John’s vision 10
EXTRACT: FOOD
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Little of this appears in mainstream media in the North, where the rich have been the last to be hit. Food costs are ten percent of household expenditure in rich countries, whereas In China the figure is 30 per cent. In sub-Saharan Africa, 60 per cent of household income goes on food, the crisis is acute already.
Many civilizations, from the Summerian to the Maya, have faltered when the scale and complexity of food production produced ruinous diminishing returns. On American farms in the ealry 1800s, the balance between calories expended, and calories produced as food, was about even. Under today’s system, it takes sixteen calories of input to produce one calorie of meat. Up to 40 percent of the ecological impact of an modern city can be attributed to its food systems.
In a report titled “What will we eat as the oil runs out?” Richard Heinberg has mapped four coordinates of the evolving food crisis. First is the direct impacts on agriculture of higher oil prices; increased costs of tractor fuel, agricultural chemicals, and transport, add cost to farm inputs and outputs. Second, increased demand for biofuels leads farmland being turned from food production to fuel production; 70 percent of vegetable oil grown today in Europe is destined to power cars. A third dimension of the crisis is climate change and extreme weather events caused by fuel-based greenhouse gas emissions. The fourth problem described by Heinberg the degradation or loss of basic natural resources - principally, topsoil and fresh water supplies - as a result of high and unsustainable methods of production stimulated by decades of cheap energy. “Each of these problems is developing at a somewhat different pace regionally, and each is exacerbated by the continually expanding size of the human population” Heinerg writes; “as these dilemmas collide, the resulting overall food crisis is likely to be profound and unprecedented in scope”.
Thanks to cheap fuel, agriculture and food now account for nearly 30 percent of goods transported on Europe’s roads. We also ship millions of bottles of water from one country to another despite the fact the carbon emissions of one bottle are 600 times higher than the same amount of water drawn from a tap. On the island of Fiji, citizens suffer from typhoid in the vicinity of a foreign-owned water bottling plant that exports designer water all over the world. BBC Panorama 18 February 2008 There are even more bizarre exports pof water. Notoriously, one supermarket flew planeloads of turnips from New Zealand to the UK in order to drive down the prices being asked by home growers. Turnips contain 70 percent water - so the company was in effect flying planeloads of water across the world to drive down prices of a root crop that could once have been found within a couple of miles of where most of the population lives.
Producers have benefitted from cheap money as well as cheap fuel. Every head of cattle in Europe gets a subsidy from the taxpayer worth $2.20 a day at a time when half the world’s population - three billion people - scrapes by on an income less than that.
Most processed foods are packaged, and manufacturing the packaging (steel, aluminium, plastics) accounts for 70- 80 percent of the overall emissions of the food industry. Once packaged, processed food is generally purchased in supermarkets which consume electricity to keep foods frozen - especially in open display units. Food retailers also spend insanely on energy - seven times more than is used in an ordinary office. In larger food stores up to a quarter of their energy budget goes on lighting – to make the food look good, not for it to be good. Most of the rest is used for refrigeration. More than 50 percent of food in developed countries is retailed under refrigerated conditions. A single open-fronted freezer costs a retailer 20,000 euros per year to run in energy bills alone - and that does not include the embergy (embodied energy) involved in each unit’s manufacture.
Supermarkets generate wasteful mobility in deciding to locate their shops in places that we can only reach by car; in the UK, 25 percent of car journeys are to get food. We increasinlgy eat food whilst moving, too. “Dashboard dining” is a fast-growing and energy-squandering chunk of the food industry; seventy percent of fast-food sales in the US are at the drive-through window, and a lot of energy is needed to speed up the service. At San Diego-based Jack in the Box restaurants, for instance, where it takes 3.8 minutes to get burgers out the drive-through window, a research firm told the company that speeding up delivery by six seconds could improve profits substantially. The British, for their part, purchase three billion pre-packed sandwiches a year from outlets whose every wall is lined with energy-intensive chiller cabinets. Once back home, our reliance on processed stimulates energy use in fridges and freezers, stoves, ovens, and microwaves.
When food is forced into the formal economy and industrialized, indirect costs skyrocket. Poor diet and physical inactivity account for 35 percent (and rising) of avoidable causes of deaths in the US; the on-costs of obesity alone amount to 10 percent of total health costs. In Europe, grab-and-go consumers probably do not realize is that the sandwiches they eat contain the same amount of salt as seven bags of crisps.
Processed food does not just clog our arteries. Two geographers, Simon Marvin and Will Medd, found that fat deposits from fast food outlets and homes was increasing the number of sewer blockages and overflows across cities in the United States. Cities become fat, they say, as restaurants and fast food chains pour cooking residue into drains. Local governments lack the resources to monitor grease disposal or to enforce the relevant regulations.
Food madness is not confined to the North. The obesity pandemic has reached India, too; 29 percent of school-age children in Delhi are obese - possibly because the sugar content of their diet has risen 40 percent during the last 50 years, and its fat content by 20 percent. Delhi authorities now want to ban the city’s 300,000 street food vendors (few of whom use much sugar or fat) in the name of “hygiene” and “modernization” ahead of the 2010 Commonweath Games.
The financial pressure to industrialize food in emerging economies is immense. In a Western food shop, for every ten dollars you or I spend at the checkout, only 60c ends up with the farmer. The remaining $9.40 - the “added value” - represents turnover and profit for the industries involved. Compare that to formal stores in India (also known as organised retail); they account for only three percent of of India’s $300 billion food retail sector. Most food shopping is still done through hole-in-the-wall stores, roadside vendors, and open-air markets. A report published for the Indian government by McKinsey promoted the idea that India become the ‘food factory of the world’ in the next few years. The firm promoted the twin concepts of “efficiency” and “innovation” as the basis for an Indian drive into the $640 billion global packaged food industry. “Efficient products at extremely low cost…that’s where the heartland of the Indian consumer is going to be”. The likely costs to social and environmental quality, and public health, were not mentioned in McKinsey’s report.
Plan B for food
The impact of business on food is not all negative. Some multinational corporations in the food sector are moving faster than most governments in response to the unfolding food and water crisis. Patrick Cescau, for example, Group Chief Executive of Unilever, talked to an industry conference about “seismic shifts in the world we do business in” and warned of a “reality gap between where we are, and where we need to be”. Cescau proposed to apply new design principles to “drive down our usage of resources and move towards ever more sustainable consumption”.
Easy to say, of course; harder to do. When I asked people in Unilever about this pledge, it seemed to me that many of Cescau’s 234,000 colleagues remain vague, to put it mildly, about what these “new design principles” are - let alone how they are to be implemented. But this also means there’s a design opportunity here: If huge companies like Unilever are in the market for sustainable design principles, it seems to me we should provide them.
For its part WalMart, Another giant company, is facing in both directions at once. Its India operation is complicit in the drive to wipe out the informal sector - but back in the USA the company required all its managers to watch Al Gore’s movie. Confusion, but not inaction, also describes Marks and Spencer’s position. As I explained in Chapter 1, Britain’s most active food retailer is committed to make all it UK and Irish operations carbon neutral within five years. “We’ll maximise our use of renewable energy and only use offsetting as a last resort” pledges the firm. It has committed to act on waste, raw materials, healthy eating, and fair trade; it has banned white veal and calves liver from its shelves; and the firm is playing a leading role in a government programme called WRAP that is tacklng the packaging issue.
M&S’s glaring omission is refrigeration. This sleight of hand is similar to the decision of governments to omit aviation from their national footprint calculations. More than 50 percent of food in developed countries is retailed under refrigerated conditions. Shopping for a snack in central London recently I counted out 78 metres (256 feet) of chiller cabinets in one small central London branch. A single open-fronted freezer costs 15,000 pounds (22,000 euros) per year to run in energy bills alone - and that does not include the embergy (embodied energy) involved in each unit’s manufacture. Unchecked, air conditioning units and chiller cabinets will cause hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere in the next 50 years.
Off course, M&S may reply, if food were not refrigerated, a good proportion of it would rot or spoil. Up to 40 percent of fruit is lost post-harvest in some food systems. Such a loss of produce represents a waste of energy on its own account, since wasted food embodies the energy used in its production, processing and transport. Nonetheless, as things stand today, it looks as if M&S is resigned not to reduce, but to offset, the massive energy emissons from its supply, storage and retail operations when its five year deadline for Plan A expires.
The alternative would be for food retailers to change their business model to one of shopless shopping, and close down most of their retail outlets. And why not? Refrigerated trucks, warehouses, and high street stores are expensive and wasteful steps in the journey from farm to table. It would not require much infrastructure investment to re-purpose retail outlets into hubs in a warehouse and delivery system. Many intermnediaries in food systems wouod disappear, but the big players like M&S are well-placed to become the radically de-centralised distribution and quality assurance platform that all towns and cities need to relocalise their food systems.
Measure what matters
As awareness of crisis of food systems has grown, so too has demand for information about what we are eating. As public awarness about food issues has grown, food miles have come to emblemise the problem. Some experts point out, correctly, that the energy efficicnce of food systems is not just about miles covered by the various ingredients. One study found that transportation accounted for 11 percent of the energy use within the food system in the United States, compared to agricultural production (17.5 percent) and processing (28.1 percent). Friends of the food industries use these anomalies to draw misleading conclusions. The Economist, for example, opined that it is “better for the environment to truck in tomatoes from Spain during the winter , than to grow them in heated greenhouses in Britain (Economist 7th Dec 2006). A British government minister argued that that “flowers flown from Africa can use less energy overall than those produced in Europe because they’re not grown in heated greenhouses”. A total-energy-used metric was also used to show that tomatoes grown outdoors in Spain, then flown to the UK, were “responsible for fewer carbon emissions than UK tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses”.
Nobody lied here, but “better” is this context does not mean “sustainable”. It just means less bad.The fact that a product flown from another country is responsible for fewer carbon emissions than its equivalent where it is consumed does not mean it its import is sustainable.”.(Saunders et al. 2006)
The term greenwashing applies when companies (or governments) devote more resources to advertising and communications, than to actions that materially change the way a system impacts on the biosphere. The worst greenwashing involves changing the name or label of an otherwise unchanged product. Images of trees, birds, or dew drops are warning signs.
National and transnational governments are taking important steps against greenwashing. In the UK for example, the Carbon Trust and Defra, the environment ministry, are co-sponsors of the Publicly Available Specification(PAS). A standardised system for measuring embodied green house gas emissions in products and services wil be applied across a wide range of product and service categories and their supply chains, including food. The aim is to enable companies to measure the life-cycle climate change impacts of their products and highlight significant emission reduction opportunities. In the medium term improved food system standards, specifications, metrics, and scorecards, will make greenwashing much harder.
Harder, but not impossible. If we are to re-localise food, a new generation of information systems will be needed as support. Many of today’s food systems rely on closed networks in which access to information is controlled by entities (such as supermarkets) that are not keen on localisation. Many food and agriculture companies have deployed private information and labelling systems that they have designed and they operate. This allows them to decice what variables will be measured, and which benchmarks will be used to plot progress. The result has been to confuse matters. The good news is that open source software for food systems are already emerging.
Efforts by international institutions to impose order and transparency on reporting systems will be a continuous battle. A challenge for designers is to develop new ways reveal data as thery are uncovered. With a system called ThingLink, for exampe, the Finnish designer Ulla Maaria Mutanen has made it possible, simply by touching items with a mobile phone, their unique story can be told. The phone is used as a scanning device, linking with individual tags placed on items. The phone then uses a database called Thinglink to access the full history of the item and send this information back to the mobile phone. The details of the item are displayed on the phone in various forms including audio messages.
Urban farming
When the civic and business leaders of thirty world cities convened in New York in 2007 for the Large Cities Climate Summit, food did not figure on the agenda. Delegates discussed Congestion, Energy, Water, Buildings, Business, Urban Transit, and Waste - but not food systems. This was a remarkable omission: Up to forty percent of the ecological footprint of a modern city can be traced back to its food systems — the transportation, packaging, storage, preparation and disposal of the things we eat.
It’s a measure of the speed with which things are changing that food does now figures prominently in the ways some cities are planning their futures. An unexpected best-seller, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (Cpuls) by Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn, persuaded many planners and architects that food systems to accord food systems the same priority as transport, or housing. City farming is spreading fast and some 800 million people worldwide are involved in urban agriculture .
In cities as diverse as Rosario, Argentinia, the South Bronx, Portland, Curitiba, Freiburg Mexico City and Barcelona, citizens are rediscovering how to grow fruits, vegetables, and herbs, as well as raise livestock. The core belief system modern urban design - that cities are for people to live and work in, and the countryside is for growing food - is being swept away. A curious side-effect of the shift to urban farming is the attention now paid to Cuba as a whole nation model and laboratory for sustainable development. Cuba could assume global leadership in designing sustainable products, processes, and policies - with urban agriculture food systems as its core competence.
Urban farming brings together the disparate disciplines of architecture, engineering, landscape, ecology, land-use planning, embodied energy studies, recycling and pollution control to create what the Malaysian architect Ken Yeang describes as “a single approach to ecological design.” Another architect, Chris Hardwick, a member of Toronto’ food policy council, describes as ecosystem planning an approach that includes the whole food system, not just parts of it, and understands that humans are part of nature, not separate from it. Ecosystem planning recognizes the dynamic nature of the ecosystem and incorporates the concepts of carrying capacity, resilience and sustainability.
When I became the programme director of a new national design biennial, Dott 07, I contacted Viljoen immediately for advice on how best to develop a large urban agriculture project. Today, thousands of people living and working in the town of Middlesbrough are participants in a project devoted to the cause of local food production and reduced food miles. Young, old, rich and poor have begun to work together work to grow and eat food, and to realise new relationships with local food producers and existing growers in the town and its surrounding area.
The Dott project set out to help schools, communities and businesses grow their own fresh food in small, medium and large urban growing spaces; these ranged from window boxes to larger planter boxes and open-sided skips. The project included the establishment of Meal Assembly Centres (MACs) in different locations, and culminated in a big ‘Meal for Middlesbrough’ in the city centre. In parallel with this community action, the town commissioned a revision to its strategic plan which identifed and mapped new opportunities for growing food. This map connected the location of the containers and interested public growers with existing allotment sites and ‘dead land’. ‘
Food systems are a key part of the agenda in making towns and cities sustainable. The design challenge is knitt together diverse resources and opportunities. The ecology of a city is complicated, and a tremendous level of coordination is needed among service providers, consumers and producers. Urban Farming, in this sense, is more about the design of services and infrastructures than it is about stand-alone artefacts. New services and infrastructures are needed to support food co-ops, collective kitchens and dining rooms, community gardens, and other enhancements
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