In this episode we are going to focus on energy and food. This is a topic that I am very passionate about and am spending more and more time thinking, learning and restructuring my own food systems around. In this case I am not talking about energy, in terms of calories and food energy. I am talking about the energy inputs into our food system.
This topic is not talked about enough, everyone talks about climate change and food, but not energy itself.
One of the current hot topics when it comes to food is food pricing and once again energy is at the heart of this. When it comes to food, how we use and what we use energy for, is at the root of many of our health and ecological challenges.
If you want to have an abundant supply of healthy food available at all times for everyone then this is a topic you will want to hear about.
I want to start by setting the scene with where we are now and then we are going to have some fun with imagining alternative to our current systems.
Globally, our modern food systems use about thirty percent of globally available energy. In fact, globally our food systems put 5 calories of energy in for every food calorie out, this does not include the energy from the sun used in photosynthesis or that drives water and nutrient cycles. This is a number that any of us can calculate using global energy data, crop and food energy data and population.
If your look at data for the United States, and I suspect other industrial economies, that number is roughly 10 units of energy in for every unit of food energy out. We are going to get a little deeper into this a little later.
What is the problem with this? There are so many reasons, but I will just talk about the big ones:
1. Food prices: It’s no secret that food prices have been rapidly increasing, at least in Canada and the United States, I presume it is also affecting people in many countries. Globally, fossil fuels make up roughly 80% of the global energy mix. With food systems that are so dependent on oil and natural gas increases in the price of oil and gas generally force the prices of food higher. Other factors in food price increases include crop failures due in part to an increasingly unpredictable weather due to climate change.
2. Climate change: We are already feeling the effects of climate change and it is already affecting food supplies in many ways. The leading cause of climate change is not cow farts it is greenhouse gas emissions from our energy systems. We need to rapidly transform our energy systems to renewable sources of energy but this build out will create more emissions as new infrastructure is built. Frankly the less energy we use, the easier the transition to renewable energy will be. Without getting into a lot of details, renewable sources of energy do not work the same way as fossil fuels and if we are going to make the transformation quickly to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to transform our economies to use a lot less energy.
3. Fossil fuel depletion: There is no shortage of oil and natural gas yet, but we are rapidly depleting or have depleted many of the easiest to access reserves. As we continue to deplete these sources, it is going to take more energy inputs to get the same amount of usable energy we are used to. This will likely result in even higher prices. Renewables just don’t work the same way as fossil fuels, so we need to prepare ourselves for a future with a lot less available energy.
4. Another big reason for me is related to health. In modern industrial economies about 15% of the energy used in our food systems are on-farm processes, compared to a whopping 85% of the energy used if post-farm processes. In less industrialized countries the number is more like 30% on farm and 70% post farm processes. Humans have stored and processed food in some ways for thousands of years to prevent it from spoiling and to store it for lean times. But nowadays ultra-processed foods make up a huge part of many peoples’ diets and these are generally not good for our health. This processing, packaging, storage, transportation, and retailing uses a lot of energy.
5. The final reason I am going to give is population. The human population is still growing and this means that if we don’t change the systems then we will need even more energy.
The fact is that we don’t see energy we only see symptoms of its use. I want to tell you a quick story about how little we see the energy associated with our food habits. More than ten years ago I was overseeing the construction of two building related to a new four-lane highway that was being constructed. The two sites were almost forty kilometres apart and the office was in a small community roughly in the centre. As part of my job I had to review the expense reports of the inspectors on the sites. The one inspector used to have these huge mileage claims and this went along with a contractor complaining this fellow was often not on site. What was happening? A Tim Horton’s had opened in this small community and this inspector was driving to Tim Horton’s a couple of times a day for his coffee and snack in a big-assed SUV, this was a 34 km round trip. He certainly did not see this as energy or cost as long as his expense claims got paid. But how much energy went into getting that guy’s coffee?
So let’s put that extreme case on one side.
But when it comes to totally transforming our energy use the potential for food and food systems is really exciting. Because historically human food systems used to produce an energy surplus, they produced more energy than we put in. Humans were not unique in creating an energy surplus, every other living thing keeps and energy surplus. And this gives us clues as to how we can structure our own food systems now and into the future.
The fact is that every living thing operates on an energy balance and to survive, grow and reproduce, plants, animals and other organisms must operate on an energy surplus.
Let me explain with the example of a black bear that lives where I do.
Plants and animals, including humans, for most of our history, have to make, collect, forage or hunt for their food.
Let’s stick with animals for now, because plants are a little different. This means that animals must get at least as much energy from their food as it takes for them to forage for it or hunt for it, and for their bodies to process it, otherwise they will die.
So the black bear is a big animal so they need plenty of energy from their food to maintain their bodies and even more to grow and reproduce. There are times of year when food (energy) is plentiful so the bears store that excess energy as fat. Use example of pin cherries.
When the weather cools and foods become less available, they sleep a lot and only move around for short periods. During this time, the cubs are born. By storing excess energy as fat, when it is available and cutting their energy use by sleeping, over the year they can keep a positive energy balance.
In really simple terms it takes energy to get energy.
Humans, just like all other animals need to operate on an energy surplus.
When humans were hunter gatherers, we lived within the energy and matter cycles of ecosystems. We lived in small groups, foraged for food, often moving with our food sources, we stored fat on our bodies in times of abundance and losing it in time of scarcity. Cooking, helped us to improve our energy balance. We used an external energy source like wood to make fire and cook our food. This made the energy and nutrients from our food easier for our bodies to extract and reduced the toxicity of some foods. In abundant times it did not take long to collect food and there was plenty of time for leisure (we had a high energy surplus).
Our relationship with energy transformed when we started farming, about 10,000 years ago. Humans with the help of domesticated animals for food and power were still able to create an energy surplus, as long as there was fertile soil and water. This meant that not everyone had to farm in order to have enough food for everyone. This allowed other roles in our societies to develop, such as ruling and religious classes as well as military, artists and scholars. The energy surplus meant that populations grew.
The energy from food was the foundation of our societies.
As a side note, hunter-gatherers had a wide and varied diet. Once agriculture began, human diets generally became less varied and humans became smaller. This was likely because diets were more energy dense but less nutrient dense.
Now, when fossil fuels were discovered and became more widely used this fundamentally changed our relationship with food and energy. Over time, people in the production part of the food system were increasingly replaced by mechanization which means energy inputs, the measure of productivity has typically been the number of dollars produced per worker and so the energy inputs have grown. Let’s go back to the extreme example of the inspector who drove 34 km round trip just to get a coffee and snacks. But examples not as extreme as this are all around us with food delivery, drive throughs etc and these are likely not even in the energy calculations of food.
So how do we escape this? How do we rapidly change this system so that we can reduce our food prices, significantly transform our environmental impacts, while improving the health and nutrition in our food? The clues are all around us. I will tell you now, this is not about being more efficient, or trying to eat less food.
Let’s explore this….
In 2012 I did a project as part of a graduate course I was taking in life cycle assessment and sustainable supply chains. I studied the difference in ecological food between lettuce and bagged greens imported from California and Arizona and sold at the grocery stores and the impact of locally grown microgreens sold through community supported agriculture. I will put a diagram in the show notes.
Explain the diagram.
Explain microgreen process.
Food and taste and spoilage, food lasted longer because it was fresher.
If we are looking to transform this even further what can we do?
In cold weather, we can buy a packet of sprouting seeds and a tray and grow microgreens or soil sprouts in our homes using the heat and light that is already in our homes. Or we can grow sprouts in a jar on our counters.
In warmer weather we can have a couple of planters with cut and come again greens that we can keep cutting and they will regrow.
Or even simpler we can grow perennial greens in a garden or lawn and they will come up early in the spring and can last through frost and beyond. A good example of this are foods like dandelions and other things that may grow in a chemical free lawn. Some people may even have cold frames or other protection to extend the season. My mum has a solarium on her house and she brings some planters in and the greens keep going late into the year.
The reason I am talking about greens to start with is because they are an important part of a healthy diet but they have very caloric value but we eat them for their taste, flavour and nutrients. So the relationship between energy in and energy out can be very exaggerated in very exaggerated in food like greens.
The modern trend has been to talk about and build these vast vertical farms indoors. But once again, these take a huge amount of energy and infrastructure. Without getting into much detail, the nutrients in our food are affected by the plant varieties, growing conditions, time from harvesting, processing and storage. If we want the most nutrient rich foods with plenty of taste and flavour, we need to grow foods in healthy soils, not hydroponically, and we want to eat them or preserve them very soon after harvesting. So the best way to do this is to grow foods like this hyper-locally using very few inputs.
We can extend this example to all sorts of foods. What if our parks, schools, community spaces and of course our gardens all had fruit trees and berry bushes and edible greens in them? What kind of energy surplus could we start generating on those plants and foods?
Another extreme example of putting huge energy inputs into food is, industrial beef operations and even the vegan replacements. Essentially, corn and soya are grown using high input industrial agriculture, this means chemical fertilizers and chemicals. Then these crops are fed to cattle kept in feed lots (we are not going to talk about all the other problems that go along with this). But just as disturbing for me is the use of commodity crops and adding even more energy in the form of industrial processes to make something that approximates the appearance of industrial meat, which I will talk a little more about later. I am only touching on that example very briefly because I have so many issues with both those examples from ethical, environmental and health points of view.
But what about food systems that integrate animals and food crops in ways that are mutually beneficial, there are so many examples of this being done by innovative farmers.
But this is where I find this all highly amusing. Because we are coming full circle. I am going to read a passage from the book dirt by David R. Montgomery “READ p58 second paragraph” I love this example because it also reflects an intensive method that can be done in a small space and we have talked on other episodes about space constraints. These types of systems can produce an energy surplus, especially when paired with traditional food storage and preservation methods.
The reason I find this so funny is that this technique is so similar to what has now being rediscovered and coined as permaculture or regenerative agriculture.
This a real shift in thinking though and structure of food systems, to go from the highly mechanized and automated systems that are increasing present now, to integrated human, plant and animal systems.
I can tell you from my own experience with my own human, plant and animal systems and from buying foods from low input foods from local farmers and small businesses that it is a much richer and more satisfying food experience.
Just think if we filled our communities with growing systems like this, from our homes to public spaces and small scale enterprises, just think of the abundance of healthy tasty food we can grow, the access that everyone could have to those foods. Think of the businesses and enterprises that could spring from this to store and preserve these foods in the most appropriate local methods.
Now I could talk about food and growing systems all day. But one short thing I do want to talk about is this idea about growing all sorts of food in laboratories and warehouses to replace meat or other materials for example. This is often touted as a climate change solution. Let me remind you that the leading cause of climate change is related to energy use and that we need to transform our energy systems, fast. The problem with these laboratory grown foods is that they require a feedstock crop (often from high input industrial agriculture) and once again require energy and infrastructure to produce them. These types of systems are dependent of high energy inputs and for this reason these solutions will actually hinder any efforts to make and energy transition. For me this is an example of why the changes we need will not come from big companies and technology. They are highly energy dependent, their very existence is dependent on the availability of masses of cheap energy.
So let’s talk about the future, the types of systems abundant, healthy, resilient systems that we need that are sustainable for the long term are not going to be built by governments and large scale businesses, they are going to be built by individuals, communities and small scale enterprises. Why? Because these systems may be better for us, our health and our connections within our communities but they undermine the predominant economic system.
To finish up, we are coming to a big energy transition whether we believe in climate change or not. Access to health affordable food for everyone should be non-negotiable and we certainly do not have systems that provide that now.
In terms of action I started many years ago with something as simple as a jar of sprouting seeds on the counter of a 1 bedroomed apartment. What can you do now? You are only limited by your creativity. Until next time