Sustain Ability

This week I want to shine a bit of light in the gloom I’ve been spouting, and talk about sustainable agricultural practices. Yes, I know that I’ve been going on about how our agricultural systems are enormous emitters and we’re all going to eat ourselves into an agrapocalypse of high emissions and vanishing rainforests, but there is some hope left out there! Humans don’t actually want to become extinct, so sometimes we do face our problems and work on solutions.

 When looking at news stories on breakthroughs in the field, it can be a little hard to sort the wheat from the chaff (agriculture joke for you there) but there have been a few recently that I’ve come across and found somewhat interesting.  First, this one about feeding seaweed to cows has been doing the rounds recently, and while it probably needs a little more experimentation before it becomes the norm, it’s quite an exciting notion. I plan, in a later post, to discuss why pastoral farming in general isn’t the best thing for the environment, but something people are often fascinated with is the fact that cow burps emit a lot of methane. And now, this study seems to be en route to solving that by adding this seaweed to cows' diets. It sounds a little funny, and trivial, but it’s actually quite a big thing. Hundreds of thousands of cows are out there right now, burping us into a future of sea level rise and freak weather conditions, and finally someone is doing something about it. Maybe.

 I also got hold of this one (image below), about Sundrop Farms in Australia, thanks to my dear grandmother’s penchant for sending me newspaper clippings she thinks I’d like. Growing crops with nothing but seawater and solar power sounds like a pipe dream, but if we can make it real then… well, good. Seawater and sunshine and both things of which we have something of an abundance, so we might as well put them to good use. Desalination of water is an energy-intensive process, but using solar power would keep it ‘green’. It’s an exciting concept, at any rate.

Chris Moss, The Sunday Telegraph, November 27th 2016

 These are just a couple of current examples of changes in the way we treat the agricultural system, aiming towards a greener food industry. While these developments are both exciting and funny sounding, it’s important to remember that most agriculture does not in fact take place in laboratories or experimental facilities. There are hundreds of thousands of farms in the world, all operating under slightly different systems, but the majority of them favouring emissions-heavy techniques. Sustainable agriculture is an exciting prospect and a wonderful goal, but it takes innovation and fundamental changes to the way in which we view and treat our food supply.

GMO - OMG!

You might have heard of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), foodstuffs with their genetic material altered to make them easier to cultivate, or more nutritious. You might have heard that meat is being grown inlabs, set to become a more efficient alternative to the stuff that has to bother with being an animal before it’s a food. You may have heard the word ‘Frankenfoods’ which, to be perfectly honest, is just fear-mongering. What you probably haven’t heard is that carrots, when we originally started cultivating them, were a rather exciting shade of purple, but that some savvy European farmers bred the orange hue we know and love into them along the route to making them more nutritious. You almost certainly haven’t heard that wheat, as we know it today, is the result of centuries of cross-breeding of different grass species. And I’m sure you never heard cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and kale were all once the same foul-tasting yetedible plant – which ancient humans bred into several different edible yet foul-tasting plants, for some reason.

Carrots as they once were

Source: flickr user Carl Black, Cosmic Purple Carrots, 2011.

 Yes, dear readers, genetic modification of that which we put into our bodies is so prevalent that almost everything you eat has, in one way or another, been subject to it. Nothing that we farm is the same as the ancestor species we found in the wild, and adapted to our needs. Be it for taste, ease of harvest, or just to see what would happen, humans have been altering our food for thousands of years (Barrows et al, 2014). But it’s only recently that we started doing it in laboratories, and that’s when people started getting angry.

 Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been a point of much contention since they were first developed; the thought of mixing up genetic material can seem a bit frightening, verging on the mad-scientist trope we all know and love. But they’re out there already, growing in fields and sitting around in our food. Or our food’s food; soybeans are one of the most common GMOs, and one of their main uses is to feed livestock (Jacobsen et al, 2013). I, personally, have nothing against GMOs, although I won’t deny that they come with their own unique set of issues and controversies. But first, let’s talk about the positives.

 Hunger is a big issue on this planet. I’ve mentioned this before; it’s kind of hard to avoid on an agriculture blog. Around 1 billion people live without enough food (Jacobsen et al, 2013), and even more live off diets that are lacking in some important nutrient like iron or vitamin a. The fact of the matter is, with a growing population, we need to find new ways to feed everyone. And this week I’m focussing on the potential from GMOs. High-yield varieties; there’s something good. More food, less land. Intensive, yes, but less land being used means less biodiversity lost, although it does also put more stress on the land in question. And let’s not forget that, with the impacts of climate change, it is going to be harder and harder to cultivate crops; growing seasons will change, and plants may no longer be suited to the environment around them, not to mention the migration of new pests into their areas. While genetic modification does take time, what with development and field tests, it’s still faster than selective breeding in creating pest-resistant or hardier strains (Qaim and Zilberman, 2003). Not to mention nutritional improvements; genetic modification to change the nutritional contents of a crop. Some (Borlaug, 2000) are hopeful about this kind of alteration, although there seem to be few real examples out there. Golden Rice springs to mind, engineered for vitamin a, which is hardly a bad idea.

 However, GMOs have their downsides as well. Patenting of genetic material means that these strains can only be bought from their parent companies, and farmers may not be allowed to keep seeds from their yield to plant a new crop (Jacobsen et al, 2013). It leads to a monopoly, with companies like Monsanto controlling the majority of the cotton market with specialised breeds such as Bt cotton, popular in India (Qaim and Zilberman, 2003).

 But one of the biggest concerns associated with GMOs is the transfer of these modified genetics to the species’ wild counterparts. It’s all fun and games until the weeds become weed-killer resistant. The process isn’t just as simple as one bout of pollen transfer, as figure 1 shows, but nonetheless the possibility of genetic transfer is real (Stewart et al, 2003), and the notion of some of these traits getting out of hand and into the wild is somewhat concerning. One of the biggest issues with agriculture is that is changes ecosystems, having negative ecological consequences; adding rogue ‘transgenetic’ material into the mix doesn’t seem like the best of ideas, somehow.

Figure 1: Gene-flow pathways between GMOs and their wild counterparts, in the event of interbreeding leading to slow hybridisation.
Source: Stewart et al 2003.

 I’m still not opposed to GMOs, but I will admit that even my opinion of them has changed a little during my research into them. They’re a good idea; they’re already out there, feeding more people than their un-modified counterparts could, and that’s nothing to sniff at. But they’re not a perfect solution to the hunger and ecological problems facing the world, and while we should always bear them in mind as an answer to the issues of the potential agracpocalyse, we also need to remember that they come with a risk or two.

Fashion Foods

Do you remember a time when kale was that gross green stuff your mum tried to force you to eat at Sunday lunch? A simpler time, when it hadn’t made its insidious green way into everything from smoothies to cupcakes to, for some ungodly reason, pizza dough. A time when people weren’t droning incessantly on and on about the wonders of kale, using buzzwords like ‘superfood’ and ‘antioxidant’. A time when the world made sense.

 Kale is a prime example of what I like to call a fashion food, or a food craze as they’re usually known. Crazes like the cronut or those rainbow bagels are harmless enough; they look cool on Instagram, and they probably taste pretty good. But what I’m talking about here are the 'It' ingredients; that thing you suddenly have to be cooking with.

Just... why?

Source: flickr user Arnold Gatilao. 'Healthy' Filipino smoothie, 2011.

 Quinoa is a prime example of this; there were already plenty of grains available to us, but the foodies of the world jumped onto the quinoa train as soon as it pulled into the station, spurred on by social media and the general experience of viral hipsterism. Fashionable food sounds crazy, but it’s a thing. For the last few years, kale and avocado have been the a-list of crops, for some ungodly reason, taking over lives and advertising campaigns to a bizarre and memeworthy extent. I am no exception to the fashion food frenzy, as the unopened containers of millet, bulgar wheat, and chia seeds sitting in my cupboards will attest. I do maintain that I made a mean chia pudding, just to be clear.

 The problem with quinoa, the way its popularity has led to the people who depend on it being unable to afford it, is something that has been playing on my mind since I talked about it in another post not long ago. This isn’t a long post, I just wanted to reflect on the very real and seemingly unpredictable impacts our actions can have. Ethical shopping doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but it can really make a difference to someone else. And I just wanted to say that, if you get anything out of reading this blog, I hope it’s that you take a moment to think before you jump onto the newest fad.

Food Insecurity and Malthusian Catastrophes

In a world with a population exceeding 7 billion and on the course for 9 billion within the next century, we desperately need new ways of producing enough food to keep everyone fed. We already have food shortages around the world, though these are often to do with localised droughts or infrastructure deficiencies making transportation difficult. The FAO estimates that around 795 million people around the world were undernourished in 2014-2016 (FAO, 2015).

 Thomas Malthus believed in a future in which the hungry mass of humanity would outstrip the planet’s ability to feed it, leading to societal collapse and an eventual return to subsistence-level living (Den Herder et al, 2010). This was not an unreasonable thought in the 1800s, a time when the UK population was increasing but their capacity to produce food was not. His gloomy predictions were proved wrong, at the time, by the Industrial Revolution. With the advent of farming machines such as the combine harvester, food production in the west could keep up with its expanding populations. But was the Industrial Revolution merely a delay in Malthus’s predicted agrapocalypse? Machines continued to develop; but the global population is still growing, and there are areas of the world where food shortages and famines are a fact of life. Are we heading for a Malthusian dilemma of food unavailability?

Thomas Malthus, rocking the mutton chops.
Source: Wikimedia Commons, Thomas Robert Malthus.

 Defined by the FAO as “A situation that exists when people lack secure access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life,” food insecurity is an issue which plagues people in all parts of the world. There are many reasons for people to be suffering from food insecurity; even in the more developed parts of the world, not everyone has the income to keep themselves on the ‘secure’ side of that line. Sometimes the problem is caused by supply and demand; like when the increasing popularity of quinoa (keen-wah, say it with me) in the USA and the UK lead to the price of the crop tripling, leaving the people of Bolivia and Peru who depended on it as a main source of food unable to afford it. Yeah, your super-duper-vegan-friendly-protein-packed quinoa and pesto dinner doesn’t look so appetising anymore, does it? But supply and demand is the reality that we live with, and it’s the reason we’re using so much of our land to produce food that much of the world can’t even afford.

 That’s not the only reason, of course. As the wise Bob Geldof has taught us, drought and famine are enemies that are not so easily fought off; and they often crop up in the parts of the world that are least equipped to deal with them. The global population is still rising, though not in the more economically developed world, so there are still more mouths to feed. As I’ve mentioned previously, we produce a lot more food than we consume; unfortunately, we just don’t get it to all of the people who need it.

 Technological advances kept us clear of Malthus’s agrapocalypse, but unsustainable farming coupled with unequal economic situations, and famines and droughts caused by climate change, could be leading to a different kind. The technology needed to feed the global population is there, but the infrastructure to distribute the food and the wealth to distribute the machines are not. And therein lies the problem.

 No one really needs to go hungry, but they do because those of us with money drive the price up beyond the reach of those without. We literally steal food from the hands of communities that cannot afford to lose it. Technological advancement is, in some ways, exponential; we can build bigger and better greenhouses, raise our crops on nothing but water and sunlight, and take chickens from birth to butcher in under a month, but all this intensifying of the agricultural process costs money. So the better we get at it, the further behind we leave others. The Industrial Revolution saved us from Malthus’s predictions, but in a cruel irony it could become the reason for their eventual occurrence. 

John Oliver; Another Useful Video

After my post on food waste, I thought it might be useful to share this video of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on, you guessed it, food waste. It's a little long, but it's factual and funny. He covers the production of methane in landfills as well, which is useful. Though, as a former Domino's employee, I cannot personally condone his suggestion that their delicious pizza belongs in the bin.
Fair warning, it does contain some strong language.

Source: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, Food Waste, 2015.

Waste Not Want Not

Perfectly good food in a bin; a surprisingly common occurrence.

Source: flickr user US Department of Agriculture, 2013.

In terms of the unsustainable nature of our agricultural industry, perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects is that of food waste. The phenomenal amount of food which goes to waste every year is largely a product of uneven distribution of the total production. It has, in fact, been estimated that food waste could account for around a third of total crop production (Cassidy et al, 2013); an enormous quantity considering not only the huge areas of land dedicated to arable agriculture, but also the implications in terms of emissions and other environmental impacts. Imagine if we could reduce arable emissions by a third, or reforest vast swathes of land currently dedicated to monoculture that doesn’t even make it from farm to fork.

 But why is there so much food waste, you might ask? And, perhaps more importantly, how can it be prevented? Food waste occurs at three main levels: industrial, retail, and consumer (Dou et al 2016). At the industrial level, there is waste occurring as a by-product of overall production; for example, bones in the meat industry, or the inedible parts of meat. There is also an issue of ‘manufacturing mishaps’, whereby a product is overproduced, or the operation changes and some of the original is left over. The former type of waste cannot generally be eaten by humans, but does have the potential for other industrial uses, while the latter tends to be entirely edible. At the retail level, there is the issue of ‘reject’ products; packaging damaged in transport, bruised fruit, or misshapen cakes may be removed from the shelves as they do not meet the consumer-oriented notion of aesthetic perfection. And at the consumer level itself, individuals may over-buy some items, and throw them away when they go out of date. While from a personal perspective, the odd mouldy loaf of bread or blackened banana may not seem like such a big deal, when taken together it all adds up to an astounding amount of waste. In fact, while in less economically developed countries a large part of food waste is often to do with bad infrastructure causing problems for distribution, in more economically developed countries – the ‘global north’ – consumer waste is thought to be the largest of the three.

 It is important to mention here that food waste is not just about, well, wasting food. At face value, it is hedonistic and wildly unfair that millions of tonnes of food are thrown away each year, when one in nine people on Earth doesn’t have enough to eat (Dou et al, 2016), but the problem has far more layers than that. For a start, as already mentioned, agricultural production is a major global emitter of greenhouse gases, driving the effects of human induced global warming. As well as this, to produce all this food large amounts of land must be dedicated to the industry, resulting in the destruction of ecosystems. Swathes of the Amazon rainforest have been cut down to make way for cattle and soy production, and in Indonesia deforestation has destroyed the habitats of many endangered species to allow a monoculture of palm oil to spring up. (For some dramatic scenes of the latter, have a look at Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary ‘Before the Flood’.)

 Once food reaches a landfill, as so much of it does, it would be easy to assume that it would simply biodegrade. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As so much waste is piled up in a landfill, the pressure and environment in which the organic matter is left lead to anaerobic respiration, resulting in the production of methane (Karthikeyan et al, 2016). So not only do these millions of metric tonnes a food a year, which never make it from farm to fork, emit carbon dioxide in their production; once left to rot, they lead to even more greenhouse gases.

 So, what can be done to reduce food waste? Like the waste itself, the answer to this is more complex than the question. For a start, there are two parts to this reduction, both of which need to be implemented to reduce the waste in a meaningful way. First, food needs to be diverted from landfills to plates – not literally, of course, that would be a tad unsavoury. But biomass which is destined to be thrown out for no reason other than its packaging is a little dented, or the company simply doesn’t want the hassle of selling its meat trimmings on, needs to find its way to useful places. That may be at the tables of those who are not receiving enough food now or, in the case of inedible products, it may be to various industrial uses. The second part is preventing the waste from being created in the first place. At the consumer level, this means educating and encouraging individuals to buy only what they are going to use. At the industrial level, it involves tailoring the amount of production to the demand, and avoiding overproduction.

 In a global agriculture, where just a can of Coke requires ingredients produced in half a dozen countries the world over (sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, lime, caffeine… the list goes on), it is always going to be difficult to perfectly fit the supply to the demand. But when a third of what we produce goes to waste every year, it’s at least worth a try.