‘Instead of asking if we can feed the world, we need to ask if we can nourish the world.’
-Wayne Roberts
Field notes this week:
Feeding the world one region at a time
If you Google “can we feed the world,” you will get 721 million results in less than .83 of a second. That tells me a lot of people have wasted their time trying to answer a trick question.
A University of California researcher named Elliott Campbell has asked a better question: can we feed a region?
The short answer, based on phenomenal data and maps, is yes, at least in the US. Over 80 per cent of Americans could have a healthy diet by eating food produced within 50 miles of their house, and 100 per cent of Americans could have a healthy diet by travelling 200 miles.
This is game-changing research, but it’s possibly more significant than the author allows — since he didn’t bring in the new relationship developing between cities and nearby countrysides, which will double the impact of Campbell’s game-changer.
If anything like US fertility levels and weather holds for the rest of the world, Campbell’s research shows we can definitely answer the question about feeding the world.
We can feed the world, one region at a time!
More important, we can feed each region well, since the diet used as the basis of Campbell’s calculations, is a very healthy diet — with all the grains, fruits, vegetables, dairy, beans and meat we need year-round. He didn’t even need to factor in supplements, a huge saving for most of us pill-poppers.
Which means we need to ask a tougher question than the one about feeding the world. Instead of asking if we can feed the world, we need to ask if we can nourish the world. And the correct answer, according to Campbell’s research, is: We can nourish the world, one region at a time! (There is a trick to this, but we’ll get to it soon enough.)
Campbell’s research estimates how much cropland would be needed to grow three different diets – a vegetarian diet, what he calls the standard American diet (frequent meat), and what he calls a meat-intensive diet.
He needed to distinguish these three diets (lifestyles?) because meat production requires a lot of land and water. That’s because livestock are fed and fattened on grains, and need to consume a lot of grains to produce meat – about 7 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef, and about two pounds of grain to produce a pound of chicken. Needless to say, a human diet using grains and beans as the source of complete protein would require much less space than a meat-intensive diet.
As it turns out, difference in diet doesn’t make a huge difference on American regional ability to feed the population. About 85 per cent of vegetarians could live on a vegetarian diet by relying exclusively on food within 50 miles of home. About 80 per cent of heavy meat eaters could live on foods produced within 50 miles of home.
If Americans were to go as far as 100 miles to get all their food from their home region, 92 per cent could do so on a vegetarian diet, and 88 per cent could do so on a meat-gorging diet.
Keep on trucking, and everyone, including meat maniacs in huge cities such as New York and Los Angeles, could get all the food they needed within 200 miles from home.
Even that exceptionally low figure of 200 miles to cover heavy meat eaters in New York and Los Angeles adds up to about ten per cent of the distance most foods today travel from farm to plate in North America.
These are mind-boggling results.
Food miles travelled from farm to plate could be cut to one-tenth of today’s norm, and health outcomes would likely be improved – at least in terms in terms of availability of all the ingredients needed for a nutritious diet.
Since Campbell hasn’t had to break into a sweat to answer if all American regions could feed themselves, how about we raise the stakes (that’s stakes, not steaks!) by asking the only question that really matters: Can we nourish the world sustainably, one region at a time?
Campbell shies away from that but I won’t, because I want to make a point about the relationship between cities and countryside in the developing regional food economies of the future.
Tougher Questions
Like most people who have studied the intricacies of food miles, Campbell isn’t sure that food travelling fewer miles from farm to plate will make a big difference. The mammoth truck carrying strawberries from California to Toronto may use less fuel per pint than a flotilla of farmers driving 50 miles, their pick-up loaded with berries to be sold at farmers markets. Fuel per pint moved farm to plate doesn’t go the distance to cutting back on global warming gases.
But this is asking the question wrong.
Since Campbell’s research shows that typical regions can feed themselves, all questions need reframing. We don’t need to worry about whether lightly-loaded pick-up trucks burn as much fuel as jam-packed trucks. We need to ask if a regional food system will have a different impact than a long-distance system.
Once we ask that question, we must deal with the fact that the 2000 mile trek from farm to plate in today’s long-distance food system is only one of at least 8 sets of trips needed to move food from farm to plate.
“How many miles from farm to plate” is as stupid a question as “can we feed the world.”I count at least 8 sets of food trips as the norm today.
Trip 1
The trip from natural gas plant to fertilizer-making factory to farm, which is easily 2000 miles. That trip will be cancelled in a regional food system because trucks that drive into town to deliver food will come back to the farm hauling composted food scraps and other “waste.” The farmers feed us locally, we feed their soil locally.
Trip 2
The trip of the migrant farmers from their home to the field where the farm is, perhaps 1000 miles by plane. Many of those trips will be cancelled because a regional food system relies on farms that are close to city populations, and they can recruit workers regionally and pay them a wage they’ll work for.
Don’t worry about the migrant farmers. They will benefit more than anyone, as you’ll see in a bit.
Trip 3
The trip from the canning and bottling and plastic packaging plant to the processor who packages most of the food en route from farm to plate. Add another 2000 miles per item. We’re going to cancel most of those trips too. Once farmer, processor and eater live close together again, we’ll return to returnable bottles, like the thick milk bottles I grew up with that were re-used hundreds of times. They’ll be dropped off at the processing plant by the truck that brought in the milk on its return trip.
Notice how we’re doing this by reducing materials imported from afar and from making use of both delivery and return trips of trucks that once drove home empty.
Trip 4
The trip to the warehouse aggregator who handles all the orders in a region for one supermarket chain. The way the chains work, no farmer can sell product direct to a supermarket outlet; it has to go to the chain’s warehouse first, which may be 100 miles away. Most of those trips will be cancelled, because city governments and customers (neither owned by the long-distance food system) will explain that we don’t live in a global food system anymore, and they can’t tell farmers that they can’t sell to one supermarket unless they can supply the whole chain, because that discriminates against local farmers, and the supermarkets wouldn’t want to lose their license because of discriminating.
Trip 5
The car trip from the customer’s home to the supermarket. Pound of food moved per unit of fuel is probably worse here than anywhere. Many of these trips will be cancelled because cities are ensuring the presence of quality food retail outlets on main streets in all residential neighborhoods, and most people can walk to shop and have a bicycle jitney drive them home with their grocery bags.
Trip 6
The truck trip from each customer’s garbage can to the landfill, carrying 40 per cent of the food the customer bought a week or two before. Most of those foods will be cancelled because there will be a major campaign to reduce that waste, and bring back what’s still wasted to a depot where it will be composted and returned to local farms.
In terms of global warming emissions, cancelling this trip is the surprise winner, because when food rots at a landfill site, where it’s crushed with no access to oxygen, it creates methane, which has 22 times worse impact on global warming emissions than carbon dioxide.
Trip 7
The trip that will be most different, the one from farm to processor, retailer or customer. This is where you see that we have a transportation system that is built for a global food system, not a regional one. Highways in a global system go every which way because every farmer and processor is getting shipments from everywhere and shipping to everywhere. But in a regional food system, traffic is heaviest on a much smaller number of routes, mostly ones going from farms to somewhere like 5 to 10 cities.
Heavier traffic means either more load-sharing, with three or four farmers or processors sharing a truckspace, or moving to electric vehicles, since the trips are now shorter — or moving to computer- depots (as with Uber) that take advantage of unused capacity. A commuter bus with empty loading space driving to a downtown drop-off, just a few blocks from a processing food hub? Hmmm. Wonder if there’s a connection there?
Cancel the Old Trip 8! (ie the export trip)
OOPS! Did I forget to mention that each of these trip reductions comes with an increase in jobs for farm workers, bottle washers, composters, jitney drivers, and local urban agriculture farmers – enough to pay a lot of people’s way through college?
Did I also forget to mention that the migrant workers are delighted with the results, because they can now farm their own farms because they’re no longer put out of business by American exports of cheap food – because all of America’s food is staying in America?
And did I forget to tell you that we can cancel that trip of food exports too?
And did I also forget to tell you that meat isn’t quite the big deal of a problem that it was before?
Instead of eating grain, chickens and pigs are eating food scraps recovered from nearby customers, while cows and steers are raised on grass like they evolved to eat, and their meat and milk are more nutrient-rich now, the deep roots of the grass store carbon and the manure from the cattle makes sure no fertilizer has to be trucked from afar.
And did I also forget to tell you that some of the underused and low-quality farm space can be used to produce ethanol or bio-diesel, as can some of the formerly wasted food scraps?
And did I almost forget to tell you that your tax bill for garbage pickup and recycling has been cut in half?
The new Un-Trip 8 or Trip 8
The weirdest trip, this will also be much changed. That’s the long trip many packages take to Asia to be recycled. The ultra-light packages that take food long distances are very hard and dirty to recycle. They will be largely replaced by heavier reusable containers suited to regional trade –another massive improvement in the impact of regional food systems.
This is what citysides and farmsides can do if they work together as team players in a regional food economy.
It’s a whole new way of answering the real question. Can we nourish the world sustainably?
Yes, one region at a time!