Powerdown Toolkit #6: Deconstructing Dinner

This is the introduction to  week six of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Center in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.

Deconstructing Dinner: Food Miles, Trade and Food Systems

Subject

Food is energy. Nowhere is this truth seen more clearly than in the conflict for land and resources between food for the hungry in the developing world and biofuels for the energy-hungry motorist in the industrialised nations. {Murphy, P. Plan C}

Since the second world war, agriculture has become a system for turning fossil fuels into industrial foods { Pfeiffer, D. A. Eating Fossil Fuels 2006}- or, as Michael Pollan would have it, “food-like substances”. { Pollan, M. In Defence of Food 2008}

This has taken a huge toll on the fertility of soils, which have become more like sponges for absorbing fossil fuels rather than the complex organic systems, full of billions of microrganisms, that have sustained life on Earth the past 2 billion years.

The Green revolution has essentially been a way of forcing greater volumes of produce from a given area of land through use of oil for pesticides and herbicides and natural gas for the production of artificial fertilisers. It has been calculated that it takes on average 10 calories of fossil energy to produce one calorie of food.

It can be seen therefore that an energy crisis will also mean a food crisis. Such an event nearly happened in the UK in 2000 when a politically motivated truckers strike had the supermarket shelves going bare and Britain on the verge of a famine after just a few days, a result of the “just in time” policies of most of our food system.

How has this precarious state of affairs been permitted to develop? The answer may lie in the separation of the consumer from the food producing process. While in the past- and still in the Global South- most people had direct involvement with the land, and had a responsibility to ensure it could continue to feed them well, the modern consumer is divorced from the struggle of the farmer and is only concerned with price. The result has been that food has become just another commodity, rather than the very sustenance of our lives it is in reality.

In the future, not only will food be more expensive- and we will have to value it more- but far more people will need to become involved once again on food production. {Heinberg 50 Million farmers}

Response

We can distinguish between four types of cultivation; they form a sequence:

Industrial→ Industrial Organic→ “Beyond Organic” → whole system/permaculture

The food system of the future will need to be resilient; resilience increases towards the right of the sequence.

(1)  Industrial.

This is conventional industrial agriculture, shaped by its recent experience of unlimited cheap energy.  The technology derived from that has made it possible for a drastically reduced number of farmers to produce a much larger quantity of food.  Farmers have had to use every method available to them, including industrially-produced fertilisers and pesticides, biotechnology, hybrid strains and the elimination of natural ecosystems which stand in the way. (2)  Industrial Organic.

Industrial organic conforms, so far as is possible, with the recognised standards of organic farming, which forbid the use of industrially-produced chemicals either for fertility or for the control of disease, pests and weeds.  Instead, it uses crop rotations, crop residues, and composted manures from animals, along with legumes to fix nitrogen, and biological methods of pest control designed for the particular place and ecosystem, along with standards of environmental protection and animal welfare. Big industrial organic farms may, however, still rely on relatively high fossil inputs as measured by plate of food; use cheap migrant labour; involve a high impact on the environment; involve long distance transportation and refridgeration.

(3)  Organic Ecosystem.

The organic ecosystem is at present in the shadows, being hardly used except in pioneering and very small-scale local systems The Organic Ecosystem does not merely produce without certain inputs; it manages an ecosystem.  It relies on the small scale, and on a complex interlinked system of crops and livestock, water and natural habitats in a widely diverse farmscape.  It aims to sustain itself within closed systems, conserving and building fertility.  It uses networks of reciprocal protection between species, forming small-scale but diverse coalitions for mutual defence against diseases and pests.  The central principle is the care of the soil.  Permaculture principles can be seen at work here.

A good example is described by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). Joel Salatin’s farm integrates pasture, chickens, cows and the soil food web in an intricate dance: the cows are moved every day; three days later, chickens are brought in to feed on the fly larvae that live in the manure; many different kinds of grass are grown; pigs are used to help turn and aerate compost; and so on. This example may represent best practice for mixed farming, but requires considerable knowledge only available to those who live close to their land.

(4)Whole system/permaculture. Permaculture- or “Permanent Agriculture”- was developed in the 1970s by Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.  The core concept of permaculture is to design human systems of land use and food production by mimicking natural systems and processes.

This system integrates the best of organic and “beyond organic” but involve the whole community which shares responsibility for food production. Home gardens may provide much of people’s salads and fruit starting right at the back door; allotments, CSA’s, community gardens and school gardens involve the whole community in food production as part of their daily lives; “Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes” include food production throughout the town and city. {Viljoen, A. Continuous Productive urban Landscapes 2005}

Permaculture also includes specific food producing techniques and strategies based on an integration of humans and natural processes. These include:

-avoiding bare ground which can deplete the topsoil by the use of mulching and green manures;

-avoiding turning or tilling the soil, which disturbs the soil structure;

-the maximum use of tree crops and perennial edibles

-use of vertical space for climbing plants, increasing edge, conservation of water in swales.

These permaculture principles find their most complete expression in the Edible Forest Garden or food forest, the concept of a food producing garden that mimics the structure and diversity of a natural woodland or forest, with several layers of food producing plants including trees, shrubs, climbers, ground cover and edible fungi.

These approaches keep the food supply as local as possible; involve all sections of the community to some degree; recycle organic waste throughout the landscape to build and maintain fertility; and achieves a high level of resilience through multiple sources of food production. The best examples of this may be seen in Cuba, where the capital city Havana produces 60% of its food from within the city.

Barriers…

The greatest barriers include: loss of husbandry and horticultural skills;

Lack of access to land for an increasingly urbanised population;

Loss of diversity in food plants- a serious issue often over-shadowed by concerns about conservation of wild biodiversity.

… and opportunities

Recently the interest in local food, vegetable gardening and Slow food has been growing rapidly, with a strong citizens’ initiative to establish and promote the conditions we need.

The principles of organic cultivation may in fact be better understood now than at any previous time.  The fertility of soils, on the whole, has been conserved.  There are still large areas of the world which have resisted GMO technology, which would make conversion to organic local cultivation very hard indeed.  Some pioneering organic local production already exists; it is the fastest-growing part of the food business.  The food that people grow for themselves is free – in money, though not in the work it takes.

The skills still exist, though not widely shared.  The incentive exists to make local food production real.  As has been shown in Cuba, it may be possible for populations to switch rapidly towards local community food production.

Food issues touch everyone’s lives, and food and gardening could be the touchstone that brings the community together in a most empowering way.

As Permaculturalist Geoff Lawton has said, “You can fix all the world’s problems, in a garden. You can solve them all in a garden. You can solve all your pollution problems, and all your supply line needs in a garden.

And most people today actually don’t know that, and that makes most people very insecure.”