This happened in my friend's henhouse this morning.

My friend Kate Hastings, who took this photo, thinks this egg froze because the hen cracked it slightly. But it also looks like the kind of expansion cracking that you can get when eggs freeze and burst their own shells. When the water in the egg white and yolk freezes, it forms a crystalline structure — and that structure isn't very tightly packed. There's lots of space between the molecules, which means that solid ice takes up more space than the liquid it replaced. If the egg freezes solid enough, it's got nowhere left to expand except outside the shell.

Eggshells, as it turns out, are not a great insulator from the cold. Chicken butts are, but chickens also don't always sit on their eggs consistently enough to keep those eggs from freezing.

One side note: You can actually thaw and eat frozen eggs. But you shouldn't thaw and eat an egg like this. That's because the shell is actually a pretty good barrier against bacteria. If a fresh egg — the kind sitting under a hen — has cracked, there's a higher likelihood of bacterial infiltration.

Think about economies of scale—the cost benefits you get for making and moving things in bulk. That works not only for cost (making non-local food often cheaper food), but it also works for energy use. It takes less energy for a factory to can green beans for half the country than it would take for us all to buy green beans and lovingly can them at home. When our energy comes from limited, polluting sources—that discrepancy matters. Plus, you have to think about places like Minnesota, where I live. In winter, local food here would require hothouse farming—something that is extremely unsustainable, as far as energy use is concerned.

Basically, I think there are benefits to local food. And I don't think the problems with local food mean we shouldn't change anything about our food system. But we have to acknowledge that the locavore thing isn't perfect, and maybe isn't as sustainable as we'd like it to be. That's why I like this Grist interview with Pierre Desrochers, a University of Toronto geography professor and author of The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet. Desrochers talks about some of the problems he sees with the sustainability of local eating and explains the nuance of his argument. It's not "local eating" vs. "change absolutely nothing, hooray for Monsanto!" And that's what makes it interesting, and important.

Q. Was there anything that surprised you as you got deeper into the issues?

A. I was surprised by the number of local food movements I discovered in the past, but I was not surprised to see that they all failed. There was a local food movement in the British empire in the 1920s. And it turns out that even the British empire was not big enough to have a successful local food movement. The first world war cut Germany off from the rest of the world, so they had to revert to local food. And of course people starved there, and they had a few bad crops, and all the problems that long-distance trade had solved came back with a vengeance.

Nobody would bother importing food from a distance if it did not have significant advantages over local food. [In the book] we talk about food miles, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the arguments — transportation is a tiny thing [in terms of climate impacts], and if you try to cut down on transportation, then you need to heat your greenhouse as opposed to having unheated greenhouses further south. Then your environmental footprint is actually more significant.

Read the rest of the interview on Grist

REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom

Participants in a rocket competition cheer after their rocket was successfully launched during the rocket festival known as "Bun Bangfai" in Yasothon, northeast of Bangkok, May 13, 2012. The festival marks the start of the rainy season when farmers are about to plant rice.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/rockets-fly-at-thai-rice-festi.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/06/whats-wrong-with-corn-ethano.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/06/whats-wrong-with-corn-ethano.html#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 22:25:01 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=153444

We grow a lot of corn in the United States, much of which never sees the inside of a human stomach. In fact, in 2010, something like a quarter of all the corn grown in this country went to ethanol production. That's a massive amount of corn grown for gas tanks. And it's a problem.

The process of growing corn is tremendously energy intensive, and it has some far-reaching drawbacks that threaten the future of vital farmlands in the Midwest. Corn crops provide steady, reliable income for farmers. But the risks likely outweigh those benefits, at least at the quantities in which we now grow corn.

In the spring of 2009, I experienced some of those risks first hand. At Smithsonian.com, you can read a excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out, my book about the future of energy. The excerpt is about Madelia, Minnesota, a small town where local farming advocates are trying to promote a more sustainable cropping system, and a better way to grow biofuels—one that provides incentives for farmers to grow less corn, not more.

In the course of reporting that story, I ran into a dust storm—a phenomenon that is related to the way corn grows and what we have to do to the soil to keep producing massive corn crops year after year.

The wind had started the day full of bluster, and it was positively furious by the afternoon, while the open, empty fields that flanked the highway offered nothing to slow the wind down. This alone wouldn’t have been a big problem. I grew up in Kansas, and I know how to steer a car through a windstorm. The issue was what I could see ahead of me—or, rather, what I couldn’t see. Out of nowhere, a gray cloud rose up to hover over the highway, swallowing semi-trucks and digesting them into sets of disembodied tail lights. I had barely enough time to realize I wasn’t looking at fog before I plunged into the thick of it.

The sun disappeared. Gravel pinged against the car windows. I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t artificially lit. In a panic, I turned on my headlamps just as I drove out the other side of the gritty haze, back into a normal, windy spring day. The “cloud” was made of dirt, and a mile or so up the road, another gray ribbon of it stretched across the horizon. I went through three or four of these dust clouds before I reached the exit for Madelia.

Even in town, the dust was not easily vanquished. I parked my car downtown, beneath the prow of a movie theater awning, and stepped out into air so texturized you could almost gnaw on it. Flecks of dust stuck in my sun block. When I opened my mouth, grit came in.

I had traveled to Madelia to meet with Linda Meschke, the woman who had become the driving force behind the Madelia Model, and I’d left my house dressed for the occasion, wearing the tidy business-casual wear of a young reporter. Those dust clouds knocked me down a peg. By the time I’d walked two blocks through downtown Madelia, my skin was turning pink, and my hair was a winded red whirl glued into place under a layer of grime. Meschke didn’t seem to mind my sorry state. Instead, she just nodded slowly and said, “It’s a little windy out here today.”

At that point, I still didn’t quite understand what I had seen. Dust clouds such as this, I knew, were related to soil erosion, but it wasn’t until I talked to Meschke that I was able to connect the dots between the dust in my hair and the goals of the Madelia Model.

Read the full excerpt at Smithsonian.com.

Read my book, Before the Lights Go Out, to learn more about efforts to localize energy generation.

This is not the best photo, but it is pretty damn mind-blowing. What you see here is Jerry Glover, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, holding the root system of a single perennial wheat plant. The photo was taken by Scientific American editor Mariette DiChristina at the Compass Summit in Palos Verdes, California.

There's more to this than just a freaky looking plant dreadlock. That root system represents something far bigger than itself: Soil health. Perennial plants build soil and protect against erosion in ways annual plants and their skimpy root structures simply cannot. It's why, since large-scale corn farming replaced perennial prairie, Iowa has lost some 8 vertical inches of precious topsoil. Glover's argument: To protect our farming resources for future generations we need to pay more attention to the potential benefits of perennial crops.

Beachgoers in Qingdao, Shandong province, China, were met with a fuzzy, green blanket of ocean last week, as the water there exploded with algae.

You've heard before about dead zones. These are patches of coastal ocean where river runoff full of fertilizer chemicals have produced massive algae blooms. As the algae die, their decomposition reduces the oxygen level of the water to the point that many fish and other aquatic life can no longer live there.

This is what a dead zone looks like, just before the death.

It's worth noting, when I pulled this photo out of the Reuters files, I could see similar shots, taken on the same beach, in 2010, 2009, and 2008. This isn't a fluke. It's an endemic problem.