From seed to table: the challenge of creating sustainable food systems.

Introduction

Concern over environmental conditions, health, and social justice is creating a groundswell of interest in the creation of more sustainable food systems. Both ubiquitous and complex, the way in which we produce and consume food is a bellwether for the broader sustainable development movement. We all engage with the food system every day. For many of us, our food choices are made with issues of cost, security of supply, safety, nutrition, social justice and, of course, taste in mind. Although the industrial food system is larger than it has ever been, the intimate nature of our relationship with food makes us skeptical about industrial control of this aspect of our lives more than any other. Across the globe a diverse and vibrant community of farmers, consumers, educators, researchers, activists and chefs are working together to build an alternative to industrial food that is more sustainable.

This is not to understate the challenges a sustainable food system faces. Food security has often been framed as strictly about ensuring a secure supply of food, but in this collection of papers we take a longer-term view of food security that embraces environmental issues as well. Food security is ultimately a question of long term environmental sustainability and establishing healthy and enriching food options. The widespread use of industrial food production methods has enormous, often adverse, impacts on land and water. While traditional food production methods are often more in tune with local environments, modern industrial agriculture can severely alter the natural environment on a very large scale. As the world's population approaches seven billion, and as the pace of climate change accelerates, developing sustainable ways of producing food and ensuring that those with the least means have access becomes a major 21st century challenge.

Industrial monoculture has largely obliterated smaller scale local production in much of the world. In the short term, the use of non-renewable fertilizers and large machinery has made food cheaper and more plentiful than ever before in human history, but this has occurred at the expense of taste, nutrition, and rural communities world wide. The shift from a largely agrarian workforce to an industrial one represents the largest reallocation of labor in human history, and it is becoming clear that in the process we may have endangered the symbiosis with the biosphere that ultimately keeps us alive. This sweeping change also poses a challenge to people interested in entering the field of sustainable food production: land is scarce, and knowledge is being lost.

Feeding vast populations in a way that minimizes impacts on the environment and ensures equal distribution is emerging as an issue of importance for environmentalists. Recent rapid food price inflation underscores the importance of food as an environmental issue and how the issues of food and energy are closely linked. For example, pressure is now being exerted by bio-agricultural corporations to remove regulations forbidding the use of genetically modified (GM) crops in Europe. Corporations now argue that improved yields from GM crops are necessary in order to bring these prices down. In similar fashion the price of fertilizers has sky-rocketed over the past few years as they are used to increase yields. The strain of changing climate and increased pressure on arable lands to produce larger quantities of food using unsustainable agricultural methods is an environmental crisis in the making.

The loss of biodiversity within human food crops is a quiet but dire and largely irreversible environmental crisis. There are an estimated seventy five thousand edible plants, but humans live largely on two dozen. We use or have some knowledge of about forty thousand more but the rest are unexplored, and we are losing many of these plants as natural ecosystems are destroyed. However, equally troubling is the destruction of landraces, which are variations of major crops grown by small-scale farmers, and the destruction of wild relatives to major crops. Losing these pools of genetic diversity exposes us to extreme peril. For example, if thousands of wild varieties of potato had not been growing in South America at the time of the Irish Potato famine, potatoes would likely not be a viable crop today. The potato blight was so deadly because the potatoes grown in Ireland were all very genetically similar; they lacked genetic diversity. In order for potatoes to be grown again in Europe, they had to be cross-bread with wild relatives.

Plant scientists must then turn to landraces and wild stocks to breed new hybrids. Without landraces and wild pools of genetic diversity, crop yields will fall dramatically. The increase in the use of genetically modified seeds introduces new uncertainty to the future of biodiversity within our food crops. It is interesting to note that genetic engineering also depends on wild stocks to provide base material to work with. This dual loss of wild relatives and landraces developed over thousands of years is directly tied to the expansion of the industrial food system.

The Food System from Seed to Table

Although the future of our food might seem bleak, resistance to the industrial food system is growing around the world as people attempt to retake control of what they eat.

In this group of five papers we attempt to show how, from seed to table, a struggle to build a new alternative food system is emerging. It is likely that this struggle will intensify as increases in the price of food accelerate.

We begin this unique collection with a paper that begins at the beginning. Seed saving is an essential practice if ordinary people and farmers are to ensure that alternatives can be developed in the face of the accelerated pace in growth of the agri-industrial system. At first, and taking a global perspective, the author shows the extent to which seed production and saving are now controlled by large agri-corporations. The author focuses on Canada, demonstrating the extent of agri-business control over seeds but also outlining realistic ways in which farmers are developing alternatives to ensure access to seeds.

The second paper directs attention to information needs relevant for community activists, health activists, and planners and the means by which this information might be made available. Simply put, if alternative food systems are to promote local production and consumption at a very basic level, it is necessary to know, within communities and regions, what agricultural products are grown, under what circumstances, and how these have changed over time. The author demonstrates, using regularly collected agricultural data, how such a spatial database can be assembled and utilized. The paper advocates adoption of this approach in local jurisdictions as a tool to aid local community groups and policy makers in moving their regions towards local food security.

The concept of how "local" local food can be is explored in the next paper, which examines urban and peri-urban growing in the cities of Vancouver, BC and Portland, Oregon. The author points out that development of boutique farmers markets largely for middle class clients may not make environmental or economic sense and instead describes an "extreme local food" approach in which some of our food needs are met within the city itself by growing small-scale commercial crops within the city in unused backyards and other small areas of land.

The next paper explores the issue of loss of control over local food sources around the world. The authors show that the breaking of traditions related to foods has resulted in an extreme dependence on basic foods that come from non-local, non-traditional sources, for example foods flown in from thousands of miles away. This paper demonstrates, in dramatic fashion, the need for moving to alternative local ways of growing food to improve food security.

The final paper in our series describes the importance of traditional knowledge about food among a group of New Canadians. Using a qualitative case study approach the author explores the concept of traditional food knowledge, comparing existing literature with the lived experience of a group of new Canadians and their families. These last two papers build a strong case for building local food security from the ground up.

The snapshots of innovation described in these papers draw from seed to table to suggest ways we can work in concert with the biosphere to provide food that is secure, safe, nutritious, supportive of healthy communities, and tasty. As these small seeds of resistance from around the world come together there is growing optimism that we can eat differently, and ultimately live differently. In the long run, from the field to the dining room, this is the challenge we must meet.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the extensive and insightful comments provided by the reviewers of this theme issue.

Lenore Newman is an Assistant Professor at Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada. Her research interests include sustainable food systems, urban form, and nature/culture interactions. She is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada and writes widely on environmental issues. She can be reached at lenore.newman@royalroads.ca

Aleck Ostry is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Victoria. He holds a Canada Research Chair in the Social Determinants of Community Health and is also a Senior Scholar with the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in British Columbia. He conducts an extensive program on the social determinants of health with a focus on rural health, food security and nutrition policy. He can be reached at ostry@uvic.ca

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