herein lies a metaphor about which i am excited

Sometime soon, if/when I'm able to fully wrap my head around the wonderfulness that was the wedding I attended last Saturday in Asheville, NC, I will write something here about that. For now I will say that this is one of those couples whose coupledom and marriage are so incredibly right that you can't help but believe that the world is and will be a better place for it. Seriously.

For now, I have some thoughts bubbling over about all this sudden talk about the overlap between food shortages and biofuel production, so I'm going to share the spillage (what else is a blog, anyway, but a drainage ditch for the brain?).

For starters, some basic assumptions on my part:

• Food shortages = bad.
• Cleaner transportation = good. (Using less transportation, not to mention buying less crap that we don't need - and therefore not needing it shipped around the world to us = even better.)

With these (arguably not-at-all) "sudden" food shortages making headlines, there seem to be conferences and press releases and petitions and crisis meetings about biofuel production popping up all over the place. And I wondered why, if the problem is food shortages, everyone was talking about biofuel. As usual, Oxfam gave me a good place to start. Seems that many countries whose land is conducive to growing biofuel crops - things like corn, sugarcane, and oil palm - would be more than happy to supply this lucrative new market, and the sooner the better. So they're doing things like pushing poor farmers off their land and, oh, cutting down ancient rainforests to clear land for quick cultivation.

Ironic, huh?

OK, so...

• Doing bad things in the name of good things = bad.
• Potentially good things leading to other, larger problems = bad.

But I can't just accept that these issues automatically make biofuels bad. What about, say, cows? Having grown up in the heart of the U.S. cornbelt, where almost none of the corn goes to feed people (other than by way of a cow's digestive system), I know a little about feed grain and beef consumption. The figures vary, but no one can argue that it takes far, far more grain to feed a cow (or pig, chicken, etc.) that will eventually feed a person than it does to just feed a person.

Moreover, that person most likely lives in the Global North (aka "First World," aka The West), where our meat consumption pretty much just serves the purpose of giving us heart disease and making us fat. Who wins on that one, other than industrial beef producers and giant agrochemical companies?

I guess I'm asking why biofuels - a product that could go a fair way toward helping us mitigate the peak oil crisis, which seems like it has to be a good idea - seem to be the main target in this debate over food shortages. Oxfam's analysis seems solid on every count, but why don't they have another paper right next to it urging world vegetarianism? And a corollary campaign to convert the land now used for cattle grazing and feed cultivation into biofuel production? Can someone point me to evidence that biofuels are really the worst culprit here? (I mean it, leave comments! Tell me!)

This is not, of course, to say that it's all about finding The One Cause - be it biofuels or meat consumption or whatever else - and pretending that everything else is therefore OK. There are clearly some big problems with biofuel production, and as Oxfam itself says, there is also great potential. And there are definite problems with beef and other meat consumption (along with its great potential for... triple bypass surgery?). If I'm sure of anything, it's that neither biofuels nor cattle feed nor any one thing is really The Problem. We just hate to admit that there might not be a simple solution (once we've been forced to admit that there's a problem at all).

• Oversimplifying complicated issues = bad.

Update: Clearly the UN reads my blog.