What a Dream Tastes Like
A dollar spent on a snack at the corner store sends a bit of information, a bitcoin, up the food chain. At the top, Nabisco receives the profit - along with downstream distributors and retailers - and uses the profit to pay for the following system: subsidized processed food, brand marketing, packaging, and researching how to make the processed food more addictive. The same dollar spent at the farmer’s market or on organic cilantro at Whole Foods sends a different message, and more profit, to the following system: soil-plucked vegetables, farmers, ranchers and field hands.
Some good news upfront:
# of farmer’s markets is up at least 300% since 1994.
Farm-to-consumer purchases are up 200% since 2006.
Most points from this post are quoted or paraphrased from Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All by Oren B. Hesterman, a 35 year expert and policy advisor on the U.S. food system. The well-structured book is descriptive of the current pain points in the U.S. agroeconomy. It offers focused insights and actionable steps to both incrementally improve and accelerate the regrowth of the “first economy,” FOOD.
Why Redesign? The current food system is inefficient, lacks diversity, and has incentivized components which, while well intentioned, have unintended outcomes. How to Architect a Redesign? Design for equity, diversity, ecological integrity, and enmeshed local businesses.
What can you do?
Step 1: Source Locally where possible
Step 2: Become an engaged citizen
Why Redesign? Inefficiency
Waste is a foundational problem in our food system. The amount of energy we use to provide food is laughable in relation to the accessible nutritional value of the delivered product.
Fair Food: “According to an energy audit of the U.S. food system, we use 10.3 calories of fossil fuel energy to create 1.4 calories of food energy.”
Most of those 10.3 production calories - 30% - go into packaging, transport, and sales. 30%! What the F%!k.
A porous analogy of the United States’ current approach to creating produce Providence purgatory.
Open a high-interest credit card specifically for gas purchases.
Add 1 gallon of gas at each station. Just enough to get you to your next stop.
Never look ahead.
This do in perpetuity, forever and ever, Amman.
The stops, starts and mindless spending... only to just get back that sweet 2% on your gas purchases. Additionally, the gas you get isn’t “dense” in quality.
Production inefficiency is an opportunity for improvement and huge lever, one that our purchasing can directly effect without any system redesign. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem outlandish to brandish your own bags at the grocery store. Or to buy directly from the farmer at the farmer’s market. Or to make your own bumper sticker out of recycled toilet paper that says “My other car is a grocery cart."
But the fresh stuff is just so much more expensive… and full of advantages.
Why Redesign? Ubiquitous Inequity
Fair Food: “In urban low-income areas, more than 57% of inhabitants have limited physical access to supermarkets or grocery stores.”
Many low-income households utilize SNAP, the EBT cards that provide weekly funds for groceries. Fair Food goes on to say that a majority of SNAP authorized outlets are convenience stores, drug stores and liquor stores.
I think you can guess the outcome. Many food stamp dollars are spent on soda, candy and potato chips. NOT because those are the foods SNAP card carriers dream about during phase 5 REM. More likely, the purchasing habits of low-income decision makers are directly representative to the choices presented them.
A porous choice test. Which of the following best represents the best current food choice for low-income families with SNAP funds?
A. Two corn dogs and a swath of cotton candy.
B. I split a piece of chocolate in half. You get to choose which half you get.
C. I put a microwavable TV dinner behind one of three doors, one of which is actually a window.
D. The space between rock candy and hard candy.
Seriously, when these fellow Americans have better choices, they make better choices. “For every additional supermarket percent, produce consumption increases by 32 percent.” (pg 33)
SNAP resources:
Do you qualify for SNAP? http://www.snap-step1.usda.gov/fns/
How to accept SNAP? http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/how-accept-snap-benefits-your-store
Working in the Food System
There is a dearth of young farmers, and no diversity in farm ownership. Historical lending practices, along with national policies, have drawn red lines (pg 150) through urban areas and significantly increased the barrier to entry for small- and mid-sized farms to provide to cities.
Since 1920, 97% decline in the number of black-owned farms (from 926,000 farms to 29,690). (pg 70)
80% of restaurant workers in NY in 2000 made less than $13.50 an hour. 90% of them had no health insurance. (pg 39)
Why Redesign? Nutrient Cruelty
“70% of antibiotics used in this country are employed in livestock production, primarily in CAFOs.” (pg 36)
Almost all pork eaten in the U.S. is raised in a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO). Animals raised in a CAFOs are often given antibiotics and hormones to accelerate weight gain and maturity. Silver Lining: North Carolina has some of the most robust non-CAFO systems. (pg 103)
EatWild Pastured directory: North Carolina
CAFO Video & Resources:
www.themeatrix.com and www.sustainabletable.org
Lack of Nutrient Diversity
“In the United States in 2008, more than 50% of all harvested cropland grew only two crops, corn and soybeans. And nearly 100% of those corn and soybeans are produced in vast monocultures.” (pg 77)
The majority of U.S. land is used unsustainably. There is little or no crop rotation and an unhealthy reliance on borrowing from the future by relying on expected crop innovations and acquiring more land from small farms priced out of the market.
Best practices:
Ridge tilling allows field micro ecosystems to continue. Soil organisms can thrive.
Legumes are a great cover crop in that they fix nitrogen to the soil for future rotations. Is there a way we can support more legume production without eating them? (pg 97)
Using fields for perennial pasturing (with animals) instead of annual crop production reduces carbon emissions by sequestering carbon into the soil and turning it into usable organic matter. (pg 101)
Native Soil
A micro-culture's history of eating implies a natural survival bias. A group of people came together, ate thousands of dinners, and continued to live in a healthy enough manner to sustain and thrive. Native diets seem to have fail-safe measures built in (complete conjecture by me). In some cases, the specificity of these fail-safe diets control blood sugar and, by extension, diabetes.
Tohono O’odham tribe: Documented diabetes rate of more than 50% of the total population.
Highest obesity rates in the world. More than 76% of 6th - 8th graders in the community are obese or overweight. All happened in the past 60 years with the loss of their traditional food system and reliance on processed food.
Historical diet that naturally controlled blood sugar: tepary beans, mesquite beans, acorns, cactus buds. (pg 73)
The Heros of System Redesign
Heroes consider “the extent to which the business is enmeshed into the local economy, and whether the supply chain for that business is helping to create economic viability for all of those engaged in bringing the product to the end user. (pg 114) Instead of focusing on attracting national or multinational companies, cities can re-invigorate the economy by focusing on designing a first economy: the food economy. (pg 121)
Eugene Cooke: Building small urban farms that provide food to local restaurants
https://www.patreon.com/growwhereyouare?ty=a
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gt3JeHQ8F4
David Gershon teaches Community Empowerment by utilizing several well-studied frameworks:
"Cool Blocks" neighborhood design
Water Stewardship
“Low Carbon Diet"
The Healthy Corner Stores Network supports efforts to increase the availability and sales of healthy, affordable foods through small-scale stores in underserved communities. A study done in Philadelphia showed many calories consumed by 4th - 6th graders came from corner stores, and “ the most frequently purchased items were energy-dense, low-nutritive foods and beverages, such as chips, candy, and sugar-sweetened beverages.”
ModelMeals (Los Angeles): locally-sourced, sustainable food prepared by professional chefs and delivered to your door.
What can you do?
Support sourcing systems designed with conscious capitalism in mind. Depending on the region, the measuring stick used for quantified local food research is 100 or 200 miles. Personally, I try to look for minimized transport balanced against best available, top quality food. Meat, for example, might be best raised in a mountain valley 300 miles away. It would require less resources for production than trying to grow it 5 miles away.
Push for organizational adoption (schools, hospitals, corporate cafeterias).
Look for regional certifications (what matters in your area?).
Read about Woodbury local purchasing policy (pg 189).
My company, B9 Innovations, is working on Greenline, an information system with various envisioned applications to provide insight into the U.S. food network. If you would like to be of help, let me know!
Resources:
Be a Localist (pg 86): https://bealocalist.org/
Traveling to a major city? Check out these guides to restaurants/markets with locally sourced food: http://www.eatwellguide.org/guides
Listen to a few episodes of the Urban Monk podcast.
