‘Getting up on the right side of bread in terms of climate change will be the first, most urgent and biggest accomplishment of food policies for cities and countries around the world.

—Wayne Roberts

Field notes from this week

Dear Minister Chewonthis:

Alas, this report from the field does not come from Paris, where governments and climate activists met to talk actions for reducing the damage inflicted by overuse of fossil fuels.

This briefing is for you, as the minister-in-waiting for food as set out in Prime Minister Trudeau’s instructions to establish a national food policy for Canada. Getting up on the right side of bread in terms of climate change will be the first, most urgent and biggest accomplishment of food policies for cities and countries around the world.

The fact is that global warming cannot be understood without understanding that food was transformed from being mostly a solar industry before 1945 to becoming a fossil industry ever since. Gassy food comes from every stage of an industrial food system’s production, processing, distribution, retailing, consumption and disposal. Fossil fuels make the fertilizers and pesticides and run the equipment on farms, then ship the food thousands of miles to consumers, keep the frozen foods frozen in open freezers at retailers, drive the cars to supermarkets, heat the meals at home and then truck the waste to landfills.

As far as I read, no-one got to speak on the fact that food not only accounts for at least a third of emissions but also — and this is what we need to pay attention to – food is the best fast-track way to reduce global warming emissions. That’s because solar and renewable fuels are better suited to good food, and can reduce the fossil fuel emissions by as much as a third.

Even more important, good food puts carbon where it belongs.

This is something the people who copped out in Paris don’t get at all. We don’t need to cut back on carbon. We just need to cut back on carbon that gets into the atmosphere. We need to store it in soil (think compost) and in perennial plants such as trees and bushes (think apple tree, nut tree, raspberry bushes).

Unlike all the changes that get talked about to reduce emissions from transport and homes, food not only reduces emissions, it increases beneficial storage of carbon.

Governments and climate activists can ignore the ways industrial food leads to global warming. But global warming won’t ignore the way food is grown. We’re in for some stormy weather, as we enter the era when climate change and climate chaos determine the level of food security. Dealing with the fall-out from climate chaos will soon be Job 1. With a new toolkit for food security and food sovereignty, we can prevent the global warming situation from getting worse, and we can develop food systems that withstand many of the ill-effects of climate chaos. But the longer food is ignored and forced to the sidelines, the harder Job 1 will become.

Sincerely, 

Wayne Roberts