fuel vs. food

December 4th, 2007

I heard the other day fuel prices were gonna go up.  Mostly due to high fuel costs.  Sure, it costs more in transportation to haul the nettle harvests to market down at the organic produce sections of the Plaza, Haggens and QFC.  We nettle growers have come to expect that.
 

      But this is different.  The high fuel costs are the result of some of us South End Growers in the Nettle Cooperative breakin loose and growin our crops for Bio=fuel..  It takes about 3 gallons of gas to make 4 gallons of nettle oil.  Same as corn or switchgrass or lawnmower clippings.  I’m a dirt poor nettle farmer, not a Harvard educated economist, but I’m troubled by this.  Mexico’s already got the corn riots.  They’re turning corn into bio-fuel instead of tortillas and the poor folks can’t afford to buy hi priced tacos now.  That’s like taking Big Macs and selling the buns and the glue and the crud that makes the special sauce and the hormone enhances cow and grinding it all up to make a bucket full of McGasoline so now a super size real meal deal costs 20 bucks, but it gets 20 miles per gallon.
 

     These are slippery slopes, I tell ya.  Down at the distilleries of the South End this means Skeeter’s using nettle mash to make high octane bio-fuel instead of single stalk scotch.  The entire social fabric begins to unravel.  Families have to choose:  drive to town for groceries or stay home to picket Daddle Distilleries?  The more the groceries cost, the more you need that single stalk palliative. 
Divorce rates climb.  Traffic accidents soar.  The old growth nettle forests get decimated and global warming accelerates.  Bipartisan politics widen and bipolarity increases in direct proportion to the use of St. John’s wort to make laughing gas.  Well…. You see my point, I hope.   We got to nip this bio-fuel in the butt.  Bud.  Whatever.  Food should be food.  People are starving.  They don’t need a damn car that gets 50 mpg on boiled down nettles.  And us South Enders need Skeeters Distilleries making hi proof mood enhancers, not hi octane bio-fuel.

Entry Filed under: after the rapture (apocalypse then)