean up that mess!
India emits about 7% of global emissions. The United States emits about 16% [1].
Per capita India emits about 1/9th what the US does.
[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
I still think the basic thesis I am driving at holds, instead of cleaning up their act 20 years ago, multinational corporations shipped all of these polluting jobs to nations where it was OK to pollute, acting as a sort of escape valve which allowed them to continue belching carbon into the air and keep their profits high.
US and EU industry are among the cleanest in the world and asking the working class in these places to make more sacrifices is a slap in the face which has been going on for years. The Kyoto Protocol established no carbon targets for developing countries. The Paris Agreement established targets but they were laxer than the targets for developed countries.
This is a decarbonization strategy designed to optimize the profits of multinational corporations. If the working and middle classes don't push back it will continue, but corporate-owned media is ready to put Greta Thunberg on stage at every opportunity and shame you for questioning any part of the party line on climate change.
Whether or not that felt like a luxury at the time is kind of irrelevant from an accounting perspective but important from a political perspective.
That said, for someone in the U.S. to try and pass off responsibility to a country emitting three times less per capita [1] seems borderline absurd to me. And that's not even accounting for the fact that -- as you point out -- much of China's emissions are exported from the U.S and EU. If the U.S. had the cleanest industry and its people had already made significant sacrifices in the name of climate protection we should see that the U.S. has comparatively low per-capita emissions. It clearly doesn't.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
US is 16.1 metric tons per capita in 2018. The only countries or territories higher than the US are Kazakhstan (16.8), Australia (16.8), Luxembourg (16.9), Oman (17.6), Saudi Arabia (18.6), Estonia (18.6), Gibraltar (21.8), Bahrain (21.8), United Arab Emirates (22.4), Kuwait (23.9), Trinidad and Tobago (26.2), New Caledonia (26.2), Qatar (38.2), Curaçao (52.1), and Palau (58.0).
The EU average is 8.6. China is 8.0. India is 1.9.
I don't see how the US qualifies as among the cleanest.
If you imported 200 million people into the US in poverty conditions and did nothing to improve their situation, then all of a sudden US per capita emissions would look great too.
In the worst case scenario if you attach policy to this metric you might see states gaming it by deciding to make sure their poor people stay that way (probably already on the minds of policy makers in some authoritarian states).
Admittedly I don't have numbers handy, but I think it would be better to look at emissions generated per dollar of economic output, particularly in industries that generate the most emissions. Then you can start inferring judgements about whether it's better for humanity to open a new factory in China or in the USA, and those two states have to compete on cleanliness if they want to grow their economic output. I bet this sort of measurement would paint the US in a much more favorable light than per capita (and the EU even better). If adding the next $100B to the world economy in the US or EU is cleaner than adding it in China, why shouldn't we push for that?
>While Victory Gardens were portrayed as a patriotic duty, 54% of Americans polled said they grew gardens for economic reasons while only 20% mentioned patriotism. (which cites the book Eating for victory : food rationing and the politics of domesticity)
Combined with the produce shows and competitions mentioned, I'd put indirect social pressure and saturation advertisement above the patriotism angle with this in mind. I'd wager that if there was a push to have people grow their own veg again, citing economic reasons, and calling them "freedom gardens" or some such, we could see a similar level of success.
Everybody going back to farming is a way to use the unemployed I guess. Maybe it'll have a comeback once we've automated everything (we're well down that path now).
From a policy perspective, Victory Gardens [2] were a successful strategy during WWII. It would be great to mobilize a similar effort to get people growing food in their own backyards again, and reduce the amount of monocrop farming and all the global transportation and chemical fertilizer production that goes along with it.
1: “The Carbon Farming Solution”
2: Victory Gardens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden