GROW YOUR OWN
Good news!!! In the very near future you won't need gasoline to drive your car! So that's great!! We don't have to pollute the environment anymore! We don't need to drill for oil anymore! We don't need to destroy the delicate balance of the Alaskan tundra, the coastal seabeds or the fragile environment of the Middle Eastern deserts! We don't need fossil fuels! We can grow our own!
Of course you've already heard of the electric car (but they killed it), the natural gas car (fleet vehicles only), the hydrogen cell car (file that under "in your dreams"). You've probably also heard of the french fry car -- Willie Nelson has a tour bus that runs on something very similar but the oil his engine burns has never fried a fry. It runs on unused, unadulterated vegetable oil -- soy, I think. And most of Latin America has been developing 'flex-fuel' cars that work well with a high concentration of ethanol which is made from corn or beets. Wow! Crops are the new 'gas.' But where will we grow it???? If you're a vegetarian you're eating veggies grown in some patch of dirt, big or small and irrigated with water from a river or an underground well. If you're a carnivore you eat animals that eat grass and grain which are grown in some patch of dirt and irrigated with water. That's the same water and dirt we'll be needing to grow the new 'gas.' Uh oh! And don't think we can skip the grains and vegetables and go for the animal proteins instead. This won't be a case of forgetting about beef and lamb while feasting on chicken. Those egg laying, fry-me-up-in-a-pan feathered cluckers all eat grain and we're giving their feed to the engines instead. There should be a few fish left in the sea and I suppose you could develop an appetite for squirrel and pigeon but a society celibrating a new fuel to binge on could hardly be expected to do something so wonderfully sane -- or efficient. Maybe we could farm gold fish in our bathtubs and learn to love sushi.
There's a solution for every problem but it usually involves a sacrifice and I've been wondering just where we'll be willing to tighten the proverbial belt to avoid becoming a society of walking, biking or horse-riding humans with better health and shapely calf muscles. We could probably stop growing 'unimportant' things like tobacco and Christmas trees, poppies and daisies -- maybe even holly and poinsettias (because I never could figure out what we need them for when x-mas is over and who would really miss 'em if we didn't have 'em at all???). But no matter how much we cut back on the growing of unnecessary things it hardly seems that we could do much more than merely keep up with the demand for land. The fact is, there's less space to grow food and are more people to feed. As populations grow we'll need more houses and business buildings land I'm pretty sure we'll want to build them on a patch of dirt because "floating cities" seem to have gone out of fashion and no one has been able to perfect the art of building castles in the sky. Apparently whoever was in charge of planning for the future of mankind run amok just assumed we would have colonized the moon by now. Judy Jetson wouldn't have to worry about something as silly as food! With fruit still growing on trees and burgers for a buck at most fast food joints, it's hard for us to imagine a real food crisis in the US. But if we have to give up food growing space to get more fuel growing space -- we might have to move the chow line. So how do you feel about eating something like, uh -- bugs?