FOOD FUTURES

“I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons," writer, poet and artist Kahlil Gibran once wrote. Nothing illustrates this interconnectedness– what affects one directly, affects all indirectly– more intricately and widely than our global food system. We don’t typically think about it this way, but as Michael Pollan points out, “eating represents our most powerful engagement with the natural world — it transforms the world by remaking the landscape more than any other human activity, and it transforms, and defines, us.”

Image generated by AI Canva.

When we think about any living organism within an ecosystem, we recognize that every creature plays a role within a wider system and does four things: it consumes energy in the form of food, produces waste, reproduces, and eventually dies and decays, which in turn provides sustenance for another organism. These cycles happen at the micro levels of cells, to the largest of organisms like a Blue Whale or a Giant Sequoia. Humans are no exception.

When we think about how our current global food system works, it doesn’t take long to realize that it operates by ignoring the basic patterns and processes that have allowed nature to evolve for the last 3.8 billion years. Through our short-sighted food systems, we are shorting nature. Modern agriculture and food processes are immense, opaque, and complex. With cause and effect all far removed from each other, ethical choices can feel almost impossible to make, no matter if you are workers, producers, corporate executives, or consumers; moreover, this distancing of processes means environmental and human rights infringements are commonplace.

Fifteen years ago, India Hamilton, a PhD researcher and SCOOP founder in Jersey, UK asked: How can we maximize the number of people fed, provide the highest quality food, minimize costs for consumers, and ensure the highest wages for workers? This happens to be one of the most extraordinarily complex questions for systems-level sustainability.

This chapter on Food Futures offers a deeper look into the structural development of our current system and unveils powerful opportunities to work towards the future we want to create. From the smallest building blocks of life, such as soil microbes; to the life-sustaining cycles like the water cycle; and interwoven with biological diversity and human connections, food epitomizes our intricate interrelationships with all life, and intersects virtually with every part of society. As Wendell Berry said: “How and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it.” Or, to cite the apt phrase: “You are what you eat.”

For most of human history, there was an enormous variability in our diet, largely shaped by the cultural traditions, knowledge, and climate of a place. Thousands of crop species adapted over centuries to a particular environment and farmers saved seeds which were passed on over lifetimes. This is how biodiversity flourished, and the foundation of life on this planet is the result of the unassuming seed.

This all has changed with the advent of modern agriculture where monoculture farms are the norm. To produce more and more, diversity has been reduced down to a fraction of what existed before. The majority of all the food we eat comes from nine almost identical crops and a handful of livestock genetics, setting in motion one of the greatest extinctions the earth has ever experienced and putting humans on a dangerously vulnerable path. Reduction in biodiversity is even impacting the amount of healthy microbes in our gut!

Agriculture, land use, and deforestation represent the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and the primary driver of biodiversity loss. Nearly 75% of freshwater resources and more than a third of the Earth’s land surface are now dedicated to food production – a quarter of this for crops and three-quarters for grazing animals. Furthermore, farming’s expansion into the wild is deforesting nearly 4 million hectares of tropical rainforest each year.

As of April 2022, according to Stockholm Resilience Institute, humanity is pushing beyond the safe limit for six of the nine planetary boundaries: freshwater use, climate change, biogeochemical flows (i.e., excessive phosphorus and nitrogen pollution from fertilizer use), biosphere integrity (e.g., extinction rate and loss of insect pollination), land-system change (e.g., deforestation), and novel entities (e.g., pollution from plastics, heavy metals, and what are commonly referred to as “forever chemicals”). The way we farm and consume resources is undeniably causing massive degradation of ecosystems and producing enormous quantities of waste.

Since World War II and the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 60s, we have all been living in a 70-year experiment of a production-focused global food system, where productivity, market efficiencies, and complex relationships with food brands have led to consumers paying very little for actual nutrition. Other indicators of a food system completely ill-designed is that food poverty, obesity, and diabetes are on the rise in nearly every country in the world. Today, we grapple with a paradox: 40% of the global population is overweight or obese, while another 800 million people go to bed hungry. The poorest populations spend up to 80% of their income on food. We need to delve deeper and consider the adjustments required to ensure greater access to nutritious food as a matter of public health, social security, and stewarding the current and future generations.

Presently, the issue lies not in the quantity of food produced, but rather in its uneven distribution, consumption, and wastage within the globalized economy. We do not currently face a global food shortage; instead, the challenge is rooted in political and distributional problems. In the United States alone, about 30 to 40 percent of our entire food supply is wasted every year, according to estimates from the USDA. Contrast this with the fact that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates we will need to increase current food production by 70% to feed the global population by 2050. How can all sides of this massive food system hear each other and work towards sustainable solutions?

However, as the Soil Association points out, the FAO reports that underpin the mentioned claims highlight the necessity for certain sectors in specific regions to substantially boost food production. Specifically, projections indicate a substantial increase in cereal production, aiming for an annual rise of 1 billion tons by 2050, which represents a 50% growth from the 2 billion tons recorded in 2005. This increase is primarily intended to meet the demand for animal feed. Regarding meat, the reports emphasize that in developing countries (excluding China), there's a potential for increased per capita meat consumption due to effective demand, and their per capita consumption could potentially double by 2050. It's crucial to note that this pertains to a foreseen doubling of meat consumption in select developing nations and not a global doubling of food production.

The more we race to increase production, the more we need to use GMOs and chemicals, the more we are creating more problems than we are solving: food waste, an increase in malnourished populations, land and water pollution, and biodiversity loss.

Whether you're mindful of the source of your food, driven to make a positive impact and reduce your waste, or aspire to build a sustainable value chain in your company, Food Futures is the perfect place to begin.

To better understand what you can do to make sustainable changes aligned with the 4Revs value framework, we will delve into 4Revs cases and other examples of innovative food business models that embed diversity and resilience in their design.

Let’s consider the following questions:

1. How can we deploy technologies, entrepreneurship and business models that address the crisis of food waste, poverty, climate risk and nutrition scarcity?

2. What are key opportunities that companies have to build integrated value chains which will create positive direct and indirect impacts?

By the end of this module, we hope that you glean insights and a critical thinking lens through which to evaluate your relationship to food and the people across the value chain that bring it from field to fork.