Give It Away #14 Piece and Food Security Photographs by Peter Menzel Man cannot survive on bread alone. But he certainly cannot survive without bread... or at least its nutritional equivalent. Once upon a time, our ancestors simply wandered through the rainforests and picked fresh fruit out of the air, or dug protein-rich nuts out of the ground, and ate them on the spot. We can simulate the same hunter-gatherer foraging experience when we meander up and down the aisles of Whole Foods or some other supermarket, and help ourselves to marinated olives, or sample one of half a dozen different kinds of croissants. Certainly, the food cycle has come full circle, and we once again find ourselves in the gastronomical Garden of Eden, able to almost effortlessly satisfy our food requirements. Now I don't mean to spit in your whole wheat organic grain non-genetically modified corn flakes... but if you believe what I just wrote in the previous paragraph to be true, then you may be metaphorically standing on a sandy beach, soaking up the sun, facing away from the shoreline, not noticing the 100-foot high tsunami that is about to alter our reality, irrevocably. If you live in North America or Northern Europe, then you have your pick of the crop, every crop. But the crop is increasingly grown elsewhere, criss-crossing thousands of fossil fuel miles before it reaches your borders, let alone your plate. Which means that according to no less authoritative a source than the US Army, it's all going to cost much, much more in the very near future. Our situation is not unlike that of the biblical Joseph, who knew that the years of agricultural surplus would be followed by years of shortfall. According to the Torah, Joseph raised taxes through the roof, restricting the consumption patterns of average Egyptians, thereby preventing gluttonous waste in the epoch of the cornucopia. It took a totalitarian regime with a benevolent dictator, and clever experts in agriculture and economics, to have the foresight to draw up a suitable plan of action, and the political power to implement it. Three thousand five hundred years later, we aren't short on Einsteins of Agronomy -- award-winning author Michael Pollan is but one of them -- but the plutocratic political apparatus stymies any effort to execute a sustainable food policy. The truth is that while we wait for the tip-toe of the other shoe to fall, its heel has already hit the ground, and it's starting to crush communities all over the world. In the last three years, more than twenty different third-world countries across the globe experienced full-scale food riots due to rising prices. Even in the USA, if you live in an impoverished community, the food situation is dismal and deteriorating rapidly. Two summers ago, a line-up for food stamps in Milwaukee, Wisconsin turned into a chaotic free-for-all, the kind of tragic disaster that was only supposed to happen elsewhere. We've all been eating the equivalent of ten calories in petro-dollars, for every one calorie of actual edible foodstuffs. And now we're going to have to wean ourselves off of the black crack. I wish that all of the captains of industry would have spent the world's oil wealth more wisely. But at this point, instead of crying over spilled milk, let's save and not waste the little milk we have left, make sure that everyone gets their fair share of milk, and make an intelligent plan for future milk production and distribution. Pester your elected officials until they step up to the plate and take responsibility for the future of food. And give generously to the organizations that are staving off starvation for the most at-risk among us. Groups like Meir Panim and Yad Ezra V'Shulamit feed the needy in Israel, making sure that people who need it get three square meals a day. Really, it's the least we can do, considering all of the calories that we consume. And the next least thing we can do is to start saving seeds.