Louise Fresco談餵飽全世界

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講者：Louise Fresco
2009年2月演講，2009年11月在TED上線
MyOOPS開放式課程
譯者：劉契良
編輯：洪曉慧
簡繁轉換：陳盈
後製：陳盈
字幕影片後製：謝旻均

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Louise Fresco談餵飽全世界
我從不是一位廚師，所以不用害怕，這不會是一場廚藝展示，但我的確想要和大家談一個我覺得大家都喜愛的東西，那就是麵包，簡單，且是人類基本、最根本的主食，而我認爲很少有人能一整天不吃任何種類的麵包，除非你正在做那種加州低碳節食計畫，麵包是標準主食，而且不只是西方的飲食如此，如同我將要告訴你們的，事實上麵包是現代生活的主食，我現在要為您烤一塊麵包，但同時我也在對您演講，所以，我的生命將變得很複雜，請繼續聽下去。
首先，我需要一些聽眾參與，我的手上有兩條麵包，一條是超市的標準麵包白吐司，預先包裝好，我聽說是叫什麼「神奇麵包」（笑聲），我在到這兒來之前從沒聽過這個詞，而這條則或多或少可說是全麥、手工、小型烘培坊出品的麵包，來吧，我們來舉手投票，誰偏好全麥麵包？好，我們再來試試這條，有人喜歡「神奇麵包」嗎？（笑聲）我只看到兩位遲疑的男性舉手（笑聲），現在我的問題是，為何會有此結果？我認為這是因為我們覺得這種麵包才是可信賴的，它接近一種傳統的生活方式，一種可能比較真實與誠實的方式，這是來自托斯卡尼的圖片，在那兒，農業仍被視為是種美學，生活也是，這悠關好品味與優良傳統，但我們爲何會有這種印象？為何我們覺得這條比這條真實？我想這和我們的歷史息息相關。
數萬年前，在農業開始進化之前，我們的祖先大部份都是農夫，或是和食物生產有緊密關連，所以我們對過去的鄉村生活有一種迷思，而藝術更讓這種印象堅定不移，這是過去的神話，真實當然大不相同，這些貧窮的農夫用他們的雙手或牲畜來耕地，可是産量却只能比擬今日西非最貧窮的農夫，但我們已經多少在過去的數個世紀或數十年內開始耕耘一種對鄉村與農村過往的迷思，僅是200年前，才有工業革命產生，就在我為各位製作麵包的同時，很重要的是瞭解，那場革命帶來的改變，它帶給我們電力、機械化和肥料，並讓我們的產量增加，甚至連一些粗活，像親手採收豆子，現在都能自動完成，這些都真的是很偉大的進步，尤其是過去十年中，我們當然也設法將整個世界封包在一條緊密的超市鏈上，並置於國際貿易的網路中，這意謂著你現在吃的食物可以是來自全世界各地，這是我們現代生活的真實面。
現在，也許你偏好這條麵包，抱歉我用手摸，但這就是製作的必經過程；但事實上，真正與過去生活相關的麵包，根據史實，是這條白色的「神奇」麵包，所以，不要瞧不起這條白麵包，因爲它其實象徵著，事實上，麵包和食物已經變得充足且每個人都付擔得起，只是對於這項事迹，我們並沒有明顯地意識到，但它的確改變了世界，這條小小的麵包在某方面而言是，無味且問題多多，但它已改變了這個世界，所以，到底是怎麽回事呢？
最好的審視方法是做一些小小的簡單統計，藉由工業革命的到來，藉由農業現代化，從60年代起，近數十年內，世界的食物供給（以人頭計）已增加了25個百分比，而同期的世界總人口數也已成長了一倍，這意謂著我們現在所擁有的食物，是人類歷史前所未及，而這項直接的結果如此成功，全拜我們增加産量規模與數量所賜，如您所見，這全是事實，對所有國家而言，包括所謂的開發中國家，目前麵包的現況如何？
當食物變得充足，這也意謂著我們能降低以農業為生的人口數，在高所得的國家，平均可以降到該國人口數的百分之五或更少，在美國，僅有一個百分點的人口是農夫，這讓我們都能轉而從事其他的工作，例如：參與TED會議，而不需擔心我們的食物，這真是有史以來最獨特的狀況，餵養世界的責任從沒落在這麼少人的身上過，也從沒有這麼多人同時忽略這個事實，結果是食物變得較充足，麵包變得較便宜，也因為它變得較便宜，麵包製造商決定加入各式各樣的添加物，我們加入更多的糖，我們加入葡萄乾、油、牛奶和各種玩意兒來做麵包，讓麵包從簡單的食物化作卡路里的來源，今日，麵包已與肥胖相關，真是奇怪，它作為基本、最基礎的食物已經有上萬年的歷史。
小麥是最重要的穀物，因爲它是我們的第一種家用穀物，而且至今仍是我們所種植最重要的穀物，但現在它却成爲這奇怪的混合物，內含高卡路里，且還不只在這個國家如此，而是舉世皆然，麵包已經傳到熱帶國家，當地的中産階級現在吃的是法國捲和漢堡，通勤人士發現和稻米和樹薯比較的話，麵包更便於攜帶，所以，麵包已經從主食，卡路里的來源，變成和肥胖有關，同時也是現代感的源頭，在我們的現代生活中，在大部份的國家，麵包愈白，表示品質越好，這就是我們現在所瞭解關於麵包的故事。
但當然大量生産的代價是我們的農作規模變大，而大規模的農作也意謂著更大幅地摧毀我們的地貌，摧毀生物多樣性，這兒還有一隻孤獨的鴯鶓，站在巴西Cerrado的黃豆田中央，代價是巨大的，水污染，還有各種你早知道的事，摧毀我們的居住地，我們必需要做的是回頭認識我們的食物，這也是我要向你們提問的題目，你們之中有多少人能分辨小麥與其他穀類的不同？多少人真的會做麵包？且是以這種方式做，無需藉助麵包機的幫忙或其他現成的香料？你會烘培麵包嗎？你知道一條麵包確實的成本是多少嗎？我們已經極度脫離了麵包真正的本質，再次套用進化的理論來說，這是非常奇怪的事。
事實上，在場很多人不曉得，我們吃的麵包並非歐洲人的發明，它是由伊拉克的農夫發明的，特別是在敘利亞地區，圖中最左側有著小穗的穀物，其實就是小麥的先祖，這是一切品種的源頭，也是這些農夫在數萬年前讓我們踏上吃麵包的生活模式，因為下列因素，結果就不太令人感到驚訝，量化與大規模生產導致反向運動浮上檯面，加州這裡就正上演這類的運動，反向運動大呼：「讓我們回來吃這種麵包，讓我們回到傳統的耕種模式，讓我們回到小規模、回到農夫式的市場」，小間的烘焙坊等，棒呆了。
我們不是都這麼同意嗎？我絕對同意，我會欣然接受回到托斯卡尼去生活在這樣的傳統場景中，美食、健康的食物，但這是謬論，而謬論來自理想化，一段我們已遺忘的過去，但如果我們這麼做，如果我們想要回復傳統的小規模耕種，我們其實是在隔離這些可憐的農人和她們的丈夫，我和這其中有很多人一起住過多年，在無水電的情況下工作，試圖改善他們的食物產量，我們其實是在將他們劃入貧窮，他們需要的是實作以增加他們的產能，一些可以讓土地肥沃的方法，保護他們的農作物並銷往市場，我們不能一廂情願地認為小規模是解決世界食物問題的方法，那是奢侈的方法，僅供像我們這類能負擔，而且是當你想要負擔時才為之的人使用。
事實上，我們不要這位可憐的婦人用像這樣的方式耕地，如果我們僅要小規模的生產，就像這裡的潮流，回到食用當地食物的情况，這意謂著像Hans Rosling這樣的貧困男人將無法再吃到橘子，因為斯堪地那維亞不生產橘子，所以當地的食物生産已不合時宜了，同時，我們也不想要使偏遠地區退入貧窮的行列，也不想使都會的窮人退入餓肚子處境，所以，我們必需要找出其他的解决方案，我們面臨的一個問題是全球的食物産量必需非常快速地增加，在2030年左右翻升一倍，而背後的主要推進力其實是肉類，尤其是東南亞和中國對肉類的消耗是左右穀物價格的背後推進力，對動物蛋白質的需求不會停止，所以，我們必需再辦一場演講，討論其他的替代方案，也許有一天吧，這就是背後的推進力，我們能怎麼做？我們能找出其他方法提高生産嗎？可以，但我們需要機械化的幫忙。
我現在要做一項請求，因爲我强烈的認爲你不該要求一位小農夫整地並彎腰15萬次來種一公頃的稻米，只爲種植單一種穀物和除草，你不該要求人們在這種條件下工作，我們需要聰明、低階的機械，以避免我們在大規模機械化時已經歷過的問題，所以我們能怎麼做？我們有三十億住在城市中的人口要養，小農市場無法滿足這樣的需求，因為這些人沒有依靠小農市場的本錢，他們的收入很低，他們能受益的是便宜、負擔得起、安全且多樣的食物，這才是我們接下來20到30年必需努力的目標，但是有些法子的。
我再來介紹一個簡單的概念性分析，如果我將科學視爲控制生産過程及規模的代理者，如圖所示，左下角代表傳統農業，即規模較小且低度控管，隨著箭頭，我們看到大規模及極高度控管的農業，我們必需要做的是留住科學，甚至導入更多科學，但是導向區域型規模的農業，不只是就面積規模而言，而是貫穿整個食物網路，那才是我們應努力的方向，而最後的目的不只是應用於穀類植物，我們擁有一個完全自給自足的生態系統和園藝系統，如圖左上角所示，因此，我們需要有不同的農業科學思維。
農業科學對大部份的人而言，名聲並不好，你們之中沒有多少人是農夫，因爲它常與污染、大規模生産和摧毀環境連在一起，但這不盡然屬實，我們需要更多的科學，而非更少，而且要是有用的科學，而那一種科學是我們可以擁有的？首先，我認為以我們現有的科技可以做的更好，生物科技很好用，特別是在對抗病蟲害方面，還有機器人的例子，因為它分辨雜草的解析度能達半英寸，我們還有更聰明的灌溉系統，在不需灑水時就不會溢出半滴。
另外，我們還必需要非常理性的思考，關於比較優勢於大、小規模的差異，我們必需思考，土地是多用途的，它有不同的功用，我們必需要用不同的方法來使用土地，無論是供住宅、自然或是農業用途，我們也必需要重新檢視家畜畜養，造訪各地區及都會的食物體系，我希望停車場和地下室能有魚池，我希望有園藝景觀及溫室出現在住宅區的頂樓，我希望我們使用的能源來自溫室和穀物的發酵，以作爲住宅區的暖氣來源，我們有太多的方法能做到這些，我們無法單靠生物農業解決世界的食物問題，我們可以做的更多。
我真的想要向你們訴求的是，無論你回到你的國家，或留在這裏，要求貴國政府擬定整合的食物政策、食物的重要性等同能源安全、與環境，每一件事都息息相關，我們做得到，事實上，在一個人口高度密集的國家像河口三角洲，即荷蘭，我所居住的環境，我們已經結合這些土地的用途，這不是科幻小說，我們真的可以辦得到，甚至結合社會的感受，讓人們更能親近鄉村地區，或在當地建房子，讓慢性病人到此養病，我們能做的事真的很多，但你必需要做到本份內的工作。
因為光聽我說：「投入更多創新的科學到農業中」還不夠，你必需回到起點，思考你自己的食物鏈，和農夫聊天，你上一次到訪農村和農夫講話是什麽時候了？和餐廳裡的人聊聊，瞭解你在食物鏈中的位置，你的食物來自何處，瞭解你是這個一連串巨大事件的一份子，它讓你能放心的忙於其他事務，對我而言最重要的是，食物乃是關於尊重，我們必需瞭解當你在進食時，還有許多人仍居於這種處境，他們仍在為糊口的食物拼命。
有時我們會提出簡單的解决方案，幻想靠雙手辛勤工作，就是解決之道，但這在道德上是說不通的，我們必需要協助他們脫離貧窮，我們必需要讓他們覺得身爲農夫是光榮的事，因為是他們讓我們活命，如上所述，從來供給食物的責任都沒有落在這麼少人的身上過我們也從沒有過這等奢華地將它視為理所當然，因為它現在是這麼的便宜，沒有人曾描述的比我所說的這些更貼切，對我而言，食物的概念終究在我們的傳統中，是一種神聖的東西，它不只是營養與卡路里，而是分享、誠實與一致性，甘地說的很優美，75年前，當他提及麵包，而非稻米時，身在印度的他說：「對於一天連兩餐都得不到的人，麵包就是他們的上帝」。
我的麵包也差不多好了，烤得差不多了，我要試著不要燙到手。讓我和第一排的聽眾一起來分享，讓我與你們分享一些食物，享用一些我烤的麵包。當你在享用、品嚐的時候，請到這裡來並站起來取用一些，我要你們想想，你咬下的每一口，都將你們與過去和未來，及那些無名的農夫連結起來，還有第一條麵包，第一束小麥品種，以及今日做出這些的農夫，而你甚至根本不知道他們是誰。你所吃的每一頓都包含了來自全世界的食材，這一切讓我們感到特別的恩典，因為我們能享用這食物，而無需每天辛苦掙取。這在我看來，以演化的觀點來說是獨特的。因為我們從沒有這樣過享用你的麵包。吃吧，並感到恩典滿溢，感謝聆聽。
（掌聲）
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以下為系統擷取之英文原文

About this talk

Louise Fresco shows us why we should celebrate mass-produced, supermarket-style white bread. She says environmentally sound mass production will feed the world, yet leave a role for small bakeries and traditional methods.

About Louise Fresco

A powerful thinker and globe-trotting advisor on sustainability, Louise Fresco says it's time to think of food as a topic of social and economic importance on par with oil -- that responsible… Full bio and more links

Transcript

I'm not at all a cook. So don't fear, this is not going to be a cooking demonstration. But I do want to talk to you about something that I think is dear to all of us. And that is bread -- something which is as simple as our basic, most fundamental human staple. And I think few of us spend the day without eating bread in some form. Unless you're on one of these Californian low-carb diets, bread is standard. Bread is not only standard in the Western diet. As I will show to you, it is actually the mainstay of modern life.

So I'm going to bake bread for you. In the meantime I'm also talking to you. So my life is going to complicated. Bear with me. First of all, a little bit of audience participation. I have two loaves of bread here. One is a supermarket standard, white bread, pre-packaged, which I'm told is called a Wonderbread. (Laughter) I didn't know this word until I arrived. And this is more or less, a whole-meal, handmade, small-bakery, loaf of bread. Here we go. I want to see a show of hands. Who prefers the whole-meal bread? Okay let me do this differently. Is anybody preferring the Wonderbread at all? (Laughter) I have two tentative male hands. (Laughter)

Okay, now the question is really, why is this so? And I think it is because we feel that this kind of bread really is about authenticity. It's about a traditional way of living. A way that is perhaps more real, more honest. This is an image from Tuscany, where we feel agriculture is still about beauty. And life is really, too. And this is about good taste, good traditions. Why do we have this image? Why do we feel that this is more true than this? Well I think it has a lot to do with our history. In the ten thousand years since agriculture evolved, most of our ancestors have actually been agriculturalists or they were closely related to food production. And we have this mythical image of how life was in rural areas in the past. Art has helped us to maintain that kind of image. It was a mythical past. Of course, the reality is quite different. These poor farmers working the land by hand or with their animals, had yield levels that are comparable to the poorest farmers today in West Africa. But we have, somehow, in the course of the last few centuries, or even decades, started to cultivate an image of a mythical, rural, agricultural past.

It was only 200 years ago that we had the advent of the Industrial Revolution. And while I'm starting to make some bread for you here, it's very important to understand what that revolution did to us. It brought us power. It brought us mechanization, fertilizers. And it actually drove up our yields. And even sort of horrible things, like picking beans by hand, can now be done automatically. All that is a real, great improvement, as we shall see. Of course we also, particularly in the last decade, managed to envelope the world in a dense chain of supermarkets, in a chain of global trade. And it means that you now eat products, which can come from all around the world. That is the reality of our modern life. Now you may prefer this loaf of bread. Excuse my hands but this is how it is.

But actually the real relevant bread, historically, is this white Wonder loaf. And don't despise the white bread because it really, I think, symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all. And that is a feat that we are not really conscious of that much. But it has changed the world. This tiny bread that is tasteless in some ways and has a lot of problems has changed the world. So what is happening? Well the best way to look at that is to do a tiny bit of simplistic statistics. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution with modernization of agriculture in the last few decades, since the 1960s, food availability, per head, in this world, has increased by 25 percent. And the world population in the meantime has doubled. That means that we have now more food available than ever before in human history. And that is the result, directly, of being so successful at increasing the scale and volume of our production. And this is true, as you can see, for all countries, including the so-called developing countries.

What happened to our bread in the meantime? As food became plentiful here, it also meant that we were able to decrease the number of people working in agriculture to something like, on average, in the high income countries, five percent or less, of the population. In the U.S. only one percent of the people are actually farmers. And it frees us all up to do other things -- to sit at TED meetings and not to worry about our food. That is, historically, a really unique situation. Never before has the responsibility to feed the world been in the hands of so few people. And never before have so many people been oblivious of that fact.

So as food became more plentiful, bread became cheaper. As it became cheaper, bread manufacturers decided to add in all kinds of things. We added in more sugar. We add in raisins and oil and milk, and all kinds of things to make bread, from a simple food into kind of a support for calories. And today, bread now is associated with obesity, which is very strange. It is the basic, most fundamental food that we've had in the last ten thousand years. Wheat is the most important crop -- the first crop we domesticated and the most important crop we still grow today.

But this is now this strange concoction of high calories. And that's not only true in this country, it is true all over the world. Bread has migrated to tropical countries where the middle classes now eat french rolls and hamburgers and where the commuters find bread much more handy to use than rice or cassava. So bread has become from a main staple, a source of calories associated with obesity and also a source of modernity, of modern life. And the whiter the bread, in many countries, the better it is.

So this is the story of bread as we know it now. But of course the price of mass production has been that we moved large-scale. And large-scale has meant destruction of many of our landscapes, destruction of biodiversity -- still a lonely emu here in the Brazilian cerrado soybean fields. The costs have been tremendous -- water pollution, all the things you know about, destruction of our habitats.

What we need to do is to go back to understanding what our food is about. And this is where I have to query all of you. How many of you can actually tell wheat apart from other cereals? How many of you can actually make a bread in this way, without starting with a bread machine or just some kind of packaged flavor? Can you bake bread? Do you know how much a loaf of bread actually costs? We have become very removed from what our bread really is, which, again, evolutionarily-speaking is very strange. In fact not many of you know that our bread, of course, was not a European invention. It was invented by farmers in Iraq and Syria in particular. The tiny spike on the left to the center is actually the forefather of wheat. This is where it all comes from. And where these farmers who actually ten thousand years ago put us on the road of bread.

Now it is not surprising that with this massification and large-scale production, there is a counter-movement that emerged -- very much also here in California. The counter-movement says, "Let's go back to this. Let's go back to traditional farming. Let's go back to small-scale, to farmers' markets, small bakeries and all that. Wonderful. Don't we all agree? I certainly agree. I would love to go back to Tuscany to this kind of traditional setting, gastronomy, good food. But this is a fallacy. And the fallacy comes from idealizing a past that we have forgotten about.

If we do this, if we want to stay with traditional small-scale farming we are going, actually, to relegate these poor farmers and their husbands, among whom I have lived for many years, working without electricity and water, to try to improve their food production. We relegate them to poverty. What they want are implements to increase their production -- something to fertilize the soil, something to protect their crop and to bring it to a market. We cannot just think that small-scale is the solution to the world food problem. It's a luxury solution for us who can afford it, if you want to afford it. In fact we do not want this poor woman to work the land like this. If we say just small-scale production, as is the tendency here, to go back to local food means that a poor man like Hans Rosling cannot even eat oranges anymore because in Scandinavia we don't have oranges. So local food production is out. But also we do not want to relegate to poverty in the rural areas. And we do not want to relegate the urban poor to starvation. So we must find other solutions.

One of our problems is that world food production needs to increase very rapidly -- doubling by about 2030. The main driver of that is actually meat. And meat consumption in Southeast Asia and China in particular is what drives the prices of cereals. That need for animal protein is going to continue. We can discuss alternatives in another talk, perhaps one day. But this is our driving force. So what can we do? Can we find a solution to produce more? Yes. But we need mechanization. And I'm making a real plea here. I feel so strongly that you cannot ask a small farmer to work the land and bend over to grow a hectare of rice, 150 thousand times, just to plant a crop and weed it. You cannot ask people to work under these conditions. We need clever low-key mechanization that avoids the problems of the large-scale mechanization that we've had.

So what can we do? We must feed three billion people in cities. We will not do that through small farmers' markets because these people have no small farmers' markets at their disposal. They have low incomes. And they benefit from cheap, affordable, safe and diverse food. That's what we must aim for in the next 20 to 30 years.

But yes there are some solutions. And let me just do one simple conceptual thing: if I plot science as a proxy for control of the production process and scale. What you see is that we've started in the left-hand corner with traditional agriculture, which was sort of small-scale and low-control. We've moved towards large-scale and very high control. What I want us to do is to keep up the science and even get more science in there but go to a kind of regional scale -- not just in terms of the scale of the fields, but in terms of the entire food network. That's where we should move. And the ultimate may be, but it doesn't apply to cereals, that we have entirely closed ecosystems -- the horticultural systems right at the top left-hand corner. So we need to think differently about agriculture science. Agriculture science for most people, and there are not many farmers among you here, has this name of being bad, of being about pollution, about large-scale, about the destruction of the environment. That is not necessary. We need more science and not less. And we need good science.

So what kind of science can we have? Well first of all I think we can do much better on the existing technologies. Use biotechnology where useful, particularly in pest and disease resistance. There are also robots, for example, who can recognize weeds with a resolution of half an inch. We have much cleverer irrigation. We do not need to spill the water if we don't want to. And we need to think very dispassionately about the comparative advantages of small-scale and large-scale. We need to think that land is multi-functional. It has different functions. There are different ways in which we must use it -- for residential, for nature, for agriculture purposes. And we also need to re-examine livestock. Go regional and go to urban food systems. I want to see fish ponds in parking lots and basements. I want to have horticulture and greenhouses on top of residential areas. And I want to use the energy that comes from those greenhouses and from the fermentation of crops to heat our residential areas. There are all kinds of ways we can do it. We cannot solve the world food problem by using biological agriculture. But we can do a lot more.

And the main thing that I would really ask all of you as you go back to your countries, or as you stay here, ask your government for an integrated food policy. Food is as important as energy, as security, as the environment. Everything is linked together. So we can do that. In fact in a densely populated country like the River Delta, where I live in the Netherlands, we have combined these functions. So this is not science fiction. We can combine things even in a social sense of making the rural areas more accessible to people -- to house, for example, the chronically sick. There is all kinds of things we can do.

But there is something you must do. It's not enough for me to say, "Let's get more bold science into agriculture." You must go back, and think about your own food chain. Talk to farmers. When was the last time you went to a farm and talked to a farmer? Talk to people in restaurants. Understand where you are in the food chain, where your food comes from. Understand that you are part of this enormous chain of events. And that frees you up to do other things. And above all, to me, food is about respect. It's about understanding when you eat that there are also many people who are still in this situation, who are still struggling for their daily food. And the kind of simplistic solutions that we sometimes have, to think that doing everything by hand is going to be the solution, is really not morally-justified. We need to help to lift them out of poverty. We need to make them proud of being a farmer because they allow us to survive. Never before, as I said, has the responsibility for food been in the hands of so few. And never before have we had the luxury of taking it for granted because it is now so cheap.

And I think there is nobody else who has expressed better, to me, the idea that food, in the end, in our own tradition, is something holy. It's not about nutrients and calories. It's about sharing. It's about honesty. It's about identity. Who said this so beautifully was Mahatma Gandhi, 75 years ago, when he spoke about bread. He did not speak about rice. In India he said, "To those who have to go without two meals a day, God can only appear as bread."

And so as I'm finishing my bread here -- and I've been baking it. And I'll try not to burn my hands. Let me share with those of you here in the first row. Let me share some of the food with you. Take some of my bread. And as you eat it, and as you try it -- please come and stand up. Have some of it. I want you to think that every bite connects you to the past and the future, to these anonymous farmers, that first bred the first wheat varieties, and to the farmers of today, who've been making this. And you don't even know who they are. Every meal you eat contains ingredients from all across the world. Everything makes us so privileged, that we can eat this food, that we don't struggle every day. And that, I think, evolutionarily-speaking is unique. We've never had that before. So enjoy your bread. Eat it, and feel privileged. Thank you very much. (Applause)