Mark
Do you eat when you're hungry? And when you're hungry, do you choose what you would like to eat or what you should eat or grab what happens to be in the fridge?
The soil organic carbon debt
Emissions from global human land use are estimated 214 Gt C compared to 270 Gt C from fossil fuel combustion. A third of these land use emissions are lost from soil—a debt borrowed against our children's futures.
Why service crops are an intelligent investment
Farming was a circular family affair before the arrival of big agriculture with its input heavy production of mostly monoculture crops on fields the size of suburbs. And before that, everyone was close to nature. Will...
Earthshot prize for innovations
It is many a splendid thing when a future King of England and the world's most famous natural historian come together to launch a prize for innovation.
Degrowth because the planet is finite
Growth is what we are sold as the only way to make our lives better. Here we utter blasphemy with two additional letters.
Change in calories
Average daily food consumption is above the 2,500 kilocalorie threshold to maintain human body weight in all regions of the world. A remarkable achievement.
Resilience and resistance are not the same when growing food
I get knocked down, but I get up again. So goes the song, and so too our food production systems. At least, we hope they do.
We eat and drink fossil fuels
Do you know what happens on farms to grow the vast quantities of food needed to feed everyone? No? Start with a massive use of energy.
Why we love soil carbon
We know that soil carbon is essential for food production from sifting through the science and from our practical experience working with soils from Nairobi to Narrabri. Here is a summary of that logic.
Comment | Feeding everyone well means dealing with an elephant
If the world's farmers grow enough food to feed everyone well, why are 800 million people hungry, a billion obese, and 2 billion people with nutrient deficiency?
Food supply wastes energy
Agriculture came about because it generated an energy surplus that allowed humans to do many other things than forage for food, but today agriculture is a huge energy sink.
Diversity of diet
Back before agriculture was invented, anthropologists suggest that modern humans, Homo sapiens, had a highly varied diet. Not perhaps as individuals who ate what they could get, but in the aggregate.
Agriculture emits greenhouse gases
Agricultural practices are the source of over a quarter of GHG emissions. How we grow our food and fibre is a significant source of atmospheric pollution—a challenging but necessary admission.
Soil is not a factory worker
Soil is agriculture's equivalent of the factory worker replaced by machines; initially more efficient, works longer hours without tiring, and increases output. But is food an industrial process?
Producer or keeper. Pastoralists chasing the dollar and the sheep
Humans could only live in certain parts of the world because we domesticated animals, our partners in global expansion and world domination. When we got there, we also had an eye for profit.
Food security—the most egalitarian and humanitarian concept around?
Everyone with sufficient, safe and nutritious food all the time is perhaps the most egalitarian definition in the diplomatic lexicon. We like it and here is why.
Comment | A possum problem
None of the integration of food, ecology and diet advocated here on sustainably FED is easy. There are many challenges in a more ecological way of feeding everyone well.
