Cherry tomatoes in February? Our food system needs to change

But as we realise just how precarious the food system is it’s worth remembering that this precarity pre-dates Brexit, European “weather events” or any supply-chain excuses rendered as explanations.

The idea that we can and should have access to all food anytime regardless of season or geography is a bizarre myth.

To argue for food sovereignty and resilience will be wildly unpopular I know, but turning away from the need to change is just a collective stupidity. So here’s some lessons from the Fife Diet.

In the face of the Brexit food crisis we’re all looking at as if its some kind of crazy surprise, some reflections on what we should grow, produce and eat across Scotland and beyond.

Any truly sustainable food system that produces a healthy diet for people and planet must look very different wherever it is. A relocalised diet must be regional and seasonal, adjusted to the carrying capacity and conditions of place, it must be the opposite of the globalized food that knows nothing of season or soil.

A sustainable food system will not emerge from a lab, or a meat factory or from a “vertical farm” or be created by Monsanto. You won’t get it by Deliveroo or Walmart. It will be delivered by small farmers and producers who sustain rich soil and who sell within short supply chains. It will be highly seasonal and organic, though in the sense that all food used to be “organic”. It will contain less meat, but of higher quality, and it will look very different not just within each country but within each region.

It will be enriched by a living food culture that knows something of its own traditions but isn’t captured by them.

With the realisation that the Trussell Trust’s food banks have just become a normal part of our society, the first thing to recognise is that a substantial amount of people are going hungry every week in Britain today. That’s morally unacceptable and any other considerations need to be based on and stem from this reality.

So the first and most basic human right and essential element of the “food system” must be an ability to feed people.

We can look at sustainable food systems as having three essential elements to their structure, and three essential aspects to their delivery.

Any food system we intend to create must not be an attempt to restore a tradition from the past, it must be forward-facing and contain the following key ingredients. It must be low-carbon and be a major shift away from high-intensity, polluting and displaced globalised food. It must be affordable beyond the metric of artificial food at artificially cheap prices. And it must be ethical both at the point of production and consumption.

All of this is possible but not if we contain the discussion and the vision within the current extremely narrow terms of the debate, where corporate capture and business as usual are the norms.

The scale of carbon emissions from the way we produce, transport and consume our food are routinely ignored behind the “big ticket” items such as energy. By comparison in the food industry we are barely out of the blocks. Small-scale tinkering with “local food initiatives” are dwarfed by mainstream Scottish food policy which is aimed squarely at export-growth to the virtual exclusion of all other policies.

The affordability of decent food isn’t just about making that food dirt-cheap. It’s about increasing the number of jobs in local communities; increasing wages for those with the lowest incomes; making jobs more secure.

The race to the bottom of cheap food results in, for example, dairy farmers going out of business as they sell their product to vast retailers at a below-cost price. The insanity of that model excludes the reality that milk is one of the most wasted food and drink products.

In this sense, the precarity and waste in the food system is mirrored in both production and consumption. The current system offers stability only for a handful — for many it offers a combination of economic instability and ill-health.

This is not some sort of wishful nirvana. There is no need for the barbarism of industrial farming, the hell of battery egg production or the cruelty of transporting live animals across continents for no good reason.

But if any coherent viable sustainable food system has to have these three key elements, there is one grand unifying principle that is even more essential, and that is that there must be no grand unifying principle.

Any truly sustainable food system that produces a healthy diet for people and planet must look very different wherever it is. A re-localised diet must be regional and seasonal, adjusted to the carrying capacity and conditions of place, it must be the opposite of the globalised food industry that knows nothing of season or soil.

Such an approach will inevitably be based on the democratic principles of food sovereignty as developed by Via Campesina in the Nyéléni Declaration.

IN February 2007 more than 500 representatives from more than 80 countries, of organisations of peasants and family farmers, artisanal fisher-folk, indigenous peoples, landless peoples, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, women, youth, consumers, environmental and urban movements gathered together in the village of Nyéléni in Sélingué, Mali to strengthen a global movement for food sovereignty.

They defined food sovereignty as: “The right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.

“It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.

“It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers.

“Food sovereignty prioritises local and national economies and markets and empowers peasant and family farmer-driven agriculture, artisanal-fishing, pastoralist-led grazing, and food production, distribution and consumption based on environmental, social and economic sustainability.

“Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that guarantees just income to all peoples and the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage our lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food.

“Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes and generations.”

In Scotland this means a challenging process of breaking the land ownership model that lies at the heart of much of the power dynamics at play. This is particularly difficult for a nation that has much of its “food and farming” culture and policy dominated by landed interests.

We are told that corporations are the creators of food, the providers of security and the harbingers of future abundance, but this is a toxic myth worth dispelling. As Vandana Shiva wrote in her recent book Who Really Feeds the World?: “Women, who are the primary growers and providers of food, nutrition, and nourishment in societies across the world, have evolved agriculture. Most farmers in the world are women, and most girls are future farmers: they learn the skills and knowledge of farming in fields and in farms.

“Women are the world’s biodiversity experts, nutritional experts, and the economists who know how to produce more using less.”

So our emergent food system, fighting against gigantism and vested interests has three dynamics in interplay with each other: soil, democracy and creativity combining to produce new models and ways of working.

So the first act of creating this sustainable food system, what we can call a”restorative practice”, is to remember. This act of remembering is to cast off the dead hand of corporate food which serves up swill for profit.

There are hundreds of community projects, farmers, cooks and gardeners up and down the land who know this and are actively engaged in creating the system we need. But there is a long way to go and we need critical mass.

The empty shelves of Britain’s Brexit disaster are not just a reflection of a temporary glitch, but an insight into a broken food system. Repairing that and creating a new one is a deeper act than making sure you have cherry tomatoes in February.