How Much Oil Do You Eat?

Photo: Magnus Johansson / Istock

By Annie Bell Muzaurieta

Over the past few years, as the green movement has grown, more attention has been paid to our food system. Pollution is rampant, we've become removed from knowing how or where our food was grown, and food-borne illness outbreaks are a constant problem.

While food might not be a focus on the presidential campaign trail (aside from bloggers watching the candidates' waistlines), Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, among other books, suggests it should be. In the New York Times magazine, he addressed the president-elect, suggesting that food must be a priority of the next administration.

Why will food become such a central issue? Pollan says food must be addressed in order to successfully reform climate change (the author says the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy or put another way, "when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases"); the health care crisis ("It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount,"--all of those cheap calories have affected public health, and our diets have to be addressed); and food has to be a focus due to its global impact.

The food riots that erupted over the past year illustrate the reach of our food policy: "It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third." Pollan says.

We know by now that federal subsidies made crops such as corn and soybeans artificially cheap: farmers were paid by the government to help keep the costs of those crops low. That led to inexpensive byproducts, such as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which is why fast food--burgers made from corn-fed beef, sodas sweetened with HFCS--is so cheap. (The movie King Corn provides a look at the history of the crop.)

The food crisis that we've witnessed over the past year suggests that things have changed. In addressing the president-elect, Pollan says, "with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close."

But never the pessimist, Pollan says that the good news is that the double crises of food and energy may create an environment in which it is truly possible to reform our food system, the current system that is "designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so."

And he's got a plan! And it involves sunlight!

He suggests weaning the American food system off of its heavy 20th century diet of fossil fuel and putting it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. It's a sun-food agenda.

If the federal government could create a system of enticing farmers to grow only those crops for which they'll receive subsidies, artificially lowering the price of them, then the feds can go the other way. Create a policy that encourages "diversified sun farming." Farmers would receive payments that reflect the number of different crops they grow or the number of days their fields are green, Pollan suggests. Encourage the planting of cover crops and the application of compost.

Pollan also suggests the reregionalizing of the food system, shortening the food chain. Need to be reminded about the largest beef recall in US history or the salmonella outbreak from peppers? Pollan points out the ramifications of such an incident should it involve a terrorist attack: "When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of a salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister or toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions."

Pollan's tips for how to begin to nurture the market and make food more affordable are basic but brilliant: four-season farmers markets; local meat inspection corps; reregionalize federal food procurement.

His ideas for rebuilding America's food culture include a second calorie count on every packaged food product indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its products, and a White House policy of one meatless day a week (the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year.)

Then we'd really have to think about what we're eating. This would all lead to the revival of farming in America, of course. Pollan says this sun-food agenda "enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment--that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both."

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Is It Ever Acceptable Not To Tip At A Restaurant?

Society has determined that service at a restaurant is worth between 15%-20% of the final bill, but is it ever acceptable not to tip?

Science tells us there is almost no correlation between tips and good service, but surveys show that Americans relish the power to tip because we falsely believe it provides an incentive to provide good service.

Let's consider a situation: you go out to one of your regular dinner spots for a snack with friends. The place isn't too busy, and you're not too hungry, so you only order a salad and a side dish. Your friends don't get their food for almost 40 minutes. You get nothing. After repeatedly flagging down the waitstaff, you still can't get your salad. Another 30 minutes goes by before your food finally arrives, around the time your friends are finishing their meal.

Obviously, it's not the end of the world and there are far more disturbing stories littering the internet. Before asking what kind of tip this service merits, let's travel with the New York Times to San Diego to visit a small restaurant called the Linkery. The Linkery's waitstaff doesn't accept tips. Instead, they levy an 18% service charge on all sit-down meals, which is split 3-1 between the waitstaff and the kitchen. If customers want to tip more, they are invited to donate to the restaurant's charity of the month.

...every so often diners at the Linkery take offense. “I’ll go over to the table and ask if there is a problem with the service,” McGuan, the general manager, says. “If there is, then I offer to remove the service charge. Almost always, the customers’ issue isn’t about the service but about not being able to handle their loss of control.”

In some instances, this restaurant with a uniform charge completely removes the service fee, resulting in no tip.

Keeping that in mind:

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Why Tip? [The New York Times]
(Photo: Getty)

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The Future of Driving, Part II: Life after driving

By Timothy B. Lee

In a world where cars can drive

In part one of our "Future of Driving" series, we looked at the current state of self-driving car technology and tried to predict how that technology would progress in the coming decades. Now we're going to assume that the technical problems we discussed can be solved and explore how self-driving cars could change society.

Some benefits of self-driving cars are obvious—less time spent behind the wheel and fewer accidents—but the consequences are likely to be much broader than that. Among the most intriguing are much greater use of taxis, more widespread use of smaller, more energy-efficient cars, the virtual elimination of parking lots, and a dramatic transformation of the retail sector.

Throughout this article we'll be linking to essays by Brad Templeton, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is currently the chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In recent months, Templeton has become an evangelist for self-driving vehicle technology, speaking and writing extensively about the topic. Many of the predictions we make in this story are based on ideas sketched out in Templeton's writings. If you're interested in more discussion of the topic, Templeton's web site is the place to go.

An important caveat before we get started: predicting the future is hard, and self-driving technology is still young enough that we're guaranteed to get some of the details wrong. One only has to glance through past predictions about the future to see how difficult it is to predict the social effects of new technologies. Nevertheless, we think it's worthwhile to spend some time thinking about the promise of this technology. We don't have all the answers, but we hope that talking about these benefits will inspire the next generation of engineers and entrepreneurs to turn the dream into a reality.

The deadly human driver

Image credit: evelynishere

Highway safety has improved steadily over the last half century. In the United States, five people died for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 1960. By 1980, cars were killing 3.3 people per 100 million vehicle miles. In 2000, the rate was down to 1.5. But progress has slowed since the turn of the century, and this may be because most of the low-hanging fruit—seatbelts, anti-lock brakes, stronger drunk-driving enforcement—have already been plucked. The introduction of advanced collision-prevention software, which we discussed in our first installment, will help to push accident rates lower. And we can expect the introduction of fully self-driving cars to push accident rates lower still.

That's important because for all our progress, we still lose far too many people on our highways. Here in the United States, there were six million car crashes in 2006, injuring 2.5 million people and killing 42,000. Worldwide, according to World Health Organization figures, cars kill about 1.2 million people each year and injure 50 million. Many of these crashes are alcohol-related: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that in 2004, 14,400 Americans died in crashes involving at least one driver with a blood-alcohol level of .08 or higher. Other crashes are caused by drivers who are fatigued, distracted, or reckless.

Self-driving cars will never be drunk, tired, or inexperienced. They should make designated drivers as anachronistic as linotype operators, freeing suburbanites from worrying about how they'll get home after an evening of drinking. Similarly, people on long road trips won't need to worry about falling asleep at the wheel. They'll be able to take naps while their cars drive for them. Hundreds of truckers die every year, and the automation of the trucking industry could eliminate the need for human truck drivers, saving hundreds of lives in the process. And far fewer teenagers will have their lives cut tragically short due to crashes caused by their lack of experience behind the wheel.

Image credit: bloomsberries

In short, a car that drives as well as the best human drivers would save tens of thousands of lives in the United States and hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. And most likely, we'll be able to do even better than that. Computers have much faster reaction times than humans do, and they will be "looking" in all directions simultaneously. Self-driving cars may be able to avoid many of the mistakes that even experienced human drivers make. They won't have blind spots, they'll have better sensors, and they will be able to react almost instantaneously to unexpected problems, giving them the ability to recover from dangerous situations that no human driver could have handled.

Dramatically fewer accidents is the most obvious—and probably the most important—benefit of self-driving technology. But self-driving technologies will also bring significant changes to peoples' daily lives. Next we'll consider how self-driving technology could transform the transportation system, reducing congestion and sprawl and dramatically improving energy efficiency.

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