Reading The Lettuce Leaves

Today, I bought lettuce. The selection was pretty poor, with only a few, wilted heads available. I'm assuming that's a product of the ongoing drought in California. I’m not sure how many people are aware of how much we rely on California for food. We think of it as being all about the entertainment and technology industries, and other than that, it’s all surfing, earthquakes, and mountains. But they also produce half of America’s fruits and vegetables. That makes me wonder: what is the rest of the U.S. doing? If California provides food and ideas, and China makes stuff, what are the other 49 states spending their time on?

But back to dry, dry California. It’s slowly dawning on people that there isn’t going to be an easy solution anytime soon, so they’re going to have to think about where they can cut water use. And a lot of people are looking at agriculture. It uses most of California’s water.

The Economist, for instance, demonizes farmers for taking so much water for something that makes up such a small part of the state’s economy. That sounds good, as long as you don’t remember that it’s providing half the country’s fruits and vegetables, so perhaps that is worth forcing someone in Anaheim to water the lawn every-other week.

We allocate resources in our society with a mixture of capitalism and government policy, and the result often doesn’t make that much sense. In this case, it seems to be the worst of both worlds: water use doesn’t make sense according to cold economic equations, and it’s not exactly environmentally conscious either. This is one of those cases where it becomes hard to tell the political sides apart. Conservatives would point out that deregulating water prices would lead to more efficient use, because water would be too expensive for water-intensive uses. And that would probably lead to reduced water use, and benefit the environment, which liberals would like. But it would also price the poor out the market, which they wouldn’t like. And once that Anaheim suburbanite can’t water the lawn, conservatives will sour on the idea too. So this is one of those frustrating issues where we can’t use a knee-jerk solution, and will actually have to think about it.