How Do We Improve Our Food Systems?

This essay is based upon Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot. Chapter 5- The Number of the Feast.

Monbiot begins by reflecting on the statement that food is too cheap, that we should all pay the true cost of organic food production. Should we?

To address the crucial dilemma this book explores — — How to feed everyone without destroying our life support systems — we need, as well as we are able, to resolve this issue. Food, while produced within environmental limits, must be healthy and affordable. This is a massive challenge. While it may be true that rich people should spend more of their income on food, the claim that everyone should do so seems ignorant and callous.

He then discusses food banks, their benefits and difficulties, a common one being that they do not receive enough meat or fruit to give to community members in need. Food banks are admittedly a bandaid and not a solution to hunger. “Food banks in a wealthy country are a last, desperate resort, a symptom of deep political and economic dysfunction.”

Preventing Food Waste is not the Answer to Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

Food waste is a huge, complicated problem. Supermarkets are willing to donate extra produce because they worry about their public image. However, “much of the time, it seems, the supermarkets aren’t giving their own produce away, but someone else’s. They enjoy such exploitative relationships with their suppliers that if they don’t sell the produce they’ve commissioned, the suppliers don’t get paid. So, supermarkets tend to over-order. Then they pose as heroes when they give other people’s goods to charity.”

Some of the unintended consequences of trying to prevent food waste were unsettling, especially in low-income nations where, “a great deal of food is lost as a result of slow and unreliable transport and spoiling by high temperatures, rot, pests or bruising. The solutions, such as more and better roads, more refrigeration, and more packaging can accidentally reverse some or all of the environmental savings.”

Changing Our Diets is an Answer

Ultimately, his main point is that “any savings we might achieve by reducing food loss are small by comparison to the savings we could make by changing our diets.” Rather than promoting the message — eat what you buy, it should be CHANGE what you buy. Change what you eat. And what we eat is a problem.

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Junk food has been progressively tailored by scientists and technicians through precise combinations of sugar, salt, fat and flavor enhancers to bypass our natural mechanisms of appetite control…with advertisers using psychologists and neuroscientists to unlock our weaknesses and discover ingenious ways of persuading us to buy unhealthy food… Obesity is a communicable disease. Its vectors are corporations.

Food Sovereignty

One solution to the problems of food prices and distribution is food sovereignty, an effort to break the corporate grip on the food chain. Food sovereignty is defined as, “the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, grown in ways that are ecologically sound, and the ability of local people to control their own food and agricultural systems.”

While good intentioned, Monbiot believes that there are two major problems with this plan. The first is that there is no discussion of “limiting the land area occupied by farming” or reigning in agricultural sprawl.

The right to farm is sometimes incompatible with the right to a thriving planet. To pretend this conflict does not exist is to ensure that it cannot be resolved.

The second problem is that food sovereignty focuses on local food production. While this is a laudable goal, there are many barriers preventing this from happening: “the concentration of land ownership, the structure of markets, the political power of big corporations, unfair subsidies, the dumping of food at less than the cost of production by rich nations, which undercuts farmers in poorer ones” and ultimately the often overlooked barrier — the math. “In most cases, sufficient growing areas close to our centers of population simply do not exist.”

Much of the world’s food is grown in vast, lightly habited lands — the Canadian prairies, the US Plains, the Russian and Ukrainian steppes, the Brazilian interior — and shipped to tight, densely populated places…You can negotiate with politics and economics, market structure and corporate power, but you can’t negotiate with arithmetic. Given the distribution of the world’s population and of the regions suitable for farming, the abandonment of long-distance trade would be a recipe for mass starvation.

Monbiot finishes the chapter by shooting down the fantasy of urban farms feeding a large proportion of city dwellers. While there are benefits to urban farms like supporting mental health, they are not a solution to feeding city residents.

Indoor vertical farms are not cost effective.

Monbiot did get me laughing here:

I’m not saying its impossible. There are some thriving farms in my city, neatly integrated into people’s homes, expensively equipped with lights, pumps, and temperature controls, growing crops to precise specifications. Every so often they’re busted, and the farmers are led away in handcuffs.

He also shoots down any hope that there is an easy answer to feeding the world without devouring the planet:

So within the grand dilemma that frames this book, we encounter some subsidiary, but equally difficult dilemmas. Most of our food has to be grown, for simple mathematical reasons, far from where we live, and shifted in bulk. Long-distance trade and mass production favor transnational corporations and accelerate homogenization of the Global Standard Farm. But this consolidation makes the food system less resilient, destroys the livelihoods of small farmers, and undermines food sovereignty. Somehow, we need to arrest and reverse it, but without causing mass starvation. Food has to be cheap enough to feed people in poverty, yet expensive enough to support those who grow it. It needs to be grown at low cost, but without the corner cutting that destroys the living world.

Monbiot offers not miracles, but instead some “counterintuitive solutions.”

Stay tuned for Chapter 6.

Andrea

February 2023January 2023

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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