We need to talk about food. As a nation that produces barely 50% of what it eats, we also import much of the natural gas used to make the fertilizers we use to grow it, and while we are at it, who knows where all the dodgy glyphosate and other toxins come from? We are not a food secure nation, in the world of high-speed, inter-connected globalised capitalism maybe that does not matter so much, but in a world where the international order is breaking down, climate instability is increasing, along-side a myriad of other threats, shifting the core of the food supply to a much more localised economy is certainly going to be an essential part of the mix going forward.
Ultra processed foods are destroying the health of the nation, and around the world. Chris van Tulleken has been writing and podcasting on the subject in recent months, if you are not sure what that means here is a short introduction. Powerful stuff, once you take this on board you realise just how purvasive it is, and how it is affecting just about all of us in terms of general health and also how we think about and enjoy food.
In the video Chris makes the clear point that Ultra Processed Foods are primarily designed not for nutrition but to make money, using very cheap ingredients to create the taste and feel of real food. It looks like food, tastes like food, but really it is something 100% unnatural, fools our bodies and digestive systems into producing the wrong enzymes to digest it, doesn’t actually fill us up, leaving us wanting more and more and leading to weight gain.
This is the real culprit that has generated the obesity explosion.
Consequently we have to get in line with the real food for nutrition movement, and away from these food-like substances being sold to us on almost every street corner. He also makes the point not to stigmatise people for the food they eat, this stuff is cheap and ubiquitous and aggressively marketed by every channel available. Journeying away from it is a process, one that begins with self-education and awareness of the way it fools us into wanting it.
Permaculture offers something different
Producing food is so much more than making money, and we are in the process of a food revolution, one driven by need, by cost and by a changing economic landscape.
Growing food, caring for livestock, picking, packing, processing, cooking, sharing are all part of the process. Step away from the supermarket and the take-away you are drawn into a different world. A world where organic is the cheaper option, because there are no inputs, distance to market is much shorter, waste almost eliminated and you are directly involved in the cycle of production, refining and consuption yourself. Allotments, community supported agriculture schemes, community gardens, farmer markets, back-garden growing, there are many ways into the local food economy.
I have been instrumental in starting community growing initiatives in Newtown, at Cultivate and Cae Bodfach Llanfyllin in Powys, and now I am doing it at Treflach Farm in Shropshire, a few miles up the road from where I now live. This is not about jumping to self-sufficieny, there are many steps on this pathway, but it is about moving to a place where all of us become involved in the production of food in some small way. A move to be more self-sufficient and the contstruction of a more complex and inter-connected local food supply chain where we can trade surpluses, growing tips, composting projects and everything else that goes with it.
Sri Lanka, a cautionary tale.
The beautiful sub-tropical island nation of Sri Lanka is a paradise of abundance, with verdant pastures and forests, fields and family plots. Over the decades they built up an almost self-sufficient agricultural scheme, except that it actually wasn’t. They had become increasingly dependent on nitrogen fertilizers, made from natural gas and imported and paid for in foreign currency. When they experienced balance of payment problems in the early 2020’s, and a curreny price collapse the government at the time decided to issue a decree, the whole island state would become organic. Deciding they simply could not afford the cripplingly high prices of agricultural inputs from fossil fuels, of which they are not a producer or refiner to any significant degree. They had thought that this simple sea-change might overnight solve thier problems. The result is food production halved, yields crashed and the prices of food sky rocketed. Why? Are we seeing that organic methods really are inferior, or is something else happening?
Nitrates and phosphorous fertilizers take the place of the actions of soil microbes. Over decades of use the soil structure is depleted, the mircobiome destroyed, ploughing, monocultures, and other invasive practices all serve to simplfy soils and make them addicted to the artificial inputs. To move to organic is a transition, a rebuilding of the soil biome, rebuilding the pest and predator relationships, returning balance and harmony by rebuilding the wider ecosystem, one that includes the soil builders, the nutrient cyclers and pollenators.
These approaches are what is at the heart of regenerative agriculture, organic systems and of course permaculture. There are techniques, approaches, strategies that can accelerate this healing, allowing the soils to come back to life, quite rapidly whilst creating many surprising and unexpected benefits.
Here in Powys/ Shropshire there is a vibrant local food network evolving and I include an advert for an event in October I will be speaking at, hosted by Babbinswood farm. I am also offering permaculture talks and courses at Treflach farm and below is an advert for the Lake Victoria Permaculture Conference in East Africa.
This is a global wake up call, a massive shift away from agribusiness, which often consumes 10 calories of fossil fuel for every calory delivered on a plate, at the cost of the soil structure and soil life. All the evidence tells us that the smaller the farm or plot, the more productive it becomes per square meter and the more sensitive it is to the ecology of that place. Farming, gardening, food production needs to scale back, broaden out and invite a wide new range of participants and ways to participate
Food production as a social glue
Our fractured damaged communities, depressed isolated individuals, plagued by ill health, dietary induced illness, depression, lack of exercise and the rest can be addressed by involving people in the wider cycle of soil builing, composting, sowing, planting, harvesting, processing and enjoying food. Child care, elder care, social inclusion strategies can all be part of how we do food. It is a glue that can cement society back togetther again, in permaculture I like to say, let us focus on the things we have in common, not those that divide us. Food links us together, the soil and the biome that produces it extends into us and into our every action, this is what I believe our future is going to be framed by, and driven by.
We escape the food, poverty and ill health cycle by becoming active in these areas. Of course we need so much more than food, but this is the starting point for many of the processes that will make us better. We can start with a 5% target for local food, and keep pushing that until it reaches 50 or 60%, who knows how far we can go with this?
We will always need coffee and bananas from afar, grains and spuds lend themselves to field scale production and mechanization, but the choice of varieties, how we process them and the scale we work at significantly shape the impacts that this type of production has on us, and our local ecosytems.
Think about this, fruit and vegetables are mainly water by weight, 70-90% even, have a high nutrient density, but are fragile and have short shelf life. So to focus on these things first makes so much sense, the energy wasted by basically transporting water around and the high wastage of foods that travel far can be optimised quickly. These foods need lots of water to grow also, which can be collected from roofs, road surfaces, domestic grey water etc. and the nutrients come from the compost from the gardens, homes and farms involved in the production cycle. When you localise these aspects of food production it becomes much easier to cycle and compost the residues and wastes.
Join us on this journey, there are many ways to find out about permaculture, not least the PDC, a 72 hour study and crash course that exposes to you to core themes and ideas in a practical and accessible way.