Following on from the posts by Mike and S11m, here's my take on the ecological value of LCHF. While my title might be hyperbole, a low-carb, high-fat diet could dramatically improve end-to-end farming efficiency and make the world a slightly nicer place.
Unless the politicians get their teeth into it, of course, in which case it’ll be an unmitigated disaster.
First off: any diet that doesn’t work from an agricultural point of view has something wrong with it, almost by definition. The low-fat high-carb diet is utterly flawed in this respect: even in those few countries where it’s physically possible, it can only be achieved with a great deal of effort and waste.
Ethiopians or Norwegians can't eat a Mediterranean diet. Israelis can't grow acres of wheat.
As Mike pointed out, the guidelines prescribe lots of carbs not because they’re good for us, but because money and politics. S11m mentioned the heavy-handed postwar imposition of “modern technology”, in the form of pesticides (some of which dropped out of chemical-weapons programmes), fertilizers (nitrogen fertilizers were made using repurposed explosives plant), and heavy machinery. In fact, not many farmers resisted. Chemicals and machines were seen as a godsend: freedom from the drudgery of farming, and a quick fix for fertility depletion in badly-managed soils. Unfortunately it didn’t work as expected. Artificial fertilizers are a poor substitute for the complex web of biochemical processes that support plant growth, which involves fungi, bacteria, and an assortment of animals providing very specific services. Soil erosion continued apace – especially in the US, with its more dramatic weather – and the pests never really seemed to go away, necessitating ever-greater amounts of poisons, or the invention of different ones. The machines turned out to be a vast money-sink, and only slightly faster than a well-managed team of horses.
The food supply didn’t even need any improvement. In particular, market gardeners (those working less than one acre) had evolved a very efficient system based on a cunning combination of labour, brains, and horse manure. During the War, everyone was encouraged to grow something, and the idea of raising food for oneself became deeply embedded in the public consciousness (this was particularly true in Germany, where massive self-sufficient shanty towns were organised to keep the homeless alive). The UK became self-sufficient in food towards the end of WW2: shortages were due more to market inefficiencies than lack of land or manpower. The move to “modernise” farms had little to do with food security: it arose from a need to repurpose the industry of war, and a need to take back political control from a populace who had become a little too independent. People with a can-do attitude tend to realise that politicians don’t put food on the table.
The problem of soil fertility never existed in the first place. Modern vegetables do demand higher fertility than wild plants, because they’ve been bred to yield heavily, but there are plenty of heirloom varieties which can be raised without synthetic help. Soils are depleted, compacted and eroded because of the plough, which disrupts all the natural processes that lead to healthy, friable soil. Fertilizers and pesticides represent humanity’s way of fixing something that, if they hadn’t broken it in the first place, wouldn’t need fixing.
Let’s get back to carbs. Why are governments obsessed with making farmers grow more of them?
One reason, of course, is that policymakers believe that Carbohydrates Are The Primary Source Of Energy for humans. The other reason, as the vegans are fond of pointing out, is “factory-farmed animals”. The majority of carbs go to feed meat animals. Animals were taken off pasture, where they mostly fended for themselves and assisted with soil fertility maintenance. Instead, they were shut up in concrete boxes, fed unsuitable foods, dosed up with drugs to stop them dying of disease, and produced vast lagoons of manure which became a public health hazard. In the minds of economists, this is efficient. Quite how they come to this conclusion is a mystery to me, since each animal still needs the same amount of land on which to grow foodstuffs … plus a whole load of costly infrastructure which was never needed before.
So why has meat got cheaper? Simple: subsidies, directed mostly at carbohydrate-farmers and the fossil-fuel industry, and laws that allow animal factories to do vile things to their animals. The net result is that most farmers in the US now grow corn and soy because artificial pressures push them in that direction. Something similar has happened in Europe, where EU rules punish traditional farmers and heavily favour large commercial interests.
Governments do seem dimly aware of the inefficiencies in the meat industry, as indicated by their ham-fisted attempts to portray meat as unhealthy. Sadly, factory-farmed meat probably is unhealthy – or at least is of much lower quality than we had access to 100 years ago.
Food manufacturers quickly realised all that cheap corn and soy could be turned into human “food” as easily as it could be turned into pignuts. It wasn’t difficult to convince people to eat lots of carbs. “Health” foods like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes (USA) and Bircher-Benner’s muesli (Switzerland) had been around for a long time. Bread has been a desirable item since prehistory. Food scientists easily created fake food based on corn and soy and sugar that would press all our evolutionary buttons. Add some pretty packaging, and ... ka-ching! Big Ag now present themselves as miracle-workers, selflessly saving the world with sliced white bread, pot noodles, and cheap (subsidized) rice, and providing creature comforts in the form of chocolate bars, cakes, and crisps.
But it works, doesn’t it? They are feeding the world, so surely they’re right? Carbs are a viable staple for feeding 7 billion people … aren’t they?
The basic problem is this: nature doesn’t provide many carbs that humans can eat. That's why we gorge on them when we find them. Starch and sugars have a very specific purpose: to provide fuel for a germinating seed; or, similarly, for a storage organ which will sprout after a period of dormancy. They only appear in certain seasons. Producing a nutrient-dense seed is often the plant’s final act before it dies, and it represents a fairly small fraction (typically less than 10%) of the plant’s total biomass.
If you want lots of carbs, you must subvert nature. You must create dense monocultures of plants which have been carefully selected to produce lots of seeds. Such plants demand abnormally high soil fertility, and they are a magnet for pests (humans aren’t the only creatures that seek out carbs). Given all the technology that human ingenuity can throw at it, the typical wheat yield in temperate climates is 5-6 tonnes per hectare. Natural agriculture – which, as I’ll show in a moment, is an excellent match for LCHF – can do much better than that.
Without subsidy, carbohydrates would be an expensive luxury. In parts of world where people try to replicate the carbohydrate “miracle” without subsidy, bad things happen. I won’t go into the calculations here, but rice yield is so low given the inputs that are used to produce it that poverty is virtually inevitable. The tragedy is that rice is grown in climates which could yield meat and vegetables in abundance, without machines or chemicals. But rice, like wheat, is a politicised crop. My personal view is that rice is an important instrument that oppressive governments use to keep the populace poor, dependent, ignorant and docile, and to funnel money into the pockets of their friends who control the food supply.
If we drop the obsession with carbs (and the crusade against meat), we find that nature is a lot more generous than we think. Three new components are required: large animals, small animals, and perennials (trees and shrubs).
Look at any natural ecosystem, and you’ll find a mixture of different plants occupying different niches. You’ll see animals in equivalent positions, interacting with the plants in their own specialised ways. In this kind of optimised system, the biomass output is enormous – somewhere between 20-80 tonnes per hectare, depending on climate. The modern human sneers at this fecundity, because he can’t eat most of it. It comes in the form of lignified wood, cellulose, and things that are poisonous or downright unpalatable (weeds and insects, for example).
If he could look past his own nose for a moment, he might realise that this doesn’t matter. Lots of animals can eat this stuff …and we can eat them. Bacteria and fungi can digest wood and turn it into compost; insects and earthworms can eat trash, achieving something similar; insects can be eaten by poultry and turned into eggs and meat; compost feeds grasses and perennials, which can be eaten by ruminants; ruminants can provide milk and meat; and all of those animals, large and small, produce manure. More manure, in fact, than meat. Which in turn enhances the soil. We can insert a modest number of fertility-demanding plants and get a yield.
Here’s how this looks on a practical farm (mine, in this case, but plenty of other people are doing something similar):
-The land is structured for water retention using earthworks, trees, and deep-rooted grasses.
-Three sorts of trees/shrubs are planted: human yield (fruit and veg), animal yield (cut-and-carry forage), and soil fertility (biomass for compost). These generally have a lifespan of 5-50 years, so apart from the initial planting, the only effort involved is pruning and harvest.
-The entire area is planted to a cover crop. In fact regular trimming results in “improved pasture” without any planting required – low-growing grasses and other plants simply appear by themselves. They maintain soil condition and support a population of helpful insects and earthworms.
-Compost heaps are maintained on a convenient spacing: all trimmings are deposited here. “Liquid compost” is also made in barrels.
-Animals are arranged in areas where plants cannot grow (depleted/damaged soils). Over time, these soils will improve. A rotating-paddock system keeps the animals and plants healthy.
-Annual plants (familiar vegetables) are inserted into dedicated areas enhanced with compost.
The downside (politicians, at least, think this is a downside) is the amount of human labour involved. Roughly speaking, one full-time human is needed to manage half a hectare. Policymakers hate the idea of people working on farms: just as farm animals are cooped up in concrete boxes, the zeitgeist wants humans similarly confined, tapping away on computers and shuffling paper around. God forbid they should be allowed out in the sunshine to do some exercise.
The upside is the abundance of food produced, and it’s low-carb. I don’t grow grains of any sort (mainly because the birds eat them). I do grow sweet potatoes, but their primary output is green leaves. Because I have insufficient labour available, I cultivate only about 1000 square meters and have 4000 square meters of pasture. The pasture supports 6 goats and 1000m2 yields 1000kg of fruit and vegetables per year. This is far from its maximum potential. The pasture area is underutilized because of the poor soil condition: it will be a few more years until it’s fully recovered. The vegetable area could support chickens or ducks, and more crops than are currently planted, but does not, again because of lack of full-time manpower. This farm is three years old, so most of the tree crops are not yielding yet (exceptions: papaya, moringa, passionfruit, and soursop). Around year 6 I can expect avocado, mango, soapnuts, and cashew.
In time, I would expect animal protein output (meat, eggs and dairy) around 5 tonnes per hectare per year, 15 tonnes of edible vegetation, and 0.5 tonnes of oils – all naturally-raised. If that sounds like exactly the mix that you’d put on your LCHF plate, you’d be right. That’s what nature provides, with the least amount of human intervention.
You may object: but what about all that labour input? Surely it’s more efficient to have one man driving a combine across 50 hectares, harvesting corn, than to have 100 men walking around with baskets collecting eggs and beans?
This rather depends on your definition of “efficiency”. You’ve probably heard that “it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to put 1 calorie on your plate”. I’m not sure if that figure is entirely accurate, but there is absolutely no doubt that more energy goes into a modern farm than comes out of it in food value. This is the very definition of “unsustainable”. But how can that be? The answer is that for every man driving a combine or pressing buttons on the control panel of a chicken-confinement operation, there are 100 others working on apparently-unrelated tasks, enabling him to do that. There are engineers, construction workers, phosphate mines, pesticide chemists, transport companies, veterinarians and drug manufacturers, financiers and bankers … and so on.
The idea that there is a free lunch at the end of the technology rainbow is a mirage invented by salesmen. Our subsidized lunch is nutrient-depleted, tasteless, and it’s making us ill.
New way of eating
LCHF — but not Keto