Pizza: Part of the Culture (and the Nature) of St. Olaf

Kendra Smith (`99)

Pizza is part of the lifestyle at St. Olaf. You've seen the boxes lining the halls on the weekends. In 1997, Americans ate 23 pounds of pizza per capita. That translates to 100 acres of pizza every day, or 350 slices every second. Of all of our everyday actions, eating links us most directly to the planet. When we eat food, we participate as a predator in an ecological cycle. When we grow it, we nurture the nature around us. In the One Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka writes, "Food is life and life must not step away from nature." In this article, I'd like to trace the natural and cultural footsteps of the pizza that comes to your door.

When we order a pizza, we usually eat it for a late night study break or to party, not to fulfill one of our meals. Americans, even college students, can afford to eat far beyond our daily sustenance. We eat five times as much grain per person than the 2.5 billion people in the world's poorest countries, most of it indirectly in meat, milk, eggs, and alcoholic beverages. We overeat all other nations in calories, proteins, fats, sugar, and processed foods and our appetites are continually increasing. In 1980, Americans' annual per capita food consumption was 84 pounds; by 1995, it was 101.6.

Part of our country's eating disorders come from food's centrality to our entertainment culture. Advertisers have helped us to associate food with fun. As the connection between food and entertainment tightens, a food's nutritive value becomes less important than its image and popularity. Food loses its status as the sustainer of life and becomes just another dispensable and disposable product to elevate a person's status.

The Crust

The crust of your pizza contains flour, oil, sugar, salt, water, and yeast. The primary ingredient, flour, comes from wheat. The wheat in your pizza crust came from Kansas , the leading producer of wheat in the United States . Until the 1870's, the land that grew your pizza was home to a network of prairie grasses, which supported bison, elk, prairie dogs, and American Indians. Today, it's covered with cropland and creosote.

To produce your pizza crust took a chunk of the earth's crust. For every ton of grain harvested in the United States , we lose 6 tons of soil. Most of this dirt goes into nearby streams and rivers, where the increased sedimentation threatens fish and other aquatic species. The loss of soil has economic, not just ecological effects. For every inch of topsoil lost, wheat yields fall 6%.

On the prairie, fallen grass stalks and bison manure returned nutrients to the soil, and prairie dog burrows funneled water back to their aquifers. Modern agriculture depends on fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation to do these things-with environmental consequences. Excess fertilizer washes away with soil, polluting lakes, rivers, and groundwater sources with nitrogen and phosphorous. Too much nitrogen can overfertilize aquatic areas. As plants take over the water, they take up the oxygen and block out sunlight, which kills the fish population. When nitrate concentrations in drinking water are too high, they also pose health risks for infants and small children.

Today, tractors roam the plains instead of bison. As the average farm size grows, so does the size of tractors and their environmental impacts. As they plant, harvest, plow, and disc fields, they emit carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and hydrocarbons. Tractors also compact the soil, making it more prone to erosion. In the last century, the farm has become less dependent on the natural fertility of the soil, quantity of water, and slope of the land, and more dependent on the availability of gasoline, pesticides, herbicides, and irrigation. Rather than adapt our agricultural system to the land, we've reformed and altered the land to meet consumer demands. It's no wonder that we have trouble seeing the nature in our food when the way we grow it so often defies natural processes.

The Sauce

Once the crust has been rolled out, we slather it with sauce. Pizza sauce contains tomatoes, herbs, corn syrup and other additives and preservatives. The average American consumed 86 pounds of tomatoes and tomato products in 1990. 80% of that consumption was in processed tomatoes and tomato products, like pizza sauce. The more foods are processed, the greater their environmental cost. After they were grown, your tomatoes were cooked, pureed, processed, prepared, packaged, and transported. Food production takes about 16.5% of the energy in the United States , but on farm production only uses 3%. The other 13.5% goes to manufacturing, marketing, transportation, and food preparation. Each of these processes compounds the amount of waste from your pizza-from fossil fuel emissions to solid waste. Food packaging makes up almost one-third of the solid waste stream.

The Cheese

Pizza wouldn't be complete without this stringy, clingy topping. The two cups of cheese atop your pizza used 22 cups of milk. The cows who produced this milk grazed in Wisconsin , where they converted sunlight, grass, and water to milk.

Farmers in earlier eras had a cow or two to provide for their own use. Today, if farmers have dairy cows, they probably have a whole herd. To meet greater food demands of larger herds and to produce large quantities of milk, dairy herds today eat almost as much grain as they do grass. As we convert pasturelands to croplands to grow grain, soil erosion, water pollution, and petroleum inputs increase.

When humans eat grain directly, we harness all of its energy. When we eat animal products and the animals eat grain, however, only a fraction of the plants' energy reaches our mouths because animals use and excrete the rest as waste. The more animal products that top our pizzas, the less energy efficient our eating habits become. It takes 10 calories of plant energy and 100 calories of hydrocarbons to produce one calorie of meat energy.

Larger dairy operations do not only increase the amount of milk produced, but also the amount of waste. When only a few cows grazed in the pasturelands, their manure was dispersed over a large area that could absorb the excess nutrients as fertilizer. In large concentrations, however, animal manure releases methane, a greenhouse gas. It also contributes to the nitrogen content in our water stream.

To eat is to live. Eating is one of the basic biological processes that all organisms share. When we eat, then, we should recognize our likeness to other natural species, or at least be reminded that our very survival depends on other living organisms. Eating should be a mindful, not just a physical, process. Too often, though, we eat without acknowledging the living processes behind every mouthful. When we divorce our food from its living origins, we eat a diet horribly undernourished in conceptual content. To be filled and to be fulfilled, we must be participate in nature's process of food production with minds and bodies alike.

Click here for a longer analysis of "The Ecology of Pizza".