Why Changing the System Changes Everything

On this episode, we're going to get deeper into how and why our very makeup, health and wellbeing are connected to those bigger systems. And why the structure of food systems and their underpinning values impact the health of our finite planet.  I also want to touch on why changing systems takes a different approach to our common tactics. 

I like to use real-world examples, so to illustrate this, I will use apricots and leafy greens. 

All too often, when it comes to advice around eating healthy and planet-friendly diets, the focus is on what we eat. We look at food through this very narrow, reductionist lens. For example: eat fresh over frozen vegetables, meat bad, plants good, but it is really much more complex than that. 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Creating Change with Food. I'm your host, Dr. Tara Naylor. Creating Change with Food is the podcast that goes back to basics and explores what it really takes to build nourishing, resilient food systems for a finite planet. Today's episode is a topic I just get so excited about, and it's about why changing the system changes everything. In other words, why systems matter. And one of the recurring themes on this podcast is how food connects us as individuals to the larger systems we live within. Our communities, societies, economic systems, and Earth's biosphere. On this episode, we're going to get deeper into how and why our very makeup, health, and well-being are connected to those bigger systems. And why the structure of food systems and their underpinning values impact the health of our finite planet. I also want to touch on why changing systems takes a different approach to our common tactics. I like to use real-world examples, so to illustrate this, I will use apricots and leafy greens through this episode. As usual, I want to start this episode with a little story. One of my favorite tree fruits is apricots. I love the heavenly, sweet, juicy taste, and they have such a short season. The availability of Ontario apricots is never guaranteed. A late frost can mean little or no fruit for the year. One fruit grower from the Niagara region comes to my local farmers' market with his delicious fruit such as apricots, peaches, nectarines, grapes, plums, and more. But the farmers' markets in my area are mostly on weekdays, and depending where I'm working, it can be challenging to attend. There have been fruit growing seasons when the grocery store has been my only option to buy fresh produce. One season I could not get to the market, and I was so excited to see a plastic package of Ontario apricots at the grocery store. So I bought them. And once I got home, I opened the package and I noticed they felt a bit on the firm side. But with great anticipation, I bit into one of these apricots, and instead of that sweet juiciness I was anticipating, they were sour and completely unripe. So I left the apricots on the counter, hoping they would ripen up, but they never did. So then I had to decide what to do with them. I wasn't about to throw them out, so I ended up chopping them into yogurt, but I had to add sugar. And I also ended up giving some of them to my dogs and chickens because frankly they didn't taste that great. That's the apricots, not the dogs and chickens. I did have a chance to talk to a grower from a relatively small family-owned orchard in the Niagara region about this. He explained to me that both products could, in theory, be grown on the same farm. Large grocery stores require the fruit to be unripe to meet their storage and supply chain requirements. The fruit that is ripe and ready to eat is sold at farmers' markets or other direct-to-consumer ways where the time between harvest and eating tends to be short. He also explained that storing fresh fruit is difficult as it is sensitive to temperature and humidity. From my own experience, I've learned that if I put delicious, freshly picked strawberries or peaches in the fridge for a few days, they rapidly lose some of their sweetness and flavor. And without getting too technical, this is because some of the flavor chemicals in plants are volatile and they quickly disappear in the fridge. This story of apricots shows us that when it comes to our food's taste, flavor, and nutritional content, it's not just how your food is grown that matters. Where you buy your food from, how and where it is stored, it matters too. The fruit that was picked ripe did not need any added sugar or flavors. Another big difference between the farmer's market fruit and the grocery store fruit was the packaging. The farmer's market fruit usually comes in little cardboard containers made from recycled paper, whereas the grocery store fruit comes in plastic clamshells so it can withstand the transportation, the warehousing, and all the other processes it goes through to get to the grocery store. As a side note, where you buy your food also impacts where the money goes and how much the farmer gets paid as a portion of the purchase price. And taking care of our farmers is important. Now, this little story about apricots illustrates the interconnections between different parts of the food system. Where you buy your food from affects how and when it's harvested and what it tastes like and how it's packaged, and ultimately the health and pleasure embodied within it. So to sum it up, the whole system matters. How the food is grown, when it's harvested, how it's stored, packaged, processed, and finally sold all impact the taste, texture, nutrition, resilience of the supply chain, and environmental impacts associated with that food. Now, all too often when it comes to advice around eating healthy and planet-friendly diets, the focus is on what we eat. We look at food through this very narrow reductionist lens. For example, eat fresh veg over frozen veg. Meat bad, plants good. But it is really much more complex than that. So I want to take you down a little bit of a rabbit hole into a relatively simple food that's an important part of a healthy diet, and that is leafy greens. When it comes to leafy greens, for most people, lettuce comes to mind. But the world of leafy greens is so much more interesting and diverse than that. The reason I find greens so fascinating is that we eat greens for their taste, volume, flavor, and nutrients, not their energy content. So the relationship between the resources put in compared to the food value we get out can be very exaggerated. So let's go back to 2012. That year I went to a small local food festival featuring local food growers, producers, and chefs. And I tried some different foods, such as pickled milkweed pods, birch tree syrup, and fruit wines. And one small farm business grew and sold edible greens. So I tried freshly picked and juiced wheatgrass, edible flowers, sprouts, microgreens, and lettuces. And the taste and freshness was far superior to the large boxes of organic leafy greens I would buy every week from the grocery store. Now at that point, I was not much of a gardener, I was only a very casual gardener. Later that year, I took a postgrad course in life cycle assessment and sustainable supply chains. In case you don't know, a life cycle assessment is a systematic, standardized approach to evaluating the environmental impacts of a product or a process or a service from cradle to grave. Now the main project for this course was to choose and compare the cradle to grave environmental impacts of two different products with similar uses. I chose to compare the life cycle impacts of commercially grown imported lettuce and greens from the grocery store with the microgreens from the small local farm business. That local business operated under the community supported agricultural model, and almost every part of the system was different. The study was conducted in the late fall, early winter because when it comes to food, the time of year can impact the results. In my analysis, the grocery store greens came from California andor Arizona. The results showed that the lettuce from the grocery store had, on average, five times the greenhouse gas emissions and three times the resource use compared to the microgreens. I also put an observation in my report that when we bring greens and lettuces in from locations like Arizona and California, we are essentially importing water from areas that are relatively water-stressed to an area where I live, which is relatively water abundant. When it came to the end product, the local business gave her a better tasting, longer-lasting product with significantly lower environmental impact. And this was a huge aha moment for me that when you change the whole system behind the food and then you match your food products to the local conditions, you can make giant leaps in reducing ecological footprints while producing fresher, better tasting food and also contributing to local economies. As part of this project, I drew simplified flow diagrams on the processes, and I'm going to just describe and walk you through the grocery store model. These diagrams will be available on my website tarinela.com and see the link in the show notes. After that, we're going to look at what lies beneath these flows before looking at how to change and simplify these processes even further to make them fresher, better tasting, more resilient, and significantly lower in energy resource and environmental impacts. In my diagram, I started with the growing process. And on an industrial scale, the inputs to this lettuce process were typically seeds, water, fertilizers, pesticides, labour, energy, and equipment. But if you look just a little bit deeper, then there's the irrigation systems that bring you the water, and that depends on water availability, pumps, piping. Then there could be wells or other water infrastructure. In some growing operations, the soil is covered with plastic or other artificial mulches to suppress weeds. Then there are the agricultural chemicals which rely on natural gas and other fossil fuel derivatives. Each piece of equipment, for example, a tractor, depends on a vast network of resources and infrastructure to mine, transport, manufacture, and fuel them. The next process are typically harvesting, washing, unpacking, and cooling, and each of which has labour, energy, resource, and equipment inputs. After that, there's typically refrigerated trucking, storing and distribution warehouses along the way before transportation to the retailer. Once the lettuce or leafy greens reach the retail store, they're typically kept in refrigerated storage, and once on display, this often mister with water, depending on whether the greens are packaged. These processes are all heavily dependent on energy and resources such as equipment, warehouses, trucking, and the entire refrigeration chain to reduce spoilage, packaging, and road networks. On top of all this, there are the computing and telecommunications networks needed for such long complex chains. And each of these processes, equipment, infrastructure, can be broken into hundreds more processes, going right back to mining the ore for metals and fossil fuels to the construction of roads. And I have worked in both the manufacturing industry, and that was on the metal side, and road construction. So I've experienced firsthand how you can start the more you break down each of these processes, the more different directions and resources and equipment and waste this all leads to. Now, in recent years, there's been the idea that these automated greenhouses or vertical farms are the way of the future. But once again, these are dependent on masses of energy, resources, and infrastructure. Because we've essentially replaced people with equip with machines. In fact, if you're buying these at the grocery store, the number of processes is not substantially different from the one I mapped. These long supply chains affect the health and nutrition of those greens for several reasons. And I'm going to talk about them, but I learned I learned this through gardening actually. I learned this by trying different types of greens, of growing different plants, of ordering and sampling different plants than what you can get at the grocery store. You really start to see why these whole systems impact both the taste, health, and nutrition of the greens. The plant varieties in the industrial system are generally selected for fast growth, uniformity for packaging, and automated handling, and their ability to withstand the time between harvest and display in the retail store because it can take more than a week between when these plants are harvested and when the eater buys them. Growing leafy greens in these very controlled environments does not produce the best tasting or nutritious greens. And I'm not going to get into those details right now of why. Secondly, soil health is intricately connected to the taste and nutrition of our food, and industrial methods often negatively impact soil health or they use soilless methods. Thirdly, many fresh vegetables lose nutrients, particularly phytochemicals, after harvesting and during the time taken from harvest to retail display and consumptions, and those losses can be significant. The local business I studied as a comparison was growing microgreens for late fall and winter, and this process was a little simpler. And this local business had thought through every step from a taste, flavor, cost, and environmental impact point of view. The microgreens were grown in a repurposed insulated garage behind a house, and the crops being grown were relatively cold tolerant, and the refrigerators that were used were also stored in that space. And this was one of the beauties of their process because the waste heat from the refrigerators heated the space. The greens were grown on racks that could be moved, and the lights on each rack were turned off until the seeds had visible growth. The waste heat from the grow lights also heated the space. After the plants reached the harvest size, the next step was client-specific. So for their restaurant clients, the growing trays were dropped off at the restaurant so they could be harvested fresh on demand, and then the trays were then picked up on when the next order was delivered. For their subscribers and retail customers, the greens were bagged, then loaded into a small car and dropped off at the designated client pickup locations once a week. The soil medium and roots were composted for reuse where possible. And overall, the process from the local business was much simpler, and they largely used existing facilities and equipment for growing transportation and distribution. As I said earlier in this episode, the results of this study showed that the local business produced a better tasting, longer lasting product with a significant lower ecological footprint, and I really wasn't expecting such a big difference. Another observation I made when I was doing the study is I bought both products or the different products I was studying, opened the packages, ate them, and tried them. And what I noticed was the bagged organic greens, which at the time I was buying big boxes of these every week. I was eating masses of greens at that time. But within a day of opening the package, you were starting to see visible spoilage. And this was a problem that it meant every week I could not eat through the greens fast enough before they went all yucky and slimy. That's a technical term. So before I go any further, I want to return to the industrial process and discuss resilience and price. And I will start talking a lot more about resilience in the future, but I can only talk about so much in one episode. If you think about the price of a lettuce in a grocery store, or any food for that matter, and think about all the processes that that food goes through, or maybe you don't think about it, but you think about the trucking, the warehouses, the refrigeration, then all the equipment and energy and resources those processes depend upon, all the people in those industries along the way. And if you think about how much is left for the farmer, I don't know the exact answer, but according to some US data I saw, farmers typically receive only 16 cents for every dollar spent on food, which is not very much at all. And that 16 cents is not profit, that includes all their costs too. So the farmers aren't being left with very much at the end. So if you think about the price of that food at the store, what happens when energy prices go up? Because if you look at that whole system from irrigation and seeds and fertilizer to refrigeration to transportation and warehousing, all that is heavily energy and resource dependent. And so what happens to the food prices? Well, when you're that energy dependent, then the price of food is likely going to go up too. Or what happens if there's disruptions in those giant warehouses or on a major highway closure or in other parts of the supply chain? For example, what if there's chip shortages, or what if there's a communications problem? That impacts those supply chains. So what does that do to our food availability in that bigger, complex system? Let's step back for a moment and rethink. If our vision is to create nourishing, resilient food systems for a finite planet, what are our options? How can we make these foods better tasting, more nutritious, and available to everyone with a minimal or preferably a positive environmental impact? In the last six years, I've really been working on much more on a systems view of food whilst honing my own food growing and gardening skills. The exact solution depends on your location, your lifestyle, and access to resources. And so I want to jump to the simplest solution that gives me greens for the longest season. The simplest option I have found is to grow perennial greens. And when I say simple, I mean the fewest number of processes and the least amount of effort for us as individuals beyond shopping. About seven years ago, I bought a profusion sorrel plant from Richter's Herbs, which is a specialist nursery in Ontario. And this plant comes up within a few weeks of the snow melting and it produces leaves all season until it either gets very cold or it's covered with snow. And the leaves have this lovely lemony taste, and this particular variety does not bolt or go to seed. So this plant typically gives me leaves to eat from mid-May to November. And I also have other perennial plants in my garden with edible leaves, and some of these plants are native to the area and good for pollinators too. The only attention I give these plants is to mulch the bed in the fall and to put some compost around the plants in the spring. Because they're perennial, they have time to establish deep roots, which makes them much more drought tolerant and it enables them to form relationships with soil life. In fact, the more I've looked into edible greens, the more common. Plants I found with edible leaves, which is really interesting. So I've made a space just for edible perennial greens in my garden, so I don't make mistakes in identifying what's edible. And there's also many edible weeds that come up in my garden. In fact, if you look through history, foraging for greens, eating weeds, and perennial type of plants has been common across cultures and throughout time. And these types of greens are nutrient-dense and they're virtually free. About seven years ago, um, I discovered a book and on edible and medicinal plants that grow wild in Canada. And I was just absolutely fascinated by this book, and I've been absolutely awe-inspired by the indigenous peoples' food diversity and their wisdom in preparing these food and medicines. But foraging is definitely outside my comfort zone, and it's not something I feel any great drive or desire to learn. Now I know thinking about eating some of these different foods is well beyond the comfort zone of some people. And so, what are the other options? How can we do things differently? The other direction I'm working on is growing a diversity of greens, often in planters that mature at different times of the season. And I have a couple of planters on my deck railing, so anybody could do this even in a balcony space where I grow cut and come again greens. One packet of seeds is about $2 Canadian, and that will grow hundreds of plants. I also have some small wooden planters I made. I just knocked them together from some cedar from the hardware store, and I grow different greens depending on the time of year in them. Now, some greens are frost tolerant for spring and fall, and others can tolerate the heat of the summer. And this is all for the price of a few packs of seeds. Now I also have climbing flowers. You can tell I have so much fun with this. So I also have climbing flowers in planters like nasturtians that grow up fences and my garage walls. So this is why you don't need a huge amount of space. I'm growing things up walls and fences and on deck railings. Nesturtians produce lovely peppery leaves you can use for salads and pesto. Now, one plant that grows really well in my actual garden is kales. And they seem to tolerate down to about minus 10, minus 15 degrees Celsius. So when I pretty much leave them alone all season, and when it comes, it gets cold, um, too cold for them to grow. I pick them all, bag them up, and freeze them, and I throw them in soups and stews all winter. So I don't generally have fresh greens in the winter. I have a long list of different cold and heat tolerant greens, both annuals and perennials, that I'm gradually trying out. And wherever you live, that list can look different. And this is what's truly exciting, I think, is discovering what is truly local and what will grow where you live in the space you have. The point is with this, it's not about gardening, it is about doing things differently. We can have better tasting, more nutrient-rich foods in our communities at a price that everyone can access while eliminating vast quantities of energy, resources, and infrastructure use. And I think that's a win for everybody. So, what if we extend this to other foods? Because I used leafy greens as an example just because it was so simple. But if we extend this to other foods, what can we create? What if our parks, our schools, our community spaces, and of course our gardens all had fruit trees or berry bushes and edible plants growing in them? What if a whole new breed of grower emerges from this? What if community networks and social enterprises helped people maintain these spaces and distribute food within communities? What if these spaces also contain plants that are beneficial to biodiversity? After all, some of the plants with edible leafy greens are also great for pollinators and wildlife. What change can we create if we start taking this whole different approach as opposed to just taking the industrial system and trying to make it more efficient? Because what I love about doing this other type of approach is that it's not about building big, expensive, infrastructure-dependent systems. We're building these simple, spreadable solutions that they're just dependent on basic human skills and connections, and they also improve our physical health, our well-being, our communities, and they benefit us biosphere too. And this is why I get so excited about the possibility of really the system's view of food as opposed to what we eat. During this episode, I've essentially taken you through a back-to-basics approach. We've not done the atypical approach of top-down, let's take what we have and tweak it and make it a little bit more efficient. We've taken the example of leafy greens as a nutrient-rich food that's consumed all over the world, and we've gone right back to basics and looked at different ways of producing that food and getting it into the hands of eaters. But there's so many ways we can do this, both not just for leafy greens, but many other foods. So we've essentially looked at creating a completely different food system that's founded on a different set of values. In truth, even analysing just one type of food, such as leafy greens, in isolation, is a bit reductionist, but we have to start somewhere. Because I think increasingly we need to take a bigger systems view. I think we need to look at diets and food systems and ecosystems as a whole, as they're all interconnected and they link to place and local conditions. But due to where our starting point is and this predominant industrial, technological worldview, and lifestyle, that's an almost impossible place to start. So I wanted to start you with something simple. This back to basic approach is not the tactic that most people take when it comes to our food and environmental challenges. And I really learned this both through my postgraduate education and also through my working life in engineering. Whether it is changing our diets for health reasons or environmental reasons, we tend to use just four tactics. The reason I'm briefly mentioning these is to help you learn to spot them because once you know about these, you can see them everywhere. The four common tactics are substituting one food material or product for another, using or eating less of something, being more efficient, and finally using new products and technologies. Now let's be clear, none of these techniques will ultimately work or create the nourishing, resilient food systems we want because they don't address the underlying systems or world views that are creating our challenges. So to recap this episode, the different parts of food systems are interconnected. Where and who you buy your food from affects how and when it is harvested, what it tastes like, how it is packaged, and ultimately the health and pleasure embodied within it. In other words, how the food is grown, when it's harvested, how it is stored, packaged, processed, and finally sold all impact the taste, texture, nutrition, resilience of the supply chain, and environmental impacts associated with that food. If we take a back-to-basics approach and look at our needs, we can create simple, unique, locally appropriate solutions. In many ways, we're not trying to change the existing systems. We're replacing them with something that produces the outcomes we want. And for me, that is a diversity of local, seasonal, nutrient rich, and tasty foods at a reasonable price. That's it for today from me, Tarinela. Until next time, bye for now.