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I didn’t start this blog to talk about climate change, but it seems almost impossible to talk about fresh food these days without talking about climate. There are the obvious and oft-mentioned concerns about global warming, although the EPA says the U.S. food supply will probably be fine. (Here’s just one of thousands of accounts of how President Bush has sold out the EPA, by the way.) There are the effects of increasingly severe weather, such as we’ve seen two years ago with hurricanes and this year with flooding in the East and freezes in California, Florida and across the Midwest.

Then there are the unintended consequences of ill-conceived responses to dependence on foreign oil. I’m speaking of ethanol, made from agricultural products (primarily corn at the moment). Besides the fact that corn ethanol production yields a small amount of net energy (that is, producing ethanol consumes almost as much energy as comes out of the pipe in the end), the diversion of agricultural production from food to fuel stocks means American consumers can expect higher prices for the panoply of corn-based products, from corn chips to soda pop (which use corn sweeteners) to beef (fattened on feed corn). The reports are so many, I give you a link to a Google search on food, corn and ethanol rather than a link to a specific article. That way you can choose a “liberal” report (e.g. from an environmentalist organization) or a “conservative” one, such as from business news provider Bloomberg. And now, a researcher at Purdue University notes that hogs fed a byproduct of ethanol production, rather than the corn-based feed that hog farmers have been using, will result in less-satisfactory bacon and sausage.

Now, if higher prices on beef and lower quality on bacon mean people eat less of them, that’s probably a very good thing for our collective health. Until someone makes some genuine headway on slowing down global warming, though, we can probably assume a much wider range of effects than EPA is willing to acknowledge.

Our eating habits can have a signficant effect. We all can contribute by eating more locally produced food (saving all that energy used to transport food from distant lands) and by eating less beef. Although the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” has gotten a lot of press-and a lot of laughs from certain quarters-it’s still news to a lot of people. You can read an article on the U.N. report on livestock and global warming, which gives a link to the actual report if you’re interested.