Poverty isn’t just about income/expenditure as I noted in the preceding article, it is more global and negative impacts on health, well being, education success and longevity are part of life in a modest SES (socio-economic status) household. This article is about food poverty and it is a complex subject. We find ourselves in a classic Permaculture spaghetti, that is to say when we are doing an analysis/redesign of one aspect of a system we find that that ‘strand of spaghetti’ is touching and interacting with all the others. For example food production/transportation has a big negative impact on the climate which disproportionately effects poorer households. This means that the following analysis is going to be wider than just figuring out why so many people in the UK are near starvation.
The UK Department of Health defines food poverty as "the inability to afford, or have access to, food to make up a healthy diet.
A total of 9.7 million adults experienced food insecurity in September 2022 affecting four million children. The TUC has found one in seven people across the UK (14 per cent) are skipping meals or going without food because they can’t afford the essentials. And over two-fifths (44 per cent) of Brits are having to cut back on food spending. I heard a couple of people thinking that “well as a lot of Brits are obese cutting back on food might help them no?” No. Obesity is more about poisoning (ultra-transformed foods) than it is about simple calories.
Silliness and bad advice
A lot of people are spending a lot of time working out the carbon footprint of different foods. One of the most recent was produced by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek. I have done a small survey and people around me leap to the conclusion that it is the different foods that have embodied greenhouse gas emissions rather than it , is the case, being the way we produce these foods that produces the GEGs. According to the study, potato’s have a carbon footprint of 2.71 kg, this despite the fact that the plants will be drawing down CO2 during their growing period, some of that will be stocked in the potato’s and one thing that you may have noticed is that potato’s don’t belch or fart. So how is it that they have such a high carbon footprint? It is of course down to how we produce them, transform them and how we transport them.
Protein
There is so much inaccurate and misleading information about diets, nutritional guidelines and especially protein that it is quite difficult to make any sense of it all. For a start the body needs digestible amino acids which are found in proteins and these are found, in different ratios, in all living organisms. Some amino acids (non-essential) can be produced by the body and some (essential) not. This is important because people checking their food on the web will most often find figures for protein content which don’t indicate the levels of the different amino acids making up the protein. Which is ridiculous because it’s the amino acids, and especially the essential amino acids that we need.
Big Tech versus Local Organic
3d printed food using Cellular agriculture, smart fermentation and microbial protein production are being developed and pushed as climate friendly new foods. The proponents of this Tech food is that the carbon footprint is minuscule when compared to current agriculture. It will certainly be promoted as a solution to global food insecurity and food poverty. Those people who are not supporting this approach will point out that the products have not been long term safety tested, we have no idea if the our bodies will be able to properly digest Lab foods and probably the most important point is that a tiny number of companies will hold the patents. An example of people cherry picking the data around the subject is that Lab food needs energy to make and that this energy could come from alternative sources, as yet there have been no cradle to grave assessments of the total energy needs of these foods.
Local organic production using sophisticated agro-sylvo-pasturalist systems is promoted as a way of producing high quality food in a way that draws down Carbon and stocks it in soils and perennial vegetation. Lab food may reduce the carbon footprint of food production but local organic can actually reduce the excess GEG burden in the atmosphere. Detractors contend that these systems can’t ‘feed the world’, decades of development and trials have shown that this is a false presumption.
The microbiome
I can’t really go into too much detail about this, that would take pages and pages suffice to say that a healthy diverse gut microbiome is essential for good health. Basically diversity in equals diversity inside, researchers have found these tiny organisms living in our digestive tracts may be key players in obesity, diabetes and a variety of autoimmune and digestive diseases. Ultra transformed foods, which are cheap and the ‘go to’ groceries for modest/low SES households are very bad for the microbiome.
UK agriculture
In 2020 the UK exported £21.4bn worth of food, feed and drink. The government contends that only around 50% of food is imported but this figure doesn’t include raw ingredients which push the figure up to around 80%. The UK then is only around 20% self-sufficient in food production. In 2020 imports were valued at £48.0bn. About 1.44% of the UK population are employed in the agricultural sector.
The Utilised Agricultural Area (UAA) covers 17.3 million hectares which is 71% of land in the UK. The total croppable area is around 6 million hectares.
Research in the 1970s by John Jeavons and the Ecology Action Organisation found that about 370 square metres (4000 square feet) of growing space was enough land to sustain one person on a vegetarian diet for a year, with about another 370 square metres for access paths and storage – so that’s a plot around 25m x 30m.
United Kingdom Population 2022 is 67,612,506. 6 million hectares is 60,000,000,000 m² = 887 m² per person. So according to Jeavons and Co it should be possible to feed well over 81 million people, on a vegetarian diet which of course is difficult for some people and fruit and vegetables don’t provide essential oils. These can come from small scale livestock and nuts. In order to accommodate these productions we can raise the surface area to 1250 m² per person which means that 48 million people could be fed a balanced diet using the current Utilised Agricultural Area.
I was lucky the friend and colleague Chris Dixon just published an article called “The Marvel of Allotment Gardens” in the article he scales up what his friend Jim Skipp produces on his allotment. Basically if I scale the figures to the UAA of the UK then a large group of people like Jim could feed 240 000 000 people which is 4 times the current UK population. 520 thousand hectares of residential garden exist in urban areas in Great Britain which means that Jim and Co. could feed nearly 21 million people just using people’s back gardens.
John Jeavons himself was writing in the 1970’s and things have changed since then. Aquaponics vertically stack vegetable production with fish production the surface area used for growing the vegetables is also producing fish. Agroforestry systems ranging from broadscale through to forest gardens integrate tree crops with vegetable crops. Animals can be rotated through these systems increasing total yields.
Cereals account for the majority (72%) of the total arable crop area, covering almost 3.2 million hectares in 2022. Cereals aren’t in any way the best use of farmland, we have based our diets on cereals for too long now.
To sum up Big agriculture is failing us.
Basic food rights
The UK population needs feeding and as we have seen a significant percentage don’t have enough to eat. Whilst the UK doesn’t currently produce anywhere near enough to be self-sufficient there is enough food wafting around the country thanks to the UK imports. The people in food poverty don’t have the money needed to buy it. The question is then, how is it possible that the food distribution system is failing so many people in the UK? How is it that in a so-called advanced country access to food isn’t a basic human right, not even for children? There isn’t even a government protocol in place to help out these people, food banks are being overwhelmed and children eat at school or not at all. Why do people even have to pose the question ‘Heat or eat’ in today’s modern UK economy?
Failed by Big agriculture and failed by the government but what is perhaps worse is failed also by their local community.
We need to take a fresh look at how food is produced and distributed. We also need to find a way to ensure that people in the same way that people have access to Universal Credit they must have access to a ‘Universal minimum food hamper’. We can wait until governments do this, which might take forever or, faced with such an urgent situation, you and your local authorities can stimulate local production. You and they can work with local farmers to get them to ‘set aside’ the land areas needed to supply what is needed for the Universal minimum food hamper. It is time to move beyond community supported agriculture (box schemes) and move to community integrated agriculture. It is time that a so-called food desert isn’t an area which has no supermarkets, it is one that has no community integrated agriculture and Universal minimum food hamper system in place. After all not having supermarkets in an area is a good thing as most of their produce is poisoning us and they drain wealth away from local areas.
It is also crucial that local authorities prioritise creating allotment space and not just in scraps of land they can’t sell for building but much more widely. There are a lot of people like Jim who produce considerable quantities from their allotments and in general are always ready to lend a hand, give advice or some seeds.
Agriculture itself has to become more sophisticated and less diesel, synthetic chemical and irrigation dependant. It must become much more flexible as the climate is a’changing. Modern sophisticated systems are a mix of agriculture, agroforestry, and grazing. These systems fill a volume and don’t just cover a surface, they are polycultural and adaptive. They produce vegetables, tree and soft fruits, grains, firewood and can and often do, include fish farms, mushroom production, beehives etc. They scale, that is to say we have systems which cover tens of hectares and others which cover tens of m². Future smaller scale and de-mechanised farms would produce more food, improve biodiversity and create good jobs.
I live in France and the situation isn’t as bad as in the UK but it is still bad, a local teacher explained that kids arrive with a handful of small coins to pay for their school meals, which are heavily subsidised. If a child is off sick the parents come and pick up the school meal. School kids are also taking part of their school meal home for their family.
It has to stop. As a final warning about the consequences of food poverty let me explain that not having enough to eat impacts the health and well being of future generations. We know that a woman who was pregnant during a period of food scarcity can give birth themselves to a female child of who doesn’t herself show physical symptoms of famine but her eggs have been effected and she in her turn will give birth to children who do show physical consequences of famine.
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