The first was a comment made by a bloke who listened to a talk I gave about local food production. The second is an old English aphorism that, when I was a child, I misunderstood and couldn’t work out what it meant until one day I did. Bravo me, a bit slow but I got there in the end.
The bloke above was convinced that his local area couldn’t produce enough food for the local population. So let’s have a look into the real world. Fellow Permaculture designer Chris Dixon wrote about potential yields using real-world data from an allotment tended by Jim, a master gardener
“an acre of land divided into allotments as above would provide jobs for 4 full-time Master Gardeners and would produce more than enough vegetables to feed 40 people together with a good proportion of fruit”
Knock all of that into metric and we’ve got around 99 people nourished** from a hectare, with more people employed as market gardeners.
** Nourish — to provide people or living things with food in order to make them grow and keep them healthy. There is a huge difference between being fed and being nourished, in general the former includes huge quantities of ultra-processed foods which are toxic. It also includes pre-mature fruits sold in shops that are not yet fit for consumption and will most likely go from unripe to rotting without passing through the good to eat phase. Then of course there are all the pesticide etc residues. Nourished means having access to non-toxic, residue free ripe fit to eat foods that build good health and longevity.
Exporting and importing food means wastage and the quantities are enormous, globally about one-third of all food produced is discarded annually. The agro-industrial system in Europe wasted 154 million tonnes of food in 2021. The figures are shocking, especially in a world where around 690 million people are undernourished and food poverty and food insecurity are rife even in the so-called “rich countries”. The UK government estimated that between 2020 and 2021 food poverty affected around 4.2 million UK citizens, basically 6% of the population struggled to get the food they needed. In France around 4 million people regularly use food banks in order to have enough to eat. Impressively bad, inefficient, unjust and simply stupid. These figures reveal the truth behind the propaganda produced by the agro-industry through their lobbies which is regurgitated into the public domain by myopic, unqualified politicians.
The authors of this study estimate that if the EU reduced food waste by 50% it would the cut greenhouse gas emissions associated with food consumption by 51 million tonnes. It would reduce the agricultural area needed by 106,446 km2 (10,644,600 hectares or 26303379 acres) as a reference the surface area of Bulgaria is 110,994 km2. Perhaps more importantly in a world population faced with increasing water shortages said 50 reduction in food waste would save 4.6 billion m3 of water. The UK as a whole uses around 5 billion m3 of water a year.
Local food, again
All of these savings with a modest 50% reduction in waste. We can do better and go further than trying to repair a defunct agro-industrial system. One of the consequences of modern shoddy capitalism that we all see is that quality gets worse and worse. Tools, furniture, machines …. food. A natural consequence of the competition and price wars that go on amongst producers and retailers desperate to attract consumers.
With well designed and run local food production systems there shouldn’t be any waste as crop residues and any uneaten food or plant parts are automatically cycled through the system. Composted, used in a biodigester, as animal and fish feed. I can hear the expression ‘circular economy’ rising up as hough it was something new, it isn’t. Economies were predominately circular before we industrialised agriculture, waste not want not was the creed. If we seek to replicate this old style of circularity into our modern agro-industry we will be faced with some huge challenges simply because the quantities are so big and the whole system is designed to work as fast as possible. It is much easier to re-localise food production and design and build integrated community food production.
Win win and a positive cascade
Locally produced food should be of higher quality and the produce taken to the local exchange or market when it at it’s best. Another great advantage is the IKEA effect. Yes, seriously! People have this cognitive bias and they place a higher value on goods they have to partially build as compared to buying the whole thing ready made and assembled so ….
People value food they help produce more than the same thing bought in a supermarket.
People think that locally produced food is better for their health which is accentuated by the placebo effect.
People who are well fed and with a diverse diet have a more diverse gut microbiome which mean they are healthier and feel more positive.
Community integrated agriculture means that people tend to meet each other more and this helps redevelop and enhance the local community.
There are areas in the EU now where the number of local producers has risen to saturation point, yet there are even more people who want to grow food. The problem is of course that people have become accustomed to going to our temples of toxicity otherwise known as supermarkets. These stores suck the life out of local areas, flow money away from local economies and fill peoples houses with shoddy goods and food that isn’t fit for the purpose of nourishing people, calories don’t count quality. It is time to shut them down, to mulch them out and get back to producing and eating nourishing food and not the crap produced by the lamentable ago-industry and sold on by the supermarket chains. The figures show this, the quantity of European agro-industry food waste (domestic production and imports) at 154 Mt is more than the total amount of food imported into Europe at 138 Mt.