ABSTRACT
County residents ....................................................................... 288 9.2.2 Supply model: Historical production ..................................... 288 9.2.3 Foodshed model: Land area requirements calculated
from top-down and bottom-up analyses .............................. 290 9.2.3.1 Sweeteners ................................................................... 291 9.2.3.2 Grains ........................................................................... 291 9.2.3.3 Dairy ............................................................................ 291
The world today faces enormous problems related to population and resources. These ideas have been discussed intelligently and, for the most part, accurately in many papers from the middle of the last century (e.g., Ehrlich, 1968; Meadows et al., 1972; Odum, 1971; Hubbert, 1969, 1974). However, these concepts largely disappeared from scienti‰c and public discussion, in part because of an inaccurate understanding of both what those earlier papers said and the validity of many of their predictions (Hall and Day, 2009). Today, most environmental science textbooks focus
9.2.3.4 Meats and other proteins .......................................... 292 9.2.3.5 Fats and oils ................................................................ 293 9.2.3.6 Fruit .............................................................................. 293 9.2.3.7 Vegetables .................................................................... 293
9.2.4 Energy requirements of food production and transport .... 294 9.2.4.1 Food production ......................................................... 294 9.2.4.2 Transportation ............................................................ 296
9.3 Results .................................................................................................... 296 9.3.1 Human food requirements for Syracuse and Onondaga
County ........................................................................................ 297 9.3.2 Food production in Onondaga County ................................. 297
9.3.2.1 Land under agricultural production in Onondaga County and Syracuse ............................. 302
9.3.2.2 Distance from local farms to farmers’ markets ..... 304 9.3.3 Foodshed model ........................................................................ 304 9.3.4 Energy cost of feeding today’s population ............................ 304
9.4 Discussion .............................................................................................. 308 9.4.1 Land area requirements ........................................................... 308 9.4.2 “Local” food ............................................................................... 309 9.4.3 Land quality/urban farming potential ...................................311 9.4.4 Diet .............................................................................................. 312 9.4.5 Energy inputs ............................................................................ 312 9.4.6 Potential implications of a low-energy future on
agricultural self-suf‰ciency in Onondaga County .............. 313 9.4.7 Possible impact of biofuel production on food
production ...............................................................................314 9.5 Conclusions ............................................................................................ 315 Acknowledgments ......................................................................................... 315 References .........................................................................................................316
far more on the adverse environmental impacts of fossil fuels than on the implications of our overwhelming economic and even nutritional dependence on basic resources and the implications of their depletion. This failure to bring the potential reality and implications of peak oil-indeed, the peak of most major economic and agricultural commodities-into scienti‰c discourse and teaching is a grave threat to industrial society.
