We guess that you are passionate about the future, the opportunities for solutions to the global challenges of food production and the personal challenges of diet. And can food and diet be sustainable?
That’s how we started.
We saw the critical connections between food and diet through ecology because we are scientists who have been thinking about this stuff for decades.
What changed for us was the need to reset the rhetoric.
Like many others, we believe it is possible to feed everyone well indefinitely, but it requires a revolution in our food and diet systems. It also means a rethink about food production, diet and nature’s services.
We want to help you understand the story of food, ecology and diet and see the fantastic opportunities to solve the global challenge of feeding everyone well… for a long time.
We provide education, comment and experiences to help you gain the skills and confidence to understand the science, reframe the questions, choose well, find solutions that make a difference, and even pursue a career in the new food systems.
The journey has just started.
So far, we have over 180,00 words of content on our website and a free explainer series.
Coming soon are eCourses and exclusive content, including a mentoring program on Patreon.
Meantime we encourage you to follow your nose around this website and signup for the explainers.
Our team
Mark is an ecology nerd who was cursed with an entrepreneurial gene and a big picture view making him a rare beast, uncomfortable in the ivory towers and the disconnected silos of the public service. Despite this he has made it through a 40+ year career as a scientist and for some unknown reason still likes to read scientific papers.
You can check his bona fides on Researchgate or LinkedIn
Chris is a late comer to ecology but has happily landed where he should have been all along as an ecological practitioner in his bush regeneration business. When not out passionately managing land, trawling the evidence on nutrition, diet and health or carefully advising NGOs and government, he grows plants in his commercial nursery.
You can check his bona fides on LinkedIn
Charlie keeps quiet about his extensive economics, modelling and IT skills but can’t help sharing his knowledge of applied ecology and agriculture. He can be the quiet one but watch out when he lobs another truth bomb into the discussion to stop us all wandering off into the weeds. There is always surfing if the audience is cantankerous.
You can check his bona fides on LinkedIn
What we value at sustainably FED
Everyone should win
The use of natural resources is essential to human well-being, but it does not have to be a zero-sum game, we can and should balance all the values that people care about even when this means making challenging choices
Integrity through evidence
Knowing what is happening in the world is essential to feeding everyone well, and that needs evidence that is transparent and truthful
Everything fit for purpose
No-one knows everything but we all need to know enough, so at sustainably FED we align science as fit for purpose by knowing its strengths and weaknesses
Science finds resilient, profitable, value-rich solutions to food production
What grandad did might have worked for him, and what agribusiness does might work for their shareholders but we cannot rely solely on tradition or profit, we have to apply process knowledge to growing more food as the nutrients become scarce and the climate changes
Healthy scepticism
Every good scientist will doubt the truth, they have to in order to find it and feeding everyone well needs answers to very awkward questions
Predict, validate and measure smart
Nature is very noisy. It is hard to measure it with any reliability, so we value prediction and validation—what some call inductive science—as the path to the truth
Look long and prosper
A lot can happen in a human lifetime but it is a blink in ecological time while soils, climate, populations of plants and animals can take much longer to change so a longer view is always profitable
Why you arrived here at sFED
Maybe you are curious, thirsty for knowledge, fed up with the mainstream fear mongering, thinking that there has to be a better way. We can’t just sit by and wait while it all goes down the gurgler.
Most likely you feel upset about media drivel, claims of fake news, and the deceit that passes for public debate these days
Maybe you worry about the future, what will happen to our food, our environment and our safety
We do and we decided to do something about it.
We gave up our day jobs to develop and drive this online portal as a facilitator of solutions to the many and complex problems of food production and finding diets that create wellbeing for everyone.
It’s time
After decades of progress without thinking, the world must now deal with malnutrition, supply chain disruption, pandemics and a host of inequity issues — most of it catastrophised in the media.
It is time to be more positive, to reskill ourselves to find purposeful solutions, debate policy options, and to call out those who have none.
It is time to have a sensible discussion founded on evidence and generate solutions to pressing global issues and local challenges. Unless we tackle them positively the climate, the environment, the koala and, of course, the pandemic will haunt us.
Only to do that we need to be honest, get back in touch with integrity and refind the skills to understand and use evidence wisely.
The sustainably FED team is here to help you do all of that and more.
We want you to become famous for solving some of these problems. Not us but you, we would get a huge kick out of that.
Take action.
Read some of our posts, comment, join the community, sign up for one of our online courses.
