The Single-Use State

On Iowa, abundance, and what we keep choosing to burn

It’s finally here. The time of year I always wait for.

That stretch where spring tips into summer and the days start doing real work again, when the sun reaches down into your still-frozen bones and thaws them out whether you’re ready or not. When the rhubarb and asparagus come in, and the eggs start piling up again. When you can feel the abundance of it, right there on the counter.

It doesn’t look like much at first. A handful of asparagus, a carton filling faster than you expected, a meal that starts to come together without much effort. But it keeps going. The next day there’s more, and the day after that.

We humans are used to thinking in terms of limits. What’s running out, what costs too much, what we need to stretch. But this abundance of nutrition is something else entirely. In essence, it’s sunlight turning into food. Heat settling into the soil and coming back out in ways you can hold in your hands. Energy arriving every day whether we make use of it or not.

There’s no shortage of it, the sun.

Every calorie we eat starts there, moving through plants and animals and soil, getting stored and passed along until it becomes bodies that can work and think and carry kids and make dinner at the end of the day. We spend a lot of time acting like we’re the ones making all this happen. Building systems, fixing fences, managing inputs and outputs. But the energy was already arriving long before we touched any of it. The sun is doing the real work.

And then you start to notice what we choose to do with that abundance.

Here in Iowa, we grow a lot of energy. You can feel it standing next to a cornfield in August, tall and green and loud with insects, a whole season of sunlight sitting there waiting to be used. Most of it is already spoken for by way of ethanol. A “homegrown fuel.” It gets planted, fertilized, harvested, hauled, processed, blended, and burned, all so it can pass through the system exactly once and then disappear. Single-use energy.

There’s a lot that goes into that one pass. Land, water, time, infrastructure, policy, belief. Incredible amounts of chemicals. Entire communities built around the promise that this is the best use of what we grow.

All that sunlight, captured over a season, released in one moment inside an engine that’s likely taking you to a job that you hate that is barely making you enough money to put the food on the table that is grown somewhere else.

We built an economy around burning through things once. Iowa knows how to do this better than almost anywhere. We do it with topsoil and diesel and small towns whose best years are behind them. We do it with people too, asking them to give everything they have to systems that rarely love them back.

Coffee instead of sleep. Convenience instead of nourishment. Jobs that hollow a person out and still leave them standing in the grocery store doing math in their head. Whole communities organized around staying just functional enough to clock back in tomorrow morning.

We’ve all been paying attention to the news of tankers and shipping routes and the Strait of Hormuz, places most of us couldn’t have pointed to a month ago. You start to realize how much of our daily life depends on something far away staying open. It all feels distant until it lands somewhere closer.

Meanwhile, the sun keeps showing up here. Same fields, same roads, same quiet, steady offering of more than enough. We have systems that know how to turn that into food, into something that feeds people and keeps going, something that builds on itself. And we have systems that take that same energy and run it straight through once.

I keep thinking about that when I’m outside lately. About how much energy arrives here every single day. About what happens when a place forgets the difference between using something and exhausting it. About how easy it is to build a life around depletion and start calling it normal.

The sun will be back tomorrow either way.

The question is whether we keep building everything like it won’t be.

Mallory DeVries is an Iowa-based writer and food system practitioner focused on how policy decisions shape food, water, and rural communities. She works in food systems communications, including with the Iowa Food System Coalition, and operates a small poultry farm in Northeast Iowa. This essay reflects her independent analysis and does not represent the positions of any organization.

Photo by Bret Lama on Unsplash