Hello and welcome to flourishing within planetary boundaries, I am your host Dr Tara Naylor. On today’s episode, we are going to dive into Nature’s strategies for abundant, healthy, resilient, ecologically sustainable food.
I have had my frustrations with food and food systems since I was a teenager, the concerns at that time were food colourings and additives, and later I had concerns about animal welfare in industrial farms. In university, I added the equity of people around the world to the list, as well as the environmental impacts associated with food systems. And my frustrations have been growing over the years, the more our food is being messed about with. Frankly, I just want simple foods that are grown and prepared with the health and wellbeing of the customer, the people and animals involved in the food systems, and the health of biodiversity, and nature’s cycles in mind.
Here is a quote I found that sums it up for me. This quote was made by Gerda Verburg during the 2021 Food for Earth: 24 hour global marathon for sustainability. The quote says “A healthy Earth is the foundation for life in general, and healthy food is the foundation for a healthy life.”
Anyway, a few years ago I went back to first principles to develop a framework to distill my own thoughts on the key parts and connections of food and food systems. My own framework came from observations of nature and my own body, revisiting ecology textbooks; growing, storing, processing, preparing and eating food, as well as reading and listening to action-taking visionaries.
My framework is a visual representation for me, of how to create abundant, healthy, resilient ecologically sustainable food systems. One of the key parts of this framework are six strategies that all work together to produce this outcome. This is what I am going to dive into in more detail. Before we start, I just want to says that this list should not be much of a surprise to you in many ways, so let’s go.
The six strategies in no particular order are: local, seasonal, variety and diversity, low input, whole and finally, enjoyable. Now, you are probably thinking that this is pretty simple, and in many ways you are right. BUT, the difference between the majority of our human systems and nature, is that humans tend to pick one or two of these strategies, whereas nature uses all six strategies at once. If we are going to create abundant, healthy, resilient, sustainable food systems we too, need to learnt to use all six strategies at once.
I want to take you through this in more detail:
First up let’s talk local, there is no single definition or distance associated with local food the way I am talking about it, but there are characteristics that are important. Nature’s systems adapt to local conditions like climate, location, resources and many other factors. I am frequently amazed when I walk through the forest and see and feel the number of microclimates and diverse ecosystems, often in quite small areas. This is also the reason why nature’s systems are continually changing and adapting to conditions, seasons and have plenty of variety and diversity.
But what many of our agricultural endeavours, do it the other way around. We take a desirable crop like wheat, or corn, strawberries, lettuce, whatever is in demand and then try to create the conditions to grow it. We also focus on crops and varieties that grow large, quickly without much regard to taste and nutrition. This means that we typical have to use a lot of inputs like drain land, add fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation or even greenhouses to maintain the conditions the plants need.
On a slightly different definition of local food, strong local food systems are good for our health, communities and economies. I think it promotes connections and caring about both the health and wellbeing of people and life within a community.
If you try to choose your food just based on where you live, rather than the other strategies too, you can just be perpetuating the same systems that have been causing us the nutritional and environmental challenges we are trying to solve.
Now we will move on to Seasonal: From the ecology point of view, the energy, water and availability of other resources change through the year. This means that ecosystems, plants and animals adapt to the seasons.
We have become used to a food system that provides essentially the same foods all year round, they just come from different places. The problem with this is that the foods are not being picked at their peak nutrition and flavour, long refrigerated storage can lose what flavour there was in foods.
I want to take broccoli as an example. I read in Fred Provenza’s book, Nourishment that from the time that broccoli is picked, say in California to when it reaches our plates a couple of weeks later it can lost 80% of its phytonutrients. After I read that I stopped buying broccoli in the winter. I have also noticed that there is a big difference in taste and flavour of broccoli between fresh seasonal crops and even summer crops from the grocery store. The broccoli fresh from farm stands has almost a sweet taste and is often a lot stronger tasting too than especially the imported broccoli in the winter.
Now many people understand that there is a seasonality to fruit and vegetables, but this is also true of foods from animals, if they are allowed to forage rather than just eat the same food rations. What many people do not realize, is that eggs are a seasonal food. I certainly did not realize this until I bought some chickens. My chickens start laying well late in February or early March as the days start getting a little longer and the sun hits their shed all afternoon and heats it up. By July their laying drops a little depending on the heat and usually by late August they start moulting and the number of eggs drops down as different birds moult. By December they all have beautiful new feathers but the daylight hours are short and as they need a lot of light to lay eggs, their production stays relatively low until late February. I have learned to adjust my own use of food, especially eggs depending on seasonality.
The other important part of seasonality is our own bodies. Now, depending on your location and lifestyle you may or may not find this. But for me living relatively close to nature, in a climate with cold winters, my own food preferences are vastly different from winter to summer. In the summer I feast on fresh local fruits and vegetables, legumes, eggs, nuts, seeds and grains with just the occasional meat. But in the autumn, I crave more meats and bone broths, I need more protein too for some reason, otherwise my hair thins a little. At this time of year, I make a lot of soups and stews which I mostly make with more hearty vegetables like kale, and other cruciferous vegetables, root vegetables, legumes and grains.
The other benefit of eating seasonally, is that we have the potential to enjoy foods at the peak of their flavour and nutrition, depending on how and where they are grown and stored. I talked about this briefly when I talked about local broccoli. But something else interesting I have noticed and read about is strawberries. If your grow your own, or buy very fresh strawberries, they can be tremendously sweet but I have also noticed that when stored in the fridge the sweetness dropped. This is really interesting because there are phytochemicals in strawberries that enhance the sweet taste of strawberries but they are volatile and disappear if you store then in a fridge for a while. This is so fascinating all the subtleties of how not just how and where we grow our food matters but also how it is stored.
Variety and diversity: Variety and diversity: This is where I am spending more of my time nowadays, especially as I am gardening more than I used to. Nature is full of variety and diversity, this creates resilience. There are 30,000 wild and 7000 cultivated edible plants for humans, yet only 30 plant species make up 95% of the plant energy in human diets. Wheat, rice and maize make up more than 50% of human plant calories. If we want to have abundant, healthy diets in the face of increasing unpredictable weather patterns we need variety and diversity in our diets.
In order to increase my own access to diverse foods, that are also seasonal and local in a small community, my garden has become my source of diversity. Generally the trend where I live is that summers are drier and when rain comes it tends to be heavy and then more dry periods, but we have had some very wet years. Because my water source is a well, I do not water my plants much in dry spells. Every year I plant many different foods and many different varieties. Every year I know some things will do well and others will not. By planting such a diversity, I know I will always have an abundance of food, I just don’t know exactly which plants or varieties on any given year. When we rely on a food system that is global with so few crops, we are heading for disaster. As the effects of climate change become more severe the likelihood of crop failure in multiple regions increases and the likelihood of conflict over these resources will increase.
But from a more fun and nutritional point of view, growing and eating a variety of diverse plants and animals makes life more interesting and potentially nutrient rich. Different plants, grow in different places can access different nutrients from the soil and plants respond to pests and stresses differently which can produce different tastes and flavours as a result of the plant chemicals they generate. This year I have spent hours going through plant catalogues, increasingly trying varieties of greens, beans, tomatoes, peppers and squash that you cannot find in the stores or my local farmers’ market. I am growing more and more edible perennial plants and flowers to reduce my workload and enjoy foods that are just not commercially available. This is the area I have so much fun, I just need to learn more about preparing some of these foods to eat.
Low input: When I say low input, what does that mean? Nature’s systems are low input; they are adapted to use locally available energy and resources in very clever ways. Plants and animals work together in such a way that waste from one organism can be food for another. We need to start looking at all our processes this way.
This compares to modern industrial agriculture that uses a lot of equipment, technology, energy, chemicals, infrastructure to produce food.
This also relates to local and seasonal foods, if we are growing foods and varieties that are designed for size and appearance, the chances are that they will require more inputs to reach the desired appearance.
This also ties into variety and diversity because growing the right plants and animals in the right place requires less human intervention.
When we keep our food sources more local, we can share inputs and outputs much more easily. Low input food uses primarily solar energy, labour and skills.
Whole: Most animals eat foods that are only minimally processed. Food is often fresh, or dried. For humans the one thing that almost all healthy diets have in common is whole food. Whole food, with minimal processing, is not only good for us but often means less packaging, fewer energy and chemical inputs. Many whole foods such as wheat berries (a whole grain) store better and keep their nutrients intact rather than flours for example. I will say that there are some preservation methods like fermenting that can increase the nutrient availability of foods and store foods safely for long periods of time. For me this is where whole, simple, traditional foods prepared with love and skill are some of the best foods we can eat.
Enjoyable: Now lastly and definitely not least is that food needs to be enjoyable. Animals select their food based on both what is available and what their body needs, their nutritional wisdom. We need to return to food that we really enjoy on a deep level. I was recently re-reading the bestseller the End of Craving by Mark Schatkzer and towards the end it was talking about the different responses our brains have towards food. It was talking about foods that leave us in the state of wanting and foods that puts our brains in liking and a satisfied state.
There is a place in my town that cooks meat over wood fires and you eat outdoors. I go there a few times a year for a beef burger, although a burger is in the $15-20 CAD range, it is absolutely heavenly and satisfies me for hours and days afterwards. I would rather do this 3-4 times a year than have fast food burgers for the rest of the year, in fact I only eat burgers from places like this.
The same is true for me increasingly with things like cheeses and desserts, I would rather have just a few things that are really high quality that send me into a state of bliss rather than eating these things every day.
One trap I used to fall into, and many people still do, is to eat foods we really don’t like because we think they are healthy. This really sets us up for failure when there are processed foods ready to tempt us into wanting them at every corner.
I think all our food should leave us feeling satisfied.
How the strategies work together:
So now I have briefly gone through the six strategies: local, seasonal, variety and diversity, low input, whole and enjoyable.
Now, let’s talk a little more about how they work together to produce a food systems with the attributes of abundant, healthy, resilient, sustainable food. To make it easier I am going to break it down and only talk about a couple strategies per attribute.
Abundance: This really refers to quantity, for me this is that there is enough food for everyone at all times and I will add “at a reasonable cost”. At least in my own life the abundance comes from local, seasonal foods with plenty of variety and diversity. These three all work together.
There are so many plants that are edible that grow in different locations at different times of year, but so many of these plants are not in commercial cultivation for various reasons. By growing on smaller plots, we can take advantage of microclimates and different times of year as well as growing many different varieties of plants together. Just like nature does.
Healthy: For healthy I like to use all of these characteristics. This topic can get very complex as the interaction between different ways of growing, storing, preserving our foods affect their taste and nutrition from macro to micro nutrients and phytochemicals. I think the key here is to enjoy a variety of foods prepared, stored and eaten in ways that the ingredients taste the best. Frankly I think good food lights up our bodies and our minds.
Resilient: Enough food is available at all times. The keys here are variety and diversity, low input and whole. The more variety and diversity we cultivate the more likely there will be an abundance of food available. I talked about in my own garden and growing that every year some things do well and some things do not. Also the reliance on energy inputs, water inputs and chemical inputs make us reliant on price fluctuations and availability.
Sustainable: Works for the long term both for us humans but also ecologically sustainable. This is where all six strategies have to work together. Human systems and societies have risen and fallen often depending on how they have managed their soil and other resources. Nature shows us that these six strategies working together can produce dynamic, every changing systems that work for the long term.
To finish this off I want to tell you that the more I have embraced these strategies and used them to source and grow the foods that I eat, the better I feel, I don’t get stressed about food price increases or food availability at the grocery stores. I know that by being creative and being willing to put some work into my food the quality of my life as a whole has increased.
If we created food systems using these age-old strategies, I think we can look forward to a healthy future.
That’s it for me Tara Naylor today.