August 13, 2010

Alternative trade networks and the coffee system

(Summer re-run: first published 4 August 2008)

Every day 1.5 billion cups of coffee are drunk somewhere in the world – quite a few of them in this house - but few of us in the North know much about the 25 million families that grow and produce this valuable bean.

After reading a new book called Confronting The Coffee Crisis I feel better informed not just about the negative aspects of the story - but also motivated to explore practically the potential of emerging alternative trade networks to change the bigger picture in profound ways.

In a system that can involve as many as eight transactions to bring the coffee to market, coffee farmers receive less than two percent of the price of a cup of coffee sold in a coffee bar, or roughly six per cent of the value of a standard pack of ground coffee sold in a grocery store.

So far, so outrageous. Less well-known are the damaging effects of these unequal power relations embedded in global coffee networks: threatened livelihoods, greater poverty, malnutrition, deforestation, and out-migration.

A “bigger, faster, cheaper” mentality has created a dynamic that exploits the most vulnerable at the bottom of the supply chain.

The intensification in production that started with the green revolution is based on the use of external inputs like chemical pesticides and ferttilizers, and machines and large scale irrigation to boost production. This technology generates economic concentration, social exclusion, the rtise of expensive ‘patented’ seeds, and the depreciation of natural capital via compacted, eroded and degraded soils, the loss of biodiversity, the pollution of groundwater.

Awareness in the North of these problems fuelled the rise of fair trade systems - but their proliferation has now become a problem on its own. It's easy to be overwhelmed buy a choice of options that can include “organic”, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance Certified, Utz certified, shade-grown, Bird Friendly, and so on.

Producers have a host of new practical problems to deal with. When Fair Trade adopted a certification-based model, they introduced more coffee-industry actors into what is now a billion dollar global market. At least 200 certifying agencies now audit farmsteads and post-harvest processing, storage, and transport across a global span.

Certification has enhanced the livlihood of certified coffee farmers – but the financial and bureaucratic costs are substantial. Certification services are arrayed along a transnational “chain of custody” and documented by an audit trail. Producers feel the effects as they are asked to jump through more and more hoops in order to access high value markets.

Although certified markets create consumer awareness of the inequities of coffee production, they often operate within the traditional coffee commodity systems which continue to be controlled mainly by large scale roasters and retailers.

The saddest development documented in the book is that Fair Trade is losing its social-movement identity in a bewildering welter of competing labels, brand names, product logos, and other marketing messages. "Direct producer-consumer solidarity ties are giving way to an individualistic consumer politics of choice as the FT labeling system becomes institutionalized," say the authors.

But the book ends on a positive note, and emphasizes that it's not a simple matter of ‘traditonal’ vs ‘modern’ farming. Interactions between local livelihoods and global actors do not automatically have to be negative

Traditional 'shade-tree' coffee systems, with their diverse shade tree species and multiple use strategies, are sophisticated examples of the application of ecological knowledge and can serve as the basis of sustainable agroecosystems of the future.

The potential is there, but the challenges are significant. Scaling up traditional-progressive systems confronts the a daunting array of quality hurdles. The most fascinating section of the book for me is the following quotation from the the Mexican agronomist Eduardo Martinez Torres, as he explains that quality control only begins with the growing:

“Next comes choosing the right time for harvesting; harvesting only mature berries; not allowing harvested berries to heat up; sorting berries on intake; making sure the beans don’t crack during the depulping process; double sorting after depulping; making sure fermentation lasts the right length of time, ie between 24 and 48 hours, depending on the altitude and average temperature; thoroughly washing the berries; grading; properly drying, preferably both in the sun, as well as in the drier to avoid mildewing; the drying temperature should be moderate. The temperature should never be turned up to speed the process and save time, since an uneven drying process can significantly damage bean quality. When drying is done on patios, layers should not be too thick and beans should be constantly stirred. Never mix together beans of different grade of quality, beans at different stages of dryness, or beans from different altitudes. Selection, patience and care are the operative words during processing, since all these things make for the best bean quality and, consequently, the best price for the product”.

Hmm: so coffee is a complex business. But the book is filled with examples of growers groups that have been able to achieve remarkable progress by pooling expertise and resources that deliver a lot of the value currently added (if at all) by layers of intermediaries.

Of particular importance are alternative trade networks and the nascent Community Agroecology Network (CAN). Alternative trade networks emerging in the coffee system are based on lessons learned from farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, and attempts in other markets to connect producers and consumers in more direct relationships that are socially just and ecologically restorative, and promote mutual learning and positive change.

Alternative trade networks redistribute value through the network against the logic of bulk commodity production, reconvene trust between food producers and consumers during the direct exchange of goods.

In Agua Buena, Costa Rica, the farmers’ cooperative has developed the capacity to ship roasted coffee directly to North American consumers’ doors. Coffee delivery depends on the postal service, and direct exchange is difficulty; however email and Internet chatrooms facilitate these interactions.

Two other projects also deal with alternative trade networks.

The first, Feral Trade, created by the artist Kate Rich, has been trading goods along social networks since 2003; their first transaction was the import of 30kg of coffee direct from El Salvador to a cultural centre in Bristol, UK. The import was negotiated using only social contacts, and was conducted via email, bank transfer and SMS.

Then there is the Fair Tracing project whose aim is to to support ethical trade by implementing Tracking and Tracing Technologies in supply chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information.

The idea is to It will give producers a better overview of the value chain and price structures along it, and to empower consumers to trace a product’s origin and value chain.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2010

You can't grow food with an iphone app - -

- - but Tana Sprague *can* sample the sounds of Caciocavallo cheese maturing. I was curious, when I first heard about it, as to the meaning of ‘'Rurality 2.0' - the theme of the Interferenze festival in Italy last week. So now I know. It would miss the point to ask "why?" - and besides: this is my favourite summer picture so far.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2010

The big chill

(Summer re-run: first published 8 January 2008)

Shopping for a snack in central London yesterday evening I counted an extraordinary 78 metres (256 feet) of chiller cabinets in one small central London branch of Marks and Spencer.

Marks and Spencer have made a laudable commitment to make all it UK and Irish operations carbon neutral within five years. "We'll maximise our use of renewable energy and only use offsetting as a last resort" pledges the firm in its Plan A.

In Plan A, M&S is committed to act on waste, raw materials, healthy eating, and fair trade. For example it has banned white veal and calves liver from its shelves, and is playing a leading role in an industry consortium called WRAP.

But M&S's Plan A has a huge, glaring omission: refrigeration. More than 50 percent of food in developed countries is retailed under refrigerated conditions - a factor due is large part to the open display cabinets of the kind I paced-out in Notting Hill yesterday.

As a consequence, food retailers waste insane amounts of energy: a single open-fronted freezer costs 15,000 pounds (22,000 euros) per year to run in energy bills alone - and that does not include the embergy (embodied energy) involved in each unit's manufacture.

Unchecked, air conditioning units and chiller cabinets will cause hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere in the next 50 years.

Off course, M&S may reply, if food were not refrigerated, a good proportion of it would rot or spoil. Up to 40 percent of fruit is lost post-harvest in some food systems.

Such a loss of produce represents a waste of energy on its own account, since wasted food embodies the energy used in its production, processing and transport.

Nonetheless, as things stand today, it looks as if M&S is resigned not to reduce, but to offset, the massive energy emissons from its supply, storage and retail operations when its five year deadline for Plan A expires.

The alternative would be for M&S to change its business model to one of shopless shopping, and close down most of its retail outlets.

And why not? Refrigerated trucks, warehouses, and high street stores, are expensive and wasteful steps, and therefore profit-reducing costs, in the journey from farm to table. M&S is well-placed to become the radically de-centralised distribution and quality assurance platform that all towns and cities need to relocalise their food systems.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2010

Fish systems and design

(Summer re-run: first published August 2009)

A grim new film, The End of the Line, reveals the impact of overfishing on our oceans. It exposes the extent to which global stocks of fish are dwindling; features scientists who warn we could see the end of most seafood by 2048; and includes chefs and fishers who seem indiferent to the ecocidal consequences of their business practices. "We must act now to protect the sea from rampant overfishing” says Charles Clover, author of the book of the film.

Must, must. Although important in raising awareness, the danger with films like The End of the Line (as with 'An Inconvenient Truth', and Michael Pollan’s 'Food, Inc') is that they bombard us with so much bad news that positive and practical actions, that are also being taken, are obscured - and opportunities to help them develop are missed.

The End of the Line received far more publicity, for example, than the launch of FishChoice.com

This free, non-profit web portal helps chefs and retail buyers procure sustainable seafood from suppliers accredited by leading ocean conservation organizations; FishChoice partners include the Marine Stewardship Council, The Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Blue Ocean Institute.

FishChoice.com is one of many business-to-business (B2B) innovations that begin to unlock an intractable problem: how to reconfigure food systems that lock their participants into ecocidal behaviour.

It’s not as if fishermen, wholesalers, food processing firms, retailers, chefs,and consumers, want to destroy the world’s fisheries; but the linear structure of the supply and communication chains they operate in prevents them from seeing, and responding appropriately to, the bigger picture.

For food systems to be resilient we need to reconfigure, radically, relationships between fishers and consumers; we need to measure what matters throughout the lifecycle of fish; turn supply chains into supply webs, or ecologies; and put in place new, transparent economic relationships between fishers and citizens.

This is easy to say - hard, in practice, to do. I received the Fish Choice press release on market day where I live in France, and I soon found myself at my regular independent fish stall. The friendly couple who run it told me what tasted best that day - but information about the fish on the table before me was otherwise minimal. Hand-written tags told me things like “Cod, North Atlantic” and a price per kilo. But I was given no idea where the fish came from, how or when it was caught, by whom, or what has happened to it since then.

In the language of system design, I was an “actor” at a “touch point” at the end of a “chain of custody” running from the fishing vessel to the dock, from the dock to a processor or wholesaler, and from there, in this case, to my fishmonger.

In the language of stating the obvious, I was buying blind.

I do carry around a credit card sized consumer guide to buying fish (above) published by the World Wildlife Fund. It divides fish into “preferred”, “buy in moderation” and “avoid”. I use the leaflet in restaurants where one can consult it discreetly whilst reading the menu. But standing in front of my cheerful fishmonger, with a queue of people behind me, I did not. It’s too small and fiddly to read easily; the names of fish listed by the WWF do not always correspond with the words on the plastic tags; and above all, I was not at all sure I possessed the social tact to engage the friendly fishmonger in a non-confrontational way.

The above mobile phone application has, it’s true, been designed to make fish consumers smarter. Monterey Bay Aquarium’s new service brings Seafood Watch recommendations directly to your iPhone (in the US only so far). But although a step forward on the WWF leaflet, the iphone service is still based on a linear model: you receive information from a trusted supplier, which is good; but the service does not enable you confer with fellow citizens about it, still less with intermediaries further up the fish supply chain.

Seafood traceability is an essential element in sustainability. But most food systems are based on closed, proprietory networks in which access to information is controlled by powerful supermarkets and wholsesalers. In the UK, for example, five chains control 80 percent of food sales. They derive immense competitive advantage from their control over information flows – and handsome profits follow. I don’t have a number for fishers, but I’m sure it’s similar to the coffee farmers who receive less than six per cent of the value of a standard pack of ground coffee sold in a grocery store.

It’s not that large firms are filled with personally evil people. On the contrary, retail giants like Walmart, Carrefour and Elior (Europe’s third largest contract catering firm) are doing a lot to promote sustainable fishing. Walmart, for example, is committed to sell only MSC certified fish in its 3,700 US stories, and had achieved 50% of that target by January 2009; and in the UK, Waitrose supported the production of The End of the Line.

But however well-intentioned, these global players are not about to remove themselves as intermediaries in long global supply chains; neither are they ready to open up their information systems to independent scrutiny.

Besides, the main problem is not a lack of information. A raft of eco labels has been launched, and Iceland, Sweden and Ireland run their their own ecolabel systems for fish. But the multiplicity of such schemes, many of which are based on contradictory criteria, makes it harder for consumers make informed choices about what they are buying.

Another problem is that global accreditation schemes, such as the Marine Stewardship Council's blue ecolabel, do not take account of the energy impacts of the airfreight often used to move eco-labelled products around the world. A Danish researcher, Mikkel Thrane, who has proposed a ban on the air freight of MSC-labelled products, argues that “it doesn’t make sense to put a label on a product reflecting sustainability when non-carbon-friendly shipping methods are being used.”

The same argument applies to the huge amounts of energy used by retailers to display fish

– for example, in brightly-lit chiller cabinets; or in the location of fish counters in out-of-town megastores that greatly amplify biosphere-damaging transport intensity.

Everything in a food system needs to be measured and accounted for - not just one element in the process.

The biggest challenge is the impossibility of feedback and personal relationships in attenuated global systems. In a truly sustainable fish system, its actors will be connected in a web of relationships rather than in a one-way chain.

Technology can help here. Peer-to-peer networks, wikis, crowdsourcing, participatory mapping, mobile communications, platforms for knowledge-sharing – all these are potential components of distributed systems that connect citzens more directly with producers.

] Food systems are social systems

But iphones are only part of the answer. Food systems are social systems, and technology on its own cannot orchestrate the multitude of actors and stakeholders involved. Practical, context-specific issues need to be dealt with, continuously - and it's through these day-to-day negotiations that mutual trust develops.

Place-specific social enterprises for food, based on distributed models, are already emerging in cities of the South. In in such cities as Kinshasa or Dakar, in Africa, a “multi-actor ecosystem participation approach” (MEPA) has been developed that treats food supply as an ecosystem in which farmers, policy makers, environmentalists and regulatory bodies collaborate on the basis that the ecosystem itself is a shared responsibility. The interactions. Involved are complex and multi-directional, but geography and culture provides a shared space.

A more ecosystem-centric approach is also being pioneered in the North. In the fast-growing Transition Towns movement, for example, citizen groups are mapping foodsheds and watersheds as the basis for a more holisitc, regional approach to food security.

These maps, and other web-based tools in development, are viewed by Transitioners as tools to enable face-to-face contact among each other, and with food producers and citizens - not as visually mesmerising ends in themselves.

An especially inspiring UK model is a restaurant-led initiative, Pisces Responsible Fish Restaurants, that “links good fishermen with chefs…the idea is to build a long term relationship with “your” fishermen”. The Pisces team therefore insists on getting out on individual boats, and sees for themselves how the fish are caught.

This is a huge commitment of time and effort – and of trust on the part of the fishers. But for Pisces, it’s a worthwhile investment in the future. “Managing simply to avoid stock collapse is a miserably negative goal” they say; “despite all the problems, there remain an amazing diversity of fish just off the British coast - over 170 species in the North Sea alone. We want stocks to be built up so that they can support bigger catches, and better profits, while still leaving plenty for other species”.

The design lesson here is that there can be no one global “sustainable fish system”. The design task, instead, is to look for practical ways to help a multitude of different models – like MEPA in the South, or Pisces in the North – succeed, multiply, connect and adapt - in different ways in different contexts.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2010

Eating animals

If Requiem for a Species (below) is shocking at an existential level, Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals hits you at the level of lunch.

It's no less gruelling for that. Among the in-your-face statements that pepper the text: "When we eat factory farmed meat we live literally on tortured meat..and put it into the mouths of our children". And, "factory farming - which accounts for virtually all meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants - is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment".

The author is especially appalled by the wastefulness of modern food systems. It takes up to twenty-six calories fed to an animal to produce just one calorie of edible flesh - and yet animal protein costs less today than at any time in history.

This is because meat producers don't pay 'external' costs such farm subsidies, catastrophic environmental impact, and human disease. Those costs fall on the biosphere.

Then there's the shit. Farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much shit as do human beings, roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second. The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than municipal sewage... and yet there is almost no waste treatment infrastructure for farmed animals.

For Foer, these horrors and biocrimes are only possible because we are disconnected from the fact that animal foods involve killing animals. The ways we buy meat and fish at restaurants and supermarkets, pre-cooked in pieces, widens the disconnect.

But as the secrecy surrounding the factory farm breaks down "we can no longer plead ignorance - only indifference" Foer writes. "Those alive today are will fairly be asked: what did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?"

The website contains links to excellent organizations one can do something with.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:35 AM | Comments (1)

November 12, 2009

From FarmVille to TransitionVille

If I were a PsyOps specialist at Monsanto, I'd have invented FarmVille. More than 62 million people have signed up to play the Facebook game since it made its debut in June, with 22 million logging on at least once a day. It's quickly become the most popular application in the history of Facebook.

FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1, and it would be hard to imagine a better way to distract people from re-localising food in real-life.

"The whole concept of ‘I’m sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,’ there is something very therapeutic about that,” said Philip Tan, director of the Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab.

FarmVille Freak, a blog, has a simpler slogan: “I can’t stop watching my crops!”

I was tempted, at this point, to write about the prospect of real famine in the Society of the Spectacle - but a more important story commands my attention: the publication in the UK of A Transition Food Strategy.

Although the local food movement has been growing strongly for decades, local food remains a small part - around five per cent at best - of the bigger picture in most industrialised countries.

The good news is that plot-by-plot, farmers market by farmers market, the elements of re-localised and de-industrialised food ecologies have been put in place. But in order to scale-up these emergent local food systems, a higher degree of strategy and coordination is necessary at a city-region level

That's why the publication of A Sustainable Food Strategy for Bristol and Bristol Food Network is so significant.

Its author, Claire Milne, says the purpose of the strategy is "to develop a sustainable and resilient food economy for Bristol based on mutually supportive collaboration between Bristol communities and producers, processors, suppliers in and around Bristol that supports the health and wellbeing of communities and the environment now and in the future".

The Bristol plan is is based on six strategic work programmes:
1. Reaching wider audiences
2. Increasing sustainable food production for Bristol
3. Developing sustainable food chains providing food for Bristol
4. Developing a sustainable food culture in Bristol schools and early years establishments
5. Influencing decision–makers to support sustainable food systems in and around Bristol
6. Communications to raise awareness about sustainable food and activities in Bristol

To drive this work along, and to coordinate it, a Community Interest Company, provisonally named Bristol Food Network, will be set up to deliver the six core programmes; facilitate links between city stakeholders around the programmes; and to enable community participation in the strategy.

Following the Bristol project, Caire Milne has started on a similar programme in Edinburgh.

In parallel to these initiatives, the Transition Network is piloting a Food Project Database.

There's also this new book Local Food: How to Make it Happen in Your Communit. by Tamzin Pinkerton and Transition Towns co-founder Rob Hopkins.

These Transition food projects are exciting but, thankfully, are not unique. In Canada, for example, Toronto is the first of the major international cities to boast a Food Policy Council (FPC). The first FPC was started in the US 20 years ago in the city of Knoxville. Today more than 50 US towns and cities now have a similar structure.

FPCs take many forms, but are typically either commissioned by state or local government, or are predominately a grassroots effort. FPCs have been successful at educating officials and the public, shaping public policy, improving coordination between existing programs, and starting new programs.

* * * *

One could go crazy trying to track, and make sense of, the many thousands of food projects out there. My own in-box contains 150 unwritten blog entries just on on food. The trick, i think, is to welcome this diversity as a flowering of what Rob Hopkins calls "surge breakers" (in his new text on Resilience Thinking)

Another trick that works for me, when I'm overwhelmed by input, is to gaze passively at a screen -not at FarmVille, but at the real-life comings and goings on channels like Bright Neighbor TV.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:23 AM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2009

Melons we can believe in

Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the US Congress last week that Japan's debt path was out of control. Simon warned of "a real risk that Japan could end up in a major default". [The IMF expects Japan's gross public debt to reach 218pc of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, 227pc next year, and 246pc by 2014].

I really don't understand this scaremongering and negative thinking at all.

Japan must be full of money, because there are so many beautiful things to spend it on.

Last evening, for example, I visited a gorgeous shop round the corner called SunFruits. In it, one of these melons was on sale for only 21,000 Yen [euros 160, US$ 233].

Now to the farmer who grew the melon, these prices might seem a bit on the high side, compared to what he was paid for it.

But this is where the politics of envy so often gets it wrong. Because SunFruits don't just sell melons, they sell a totally designed experience.

Their shop, for example, which contained the melon, makes the average Prada store look like a charity shop. And it can't be cheap paying for the security guard who's there to keep an eye on the $6 strawberries. [That's $6 each strawberry].

My only concern is that SunFruits will get to hear about Transition Totnes' first nut:

This first produce of the Totnes nut tree planting scheme has been announced by Rob Hopkins.

Over 100 trees have been planted since the scheme was was initiated three years ago, and it's a worry that if SunFruits are seen to be selling similar nuts for fifty pounds each, thieves might steal the nuts and sell them in Japan.

Happily, most of the Totnes trees have a ‘guardian’ whose job it is to keep an eye on them.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:52 PM | Comments (1)

August 11, 2009

Fish systems and design

A grim new film, The End of the Line, reveals the impact of overfishing on our oceans. It exposes the extent to which global stocks of fish are dwindling; features scientists who warn we could see the end of most seafood by 2048; and includes chefs and fishers who seem indiferent to the ecocidal consequences of their business practices. "We must act now to protect the sea from rampant overfishing” says Charles Clover, author of the book of the film.

Must, must. Although important in raising awareness, the danger with films like The End of the Line (as with 'An Inconvenient Truth', and Michael Pollan’s 'Food, Inc') is that they bombard us with so much bad news that positive and practical actions, that are also being taken, are obscured - and opportunities to help them develop are missed.

The End of the Line received far more publicity, for example, than the launch of FishChoice.com

This free, non-profit web portal helps chefs and retail buyers procure sustainable seafood from suppliers accredited by leading ocean conservation organizations; FishChoice partners include the Marine Stewardship Council, The Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Blue Ocean Institute.

FishChoice.com is one of many business-to-business (B2B) innovations that begin to unlock an intractable problem: how to reconfigure food systems that lock their participants into ecocidal behaviour.

It’s not as if fishermen, wholesalers, food processing firms, retailers, chefs,and consumers, want to destroy the world’s fisheries; but the linear structure of the supply and communication chains they operate in prevents them from seeing, and responding appropriately to, the bigger picture.

For food systems to be resilient we need to reconfigure, radically, relationships between fishers and consumers; we need to measure what matters throughout the lifecycle of fish; turn supply chains into supply webs, or ecologies; and put in place new, transparent economic relationships between fishers and citizens.

This is easy to say - hard, in practice, to do. I received the Fish Choice press release on market day where I live in France, and I soon found myself at my regular independent fish stall. The friendly couple who run it told me what tasted best that day - but information about the fish on the table before me was otherwise minimal. Hand-written tags told me things like “Cod, North Atlantic” and a price per kilo. But I was given no idea where the fish came from, how or when it was caught, by whom, or what has happened to it since then.

In the language of system design, I was an “actor” at a “touch point” at the end of a “chain of custody” running from the fishing vessel to the dock, from the dock to a processor or wholesaler, and from there, in this case, to my fishmonger.

In the language of stating the obvious, I was buying blind.

I do carry around a credit card sized consumer guide to buying fish (above) published by the World Wildlife Fund. It divides fish into “preferred”, “buy in moderation” and “avoid”. I use the leaflet in restaurants where one can consult it discreetly whilst reading the menu. But standing in front of my cheerful fishmonger, with a queue of people behind me, I did not. It’s too small and fiddly to read easily; the names of fish listed by the WWF do not always correspond with the words on the plastic tags; and above all, I was not at all sure I possessed the social tact to engage the friendly fishmonger in a non-confrontational way.

The above mobile phone application has, it’s true, been designed to make fish consumers smarter. Monterey Bay Aquarium’s new service brings Seafood Watch recommendations directly to your iPhone (in the US only so far). But although a step forward on the WWF leaflet, the iphone service is still based on a linear model: you receive information from a trusted supplier, which is good; but the service does not enable you confer with fellow citizens about it, still less with intermediaries further up the fish supply chain.

Seafood traceability is an essential element in sustainability. But most food systems are based on closed, proprietory networks in which access to information is controlled by powerful supermarkets and wholsesalers. In the UK, for example, five chains control 80 percent of food sales. They derive immense competitive advantage from their control over information flows – and handsome profits follow. I don’t have a number for fishers, but I’m sure it’s similar to the coffee farmers who receive less than six per cent of the value of a standard pack of ground coffee sold in a grocery store.

It’s not that large firms are filled with personally evil people. On the contrary, retail giants like Walmart, Carrefour and Elior (Europe’s third largest contract catering firm) are doing a lot to promote sustainable fishing. Walmart, for example, is committed to sell only MSC certified fish in its 3,700 US stories, and had achieved 50% of that target by January 2009; and in the UK, Waitrose supported the production of The End of the Line.

But however well-intentioned, these global players are not about to remove themselves as intermediaries in long global supply chains; neither are they ready to open up their information systems to independent scrutiny.

Besides, the main problem is not a lack of information. A raft of eco labels has been launched, and Iceland, Sweden and Ireland run their their own ecolabel systems for fish. But the multiplicity of such schemes, many of which are based on contradictory criteria, makes it harder for consumers make informed choices about what they are buying.

Another problem is that global accreditation schemes, such as the Marine Stewardship Council's blue ecolabel, do not take account of the energy impacts of the airfreight often used to move eco-labelled products around the world. A Danish researcher, Mikkel Thrane, who has proposed a ban on the air freight of MSC-labelled products, argues that “it doesn’t make sense to put a label on a product reflecting sustainability when non-carbon-friendly shipping methods are being used.”

The same argument applies to the huge amounts of energy used by retailers to display fish

– for example, in brightly-lit chiller cabinets; or in the location of fish counters in out-of-town megastores that greatly amplify biosphere-damaging transport intensity.

Everything in a food system needs to be measured and accounted for - not just one element in the process.

The biggest challenge is the impossibility of feedback and personal relationships in attenuated global systems. In a truly sustainable fish system, its actors will be connected in a web of relationships rather than in a one-way chain.

Technology can help here. Peer-to-peer networks, wikis, crowdsourcing, participatory mapping, mobile communications, platforms for knowledge-sharing – all these are potential components of distributed systems that connect citzens more directly with producers.

] Food systems are social systems

But iphones are only part of the answer. Food systems are social systems, and technology on its own cannot orchestrate the multitude of actors and stakeholders involved. Practical, context-specific issues need to be dealt with, continuously - and it's through these day-to-day negotiations that mutual trust develops.

Place-specific social enterprises for food, based on distributed models, are already emerging in cities of the South. In in such cities as Kinshasa or Dakar, in Africa, a “multi-actor ecosystem participation approach” (MEPA) has been developed that treats food supply as an ecosystem in which farmers, policy makers, environmentalists and regulatory bodies collaborate on the basis that the ecosystem itself is a shared responsibility. The interactions. Involved are complex and multi-directional, but geography and culture provides a shared space.

A more ecosystem-centric approach is also being pioneered in the North. In the fast-growing Transition Towns movement, for example, citizen groups are mapping foodsheds and watersheds as the basis for a more holisitc, regional approach to food security.

These maps, and other web-based tools in development, are viewed by Transitioners as tools to enable face-to-face contact among each other, and with food producers and citizens - not as visually mesmerising ends in themselves.

An especially inspiring UK model is a restaurant-led initiative, Pisces Responsible Fish Restaurants, that “links good fishermen with chefs…the idea is to build a long term relationship with “your” fishermen”. The Pisces team therefore insists on getting out on individual boats, and sees for themselves how the fish are caught.

This is a huge commitment of time and effort – and of trust on the part of the fishers. But for Pisces, it’s a worthwhile investment in the future. “Managing simply to avoid stock collapse is a miserably negative goal” they say; “despite all the problems, there remain an amazing diversity of fish just off the British coast - over 170 species in the North Sea alone. We want stocks to be built up so that they can support bigger catches, and better profits, while still leaving plenty for other species”.

The design lesson here is that there can be no one global “sustainable fish system”. The design task, instead, is to look for practical ways to help a multitude of different models – like MEPA in the South, or Pisces in the North – succeed, multiply, connect and adapt - in different ways in different contexts.

Posted by John Thackara at 03:12 PM | Comments (2)

August 03, 2009

How much is a school garden worth?

One in nine Americans already relies on federal food stamps to help buy groceries – a startling number that will grow as unemployment rises. At the same time, medical spending on obesity - a major cause of diabetes, stroke and heart attacks - reached $147 billion in 2008, an 87 percent increase in a decade.

So, how much must a school garden be worth, as a long-term investment?

California is spending $65,000 (45,000 euros) per classroom seat in a schools rebuilding programme – but only $1 per child per year for garden upkeep and support.

Mud Baron, whose job is to help 500 L.A. schools develop gardens and nature projects, has fought a lonely battle to persuade planners and architects that contact with nature - not just buildings – is a crucual ingredient of a "green" school.

When Mud explained his campaign to a Doors of Perception workshop at The Planning Center, in February, we came up with the idea of re-labeling school gardens as “outside classrooms”; this would have resolved Mud’s resource problem at a stroke.

But the situation in California has deteriorated fast since then:The budget crisis has left countless teachers unemployed, and a $1.7-million grant to Los Angeles Unified School District for its Instructional School Garden Program has expired.

Mud’s boss has agreed to match the funds that Baron and his network can raise – if they reach $100,000. We don’t usually run campaign appeals here, but when the issue is schools + food + learning-to- grow: well, we simply have to make an exception.

Donate what you can here.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:12 AM | Comments (1)

July 08, 2009

From permaculture punks to anaerobic digesters

I came across a fascinating essay about permaculture and energy descent in Mexico that introduces me for the first time to the existence of so-called permaculture punks in Mexico City. Its author, Holger Hieronimi, has spent the last seven years developing a permaculture based homestead there- so he knows the difference between theory and practise. The picture above, which shows a stage in the construction of an anaerobic digester, is just one among a whole sequence of fascinating visual stories. I also never heard of bocashi composting, either, until today.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:03 AM | Comments (1)

June 10, 2009

Urban farming: the new dot com?

In September a new event called Agriculture 2.0 will introduce a select group of alternative agriculture entrepreneurs to investors. SPIN-Farming LLC, together with NewSeed Advisors will co-host Agriculture 2.0 in New York.

Roxanne Christensen, co-author of the SPIN-Farming online learning series, says a wave of innovators is developing profitable models for sustainable alternatives to industrial agriculture. These new entrepreneurs are developing breakthrough technologies, approaches and business models that, she says, "can help create a post-industrial food system that is less resource intensive, more locally-based, and easier to monitor and control".

When I first wrote about SPIN-Farming here last July, I was intrigued by the idea of a franchise-ready sustainable farming system that could be deployed quickly and on a wide scale. (That is the concept behind SPIN Farming; it stands for S-mall P-lot IN-tensive).

SPIN's growing techniques are not, in themselves, a breakthrough. What's novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process, it doesn't sound all that different from McDonalds.

There are a host of reasons why urban farming is more complicated, once you start, than opening a hamburger restaurant. Among these: Skewed planning laws, competition for land from developers, insecure water supplies, pollution management, and the sheer number of diffferent actors involved even in a simple food system. But the "just start a business" approach will inject a new dynamic into the range of experiments multiplying all over the world.

Areas represented at Agriculture 2.0 will include controlled climate growing systems, building integrated agriculture, urban agriculture, closed loop irrigation and waste processing systems, mobile food processing, aquaculture, and appropriately-scaled marketing and distribution systems.

According to Janine Yorio of NewSeed Advisors, the conference will take a sector which has been viewed as marginal, dispel that notion, and expose its potential to the mainstream financial community. “We want to shine the light on the sustainable agriculture sector and demonstrate to investors that there are real economics and commercial prospects here,” Yorio says.

Registration for Agriculture 2.0 opens on June 29. For more conference information visit NewSeed Advisors.

If, like me, you're trying hard to cut down on air travel, but want to know more about this development, you can always see Paula Sobie, co-founder of City Harvest and now also a SPIN farming trainer, speak at the Foodprint conference in The Hague on 26 June.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:25 AM | Comments (5)

June 08, 2009

Dodo and chips

Before my recent visit to Helsinki, I was told by one of its members, Päivi Raivio, that I needed to know about an environmental organisation there called Dodo. And so it transpired that I was taken in conditions of some secrecy to this guerilla potato planting event. Given the generous volume of soil the team had amassed, Helsinki's eco-warriors will soon be enjoying a bumper crop.

Posted by John Thackara at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2009

London "nine meals away from anarchy"

In 2007 Lord Cameron of Dillington, first head of the UK Countryside Agency, famously remarked that Britain was ‘nine meals away from anarchy.’ Britain's food supply is so totally dependent on oil - 95 per cent of the food eaten there is oil-dependent - that if the oil supply to Britain were suddenly to be cut off it would take just three full days before law and order broke down. "We rely on a particularly vulnerable system. Britain needs to invest seriously in agriculture infrastructure if we are to avoid food crisis" said the noble Lord at the time.

I'm not sure that much action has so far followed these remarks, but an exhibition opening in London next month explores what those investments might be. The show looks at different ways that cities might be transformed from consumers of food to generators of agricultural products, and at how food production can be incorporated into the urban environment at both industrial and domestic levels.

A highlight of the London show is a photographic and filmic record of the Dott 07 Urban Farming project in Middlesbrough. Good to see London following so promptly - only three or four years behind the northern town. In Middlesbrough itself, since Dott 07 itself ended, the town's Council is expanding the Urban Farming programme. The Bohm and Viljoen map (below), created for Dott 07, that plots sites of productive potential, is a reference point for a raft of new initiatives. The Council recently won a £4 million (4.3 million euro) grant to run a "cocktail" (their word) of food and health projects, and the plan is to make the Town Meal an annual event to showcase the results of this new work.

LONDON YIELDS : Urban Agriculture is curated by Jackson Hunt and opens on Wednesday, 8 April, 6.30 - 9pm at The Building Centre, 26 Store Street, off Tottenham Court Road in central London.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2008

Nill by mouth

I just wasted (sorry, invested) half an hour of a busy day scrolling through a collection of digital dashboards. The one above is made for a hedge fund; it looks to me like a virus - but then I am probably prejudiced. The dashboard below is about car door supply chains: I can imagine here adding embergy values.

Sad people like me who like dashboards are, I know, the digital equivalent of trainspotters. But what the heck: it's a low-energy vice, right? Keep on sending them in.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:42 AM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2008

Eating Spin

The British government is in talks with supermarkets about emergency food reserves "in case the infrastructure of the country breaks down”. The exercise is being spun as a response to possible strikes by fuel tanker drivers, but the more likely explanation is that the precarious state of food systems as a whole has finally registered in mud-free Whitehall.

Persuading Tesco to stock 60 days supply of staple foods is of course better than the three days supply contained in today's just-in-time systems. But sheds full of baked beans are not exactly a long-term solution. A more nutritious form of spin has been developed in the US. At the end of an interesting review of last week's Growing Food for London conference, Roxanne Christensen writes about a franchise-ready sustainable farming system that can be deployed quickly and on a wide scale. That is the concept behind SPIN Farming. "SPIN", Christensen explains (it stands for S-mall P-lot IN-tensive) "makes it possible to earn significant income from growing vegetables on land bases under an acre in size. SPIN farmers utilize relay cropping to increase yield and achieve good economic returns by growing only the most profitable food crops tailored to local markets". SPIN's growing techniques are not, in themselves, breakthrough, Christensen continues; what is novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. "SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process, it really isn't any different from McDonalds. SPIN-style farming removes the two big barriers to entry – sizeable acreage and significant start-up capital. By offering a non-technical, easy-to-understand and inexpensive-to-implement farming system, it allows many more people to farm".

Posted by John Thackara at 07:14 AM | Comments (3)

June 16, 2008

Innovating our way to oblivion

Out-of-control buzzwords are like locusts: you can swat handfuls of them down with a bat, but more will come to take their place.

I've been swatting away for ages in this blog at all things Conceptual, Cultural, Clustered and (especially) Creative. But now we're suffering a massive counter-attack by the word Innovation - 137 million uses of which are known to Google alone.

A good proportion of these mentions probably belong to the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in the UK. Nesta's mission is to "make innovation flourish," and one way it does this is by using the world innovation in every second or third sentence of the emails it sends me.

Now Nesta is staffed by smart and well-connected people, and most of my clients think innovation is the very elixir of life itself - so I probably shouldn't say this. But I have to, because it's important:

INNOVATION IS NOT GOOD IN ITSELF - IN FACT, MORE INNOVATION DOES HARM, THAN DOES GOOD.

My evidence for this statement is contained in a breathless announcement from Mintel, the market research company, that a "Record-Breaking Number of New Products Flood Global CPG Shelves" and that (the numbers are for 2006) "close to 182,000 new products were introduced globally, with key booming areas focusing on mind, body, and general good health".

Well over half of these of these innovations - 105,000, to be precise - were food and drink products. This flood of innovations enable us to profit from such trends as "brainpower foods, age-defying treatments, increases in portion control, and "just for you" customised products”.

Now I may have misunderstood something here, but surely the Mintel numbers mean that more than half the innovations that reach the market all over the world - 300 innovations, every single day of the year - decrease the resource efficiency and hence sustainability of global food systems?

Good, so that's Innovation dealt with. Bring on the next killer word!

Posted by John Thackara at 05:28 PM | Comments (2)

April 10, 2008

Worship those worms

Readers of this blog will need no introduction to the Estonian bio-semiotician Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944). Oh, you do? Go to the back of the class. Well, Tallinn Jake saw mind, body and context as inseparable, for all animals (including human ones) and he coined the word umwelt to describe the unity of an organism's physical life-support system and the subjective network of relationships that give its world meaning. Umwelt (literally, 'around world') usefully explains our visceral attachment to cars, despite the damage they do to the public domain and the biosphere. I learned about umwelt whilst reading Elizabeth Farrelly's entertaining new book Blubberland: the dangers of happiness. Umweltness (my word) seems to feed two primal urges - for speed, and for safety - and thereby "puts us in danger of destroying our minds, our bodies, our cities, and our planet" says the author. She's also tough on the boom in Australian versions of MacMansion houses; between 1990 and 2003, the average New South Wales house grew by 60 per cent - even as family size shrunk by 40 per cent, and plot size roughly halved. "Indulgent?" asks Farrelly. "Sure, but governments and markets alike smile on this behaviour since it renders us fat and infantile and keeps the dummy firmly stuck in our collective mouth". Farrelly's prose is trenchant like this throughout, but somewhat archly so at times; I was left with a hunger for more reporting from real-life situations such as the un-modernised suburb of Redfern that she mentions in passing. But the final chaper is well-done as Farrelly describes an imagined future shaped by new belief systems: "The new religion makes heavenly disciples of sun and rain, worshipful shrines of fertility, and compost and sacred objects of water tanks and work farms"

Posted by John Thackara at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2008

The big chill

Shopping for a snack in central London yesterday evening I counted an extraordinary 78 metres (256 feet) of chiller cabinets in one small central London branch of Marks and Spencer.

Marks and Spencer have made a laudable commitment to make all it UK and Irish operations carbon neutral within five years. "We'll maximise our use of renewable energy and only use offsetting as a last resort" pledges the firm in its Plan A. In Plan A, M&S is committed to act on waste, raw materials, healthy eating, and fair trade. For example it has banned white veal and calves liver from its shelves, and is playing a leading role in an industry consortium called WRAP.

But M&S's Plan A has a huge, glaring omission: refrigeration. More than 50 percent of food in developed countries is retailed under refrigerated conditions - a factor due is large part to the open display cabinets of the kind I paced-out in Notting Hill yesterday. As a consequence, food retailers waste insane amounts of energy: a single open-fronted freezer costs 15,000 pounds (22,000 euros) per year to run in energy bills alone - and that does not include the embergy (embodied energy) involved in each unit's manufacture. Unchecked, air conditioning units and chiller cabinets will cause hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere in the next 50 years.

Off course, M&S may reply, if food were not refrigerated, a good proportion of it would rot or spoil. Up to 40 percent of fruit is lost post-harvest in some food systems. Such a loss of produce represents a waste of energy on its own account, since wasted food embodies the energy used in its production, processing and transport. Nonetheless, as things stand today, it looks as if M&S is resigned not to reduce, but to offset, the massive energy emissons from its supply, storage and retail operations when its five year deadline for Plan A expires.

The alternative would be for M&S to change its business model to one of shopless shopping, and close down most of its retail outlets. And why not? Refrigerated trucks, warehouses, and high street stores, are expensive and wasteful steps, and therefore profit-reducing costs, in the journey from farm to table. M&S is well-placed to become the radically de-centralised distribution and quality assurance platform that all towns and cities need to relocalise their food systems.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2007

Who is afraid of local food?

In the October issue of Blueprint its editor Vicky Richardson's accused Designs of the time (Dott 07) of secretly buying 10,000 pounds worth of fruit and vegetables when our Urban Farming project in Middlesbrough "did not generate adequate grub for the guests". Vicky declined to name the greengrocer for whom Christmas came so early - and I hereby confirm that her charge is ridiculous and untrue. But she did give me the space to publish this reply.

"The biggest problem with the porkies in her (Vicky's) story is that you can't eat them. Dott's Urban Farming project was not an aesthetic game, nor a yuppy lifestyle fad. It was a practical response to the urgent necessity to develop alternative food systems from the ground up.

Standing in Harvey Nichols Food Hall, or wherever it is that Biueprint's editor shops, food supplies may well look secure. But as I write, there are empty shelves in Caracas, food riots in West Bengal and Mexico, warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18 percent food price inflation in China, 13 percent in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10 percent or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50 percent higher than a year ago, and rice is 20 percent more expensive, says the UN.

Harvey Nicks may look well-stocked now - but at what cost,. and for how much longer? Almost a third more food was flown into Britain last year than in 2005. Air-freight rose 31 per cent in the year to 2006, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Food air miles have more than quadrupled - a rise of 379 per cent - since 1992.

The emerging food challenge we face is about energy, not ethics. Today, up to 40 percent of the ecological footprint of a city can be attributed to the systems which keep it fed and watered. On American farms in the early 1800s, the balance between calories expended and calories produced as food was about even. In 'developed' countries now it takes ten calories worth of energy from fossil fuels - in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and transportation fuel - to get one calorie back in the form of food.

That insane ratio was sustainable whilst energy, especially oil and natural gas, was cheap. But what about now? Since Dott's New Urban Farmers fed 2,500 people in Middlesbrough's Town Meal, the price of crude oil has shot up by $25 a barrel, and there's a growing consensus that the imminent $100 a barrel energy crunch will not be a blip, but the new norm.

In her attack on Dott's Urban Farming project, Vicky Richardson writes that "the idea that a modern urbanised society can survive by growing its own food is unrealistic and undesirable". Undesirable to whom, for goodness sake? The interests most threatened by a re-localisation of food supply are those associated with biotechnology and the agribusiness.

I'm perplexed that Vicky should cite "the spirit of invention and free-thinking" in defence of these corporate interests at a time when many of them are also embarking on radical change. Patrick Cescau, for example, the boss of Unilever, one of the world's largest food businesses, spoke recently of " seismic shifts in the world we do business in A reality gap has opened up between where we are and where we know - both instinctively and intellectually - we need to be".

Global industrial agriculture was less the result of "free-thinking" than of saturating land with fertilizers and pesticides, and soaking it with vast irrigation schemes, using cheap oil and gas to do so. That era is over. Besides, it was an approach based on brute force compared to the innovation required now to re-localise food supply at the level of the city-region.

Real innovation now combines top-down and bottom-up approaches. Middlesbrough Council was deeply impressed by the enthusiasm with which the experiment was taken up at grass roots within the community. Its officers tell me that many residents are asking how they can get involved again next year. But Dott's project was not about returning Middlesbrough to some kind of pre-industrial Emmerdale Farm. It was inspired by and complements the larger Stockton-Middlesborough Initiative, a 20-year vision for regenerating the urban core of the Tees Valley to ceate a "Green-Blue Heart” for more than 500,000 people.

Middlesbrough is in a global vanguard of city regions - from Arrezzo and Barcelona, to Toronto and the South Bronx, that are beginning to integrate food and water systems into their strategic planning. For these pioneers, food flows and water systems are a new layer of productive infrastructure, not a decorative afterthought.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2007

Food systems and cities: Doors event in UK

Up to 30 percent of the ecological footprint of a city can be attributed to the systems which keep it fed and watered. But when the Mayors of the world's 40 largest cities met recently to discuss sustainability strategies, food was not on the agenda. Why not?

Doors is organising a one day international debate, jointly with Designs of the time (Dott 07), to reframe the food systems of city-regions as design opportunities. The debate opens with a review of Dott 07’s Urban Farming project, in Middlesbrough, UK, which has involved more than a thousand citizens.

The debate is intended for service and food system designers; policymakers who deal with rural and urban development; urban planners and developers; and change leaders from retail, food and house building businesses.

John Thackara will moderate the day's proceedings. Among the speakers will be Chris Hardwicke, a Toronto-based architect who is involved in Toronto's emerging food strategy and who was one of our group at Doors of Perception 9 on 'juice' in India earlier this year. Chrtis is also part of a team organizing Alphabet City a festival about food, in Toronto, that immediately preceeds the Dott 07 Festival.

Key people from Dott's Urban Farming project presenting (who were also at Doors 9) include David Barrie (senior producer), Debra Solomon (culiblog.org), Nina Belk (Zest innovation) and Andre Viljoen (architect and urban designer).
Tim White from Middlesbrough Council and someone from Bioregional Quintain will also take part.

The Dott 07 Debate on food systems and cities takes place Monday 22 October, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 10h-17h. Tickets - just this once! - are free. But you absolutely have to reserve your seat by emailing adam.thomas@dott07.com

Posted by John Thackara at 07:39 PM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2007

Gone Juicing...

With four weeks to go before Doors 9, most of our blogging energies will be devoted to the Juice site. Why not join us? Or, nearly as good, please print the Doors 9 poster (5MB) and stick it everywhere in your environment. It will feel as if you're in India with the rest of us. And if you missed our February Doors of Perception Report special "do it" edition, the archive copy is here.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2007

Doors 9 conference programme

We preview our main activities for the year - especially Doors of Perception 9 in India and Designs of the time (Dott 07) in the UK in January's Doors of Perception report which (if you do not receive it by email) is here. Please make a note of the key dates. Please also pass this information on to friends and colleagues who may be interested.

DOORS 9 CONFERENCE PROGRAMME (Saturday 3 March)

Doors 9 opens with a introduction to the relationships between food, energy and design by Hannu Nieminen (Finland, Nokia), Aditya Dev Sood (India, Centre for Knowldge Societies), Debra Solomon (Netherlands, culiblog.org) and John Thackara (Doors of Perception).

Session 2 is about food in cities: Dutch architect Winy Maas (MVRDV) proposes three-dimensional agriculture, with a reference to pig cities. Urban designer Andre Viljoen explains his book about Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULS). David Barrie and Nina Belk describe their urban farming project for Designs of the time (Dott 07) in the UK. Designers Sanjeev Shankar and John Vijay Abraham compare old and new traditions of street food. Chris Hardwicke (Toronto) and Ron Paul (Portland) discuss farmers markets as hubs within food systems.

Session 3 is on food information systems. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, ponders new ways to think about browsing for food. Divya Sharma looks at food maps. Ellis Neder (USA) and Ian Brown (Fair Tracing, UK) look at identity management and food certification systems.

Session 4 of Doors 9 is on "juice". Designers Jogi Panghaal and Ezio Manzini discuss the different ways European and Asian cultures think about food. Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich (editors Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century) describe small and large scale changes already under way with Walter Amerika, an advisor to multinational food companies.

Session 5 of Doors 9 (yes, it's a full day, but there's food throughout) is a social technologies bazaar featuring innovative food-related projects from around the world. Among those you will meet are: Garrick Jones (UK, Ludic Corporation); Georg Christoph Bertsch (Germany, Cargo Bathing); Giovanni Canata (Italy, DxH2O water project); Claire Harten (USA) and Maria Wedum (Denmark), Dirt Cafe; Kultivator (Sweden, agriculture as art); Dori Gislason (Iceland, new lives for fishing villages); Francesca Sarti (Italy, food kiosks in Florence); Marije Vogelzang (Netherlands, Proef project); Maja Kuzmanovic (Netherlands, Groworld) ; Margie Morris (USA, Intel, food repositories).

Posted by John Thackara at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2006

Lethally lit lunch

George Monbiot also writes about food in his book Heat (see below). Food retailers, especially, waste insane amounts of energy. They use seven times more power (275 k Wh per cubic metre) to run a food hall than is used in an office. For the larger stores, up to a quarter of that energy budget goes on lighting - which is to make the food look good, not for it to be good. Most of the rest (64 per cent) is used for refrigeration, which is also ruinously wasteful. Think of all those open-fronted units: A single open-fronted freezer costs a retailer 15000 pounds (22,000 euros) per year to run in energy bills alone.

Monbiot says we should replace out of town food retailing with warehouses that would service internet-enabled home delivery services. But even that sounds too transport-intensive if powered vehicles are to be involved. Bikes are the answer. Young lads seem happy to haul fat tourists around in rickshaws in London, so they (the lads) can retrained to do grocery runs, too.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2006

Food information systems

Two days ago I was in London to talk with design school tutors about the design competition concerning food information systems that the Royal Society of Arts is running together with Dott07. Today I learned from CalorieLab via SmartMobs that McDonald’s is now placing codes on the packaging of many foods so that eaters can scan the package with their cell phones and find out the nutritional information. "Known as a QR Code, these printed codes look somewhat like a barcode and are scannable by many photo cellphones. All sorts of information can be packed into these little codes, from the website to find the amount of calories and fat in a Big Mac to a company’s contact information on a business card," the site explains. This is good news for any young designers seeking to win a trip to Doors 9 (the prize for winning the RSA competition): you don't have to invent a QR food application - McDonalds has done that: take that as your starting point and amaze us with how much further it could go.

Posted by John Thackara at 12:52 PM | Comments (1)

September 21, 2006

Noisy food

A couple of days ago I found myself in the town centre of Carlisle, in the north west of England, at 7am. The roads were empty except for a a large white truck whose driver was unloading packaged food into a shop. An incredible, raw-edged roar of noise came from the refrigeration unit on top of his cab. The noise was so extreme that my skin started to creep, and I couldn't hear a word when someone called me on my mobile phone. I retreated into the railway station cafeteria, but it was not much better in there: Two large refrigerated drinks machines were roaring away so loudly that the sales assistant had to shout to tell me the price of a coffee.

That noise represents wasted energy. The scary thing, as I learned at the Creative Rural Economy conference in Lancaster last week, is that perpetually rising food transport intensity is government policy. One policymaker described the countryside as "post productivist", and a senior academic advisor to the UK government told me later that "the purpose of the countryside is consumption".

I suppose this is factually correct - city dwellers make 1.2 billion trips to the countryside in the UK alone, and spend 12 billion pounds shopping when they get there; but it's a disastrous policy in environmental and food security terms.

It's also mad. One supermarket is flying planeloads of turnips from New Zealand to the UK in order to drive down the prices being asked by home growers. Turnips contain 70 percent water - so the company is in effect flying planeloads of water across the world to drive down prices of a root crop that could once have been found within a couple of miles of where most of the population lives.

I also learned that if you or I spend ten euros on a food in a supermarket, less than 60 cents - 6% - of tha money goes to the farmer who grew it. The rest goes to the wholesalers, the processors, the packagers, the retailers - and to the running costs of that roaring white truck in Carlisle.

But lots of good things are happening too, as we are finding out in the City Farming strand of Dott.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:01 AM | Comments (2)

September 19, 2006

Juice button now works

If you look at the menu on the left, we've added a button labelled "Doors 9 on Juice".

Posted by John Thackara at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2006

Food as a design opportunity

Doors of Perception 9 takes place in New Delhi 28 February to 4 March 2007. The theme is “Juice: Food, Fuel, Design”.

We've extended the first deadline for submissions to 30 September.

Why "juice"?

(Most of the statistics that follow are taken from the miraculously useful and interesting website of Jean-Marc Jancovci)

Global food systems are becoming unsustainable in terms of environmental impact, health, and social quality. But what to do?

The U.S. food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy. This disparity is made possible by nonrenewable fossil fuel stocks.

127 calories of energy are used to grow and export one calorie of lettuce from the US to the UK.

In 'developed' countries, CO2 emissions attributed to producing, processing, packaging and distributing the food is about 8 tonnes a year for a family of four.

Agriculture and food now account for nearly 30 percent of goods transported on Europe’s roads.

95 percent of the fruit and half the vegetables eaten in the UK are imported.

There are 52 transport and process stages in one bottle of ketchup.

In France, 20 percent of money spent by citizens on food is devoted to raw products such as fruit, vegetables, or fresh meat of fish. The rest is used to buy processed food : pasta, canned food, frozen food, biscuits and sweets, drinks, etc.

These processing industries consume energy and therefore emit greenhouse gases.

Most processed foods are packaged. Manufacturing the packaging (steel, aluminium, plastics) accounts for 70- 80 percent of the overall emissions of the food industry.

Processed food is generally bought in supermarkets which consume electricity to keep foods frozen - especially in open display units.

Most supermarkets sell industrially-grown chickens. The lifecycle of such a bird entails:
• Emissions linked to the heating of the hen house;
• Fossil fuels used to manufacture the fertilizers used to grow the grain eaten by the chicken;
• Fossil fuels burnt by the tractor used to grow the grain eaten by the chicken;
• Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions that occur when the fertilizers are spread on the field;
• Fossil fuels required to manufacture chicken food (industrial chickens rarely eat "raw" cereals, but rather processed foods) from the cereals;
• Emissions linked to the manufacturing of tractors, to the drying of grain, and to the refinery of the diesel oil used by the tractor....

Eating meat requires intensive agriculture because it is necessary to grow a lot of plants to feed the animals.

When decaying, nitrogenous fertilizers cause N2O emissions, 300 times more powerful than CO2.

Ruminants emit methane, which is 23 times more powerful than CO2, because of the fermentation of the plants they eat in their digestive sysem.

Producing an unprocessed kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of beef (with bones) leads to the emission of three to four kilogrammes (nearly nine pounds) of carbon equivalent.

Between 65 and 70 percent of the available agricultural land in France is devoted to feeding animals.
Fruits and vegetables (except for potatoes and vineyards) acount for two percent of the total.

The amount of meat consumed by an inhabitant of the Earth has increased by 60 percent over the last 40 years while the world population has doubled. Meat production has been multiplied by 3.2

Every cow in the European Union is subsidised by $2.50 a day.
One in five people in the world lives on less than $1 a day.

The US insists that 50 percent of its food aid is processed or bagged.

Poor diet and physical inactivity account for 35 percent (and rising) of avoidable causes of deaths in the US.

People in industrialised countries eat between six and seven kilogrammes (about 15 pounds) of food additives every year.

Supermarkets are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. Heating and cooling stores represents, in France, between 1,5 and 2 million tonnes carbon equivalent carbon.

Supermarkets are usually located in suburbs – so we use cars to get there. In the UK, 25 percent of car journeys are to get food.

In the home, our use of processed foods causes us to use more energy in fridges and freezers, stoves ovens, microwaves.

In France, the electricity consumption linked to eating (fridges, freezers, dish-washers, stoves and ovens, not to mention small appliances) represents 22 percent of all energy consumed at home,

25 percent of domestic waste is composed of food waste which, when landfilled, leads to methane emissions.

Is that all mad, or what?

That is why Doors 9 is about food and energy.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:34 AM | Comments (1)

July 08, 2006

Doors 9 call for projects

DOORS OF PERCEPTION 9: JUICE: FOOD, FUEL, MEANING
Food continuously circulates through the landscape into our homes and Bodies. It thereby organizes our calorific, symbolic and social energies. Juice, the essence of food, can also mean credit, electricity, access, flavor and love. The topic of food, as product as well as service, as metaphor as well as material, as energy as well as connectedness, will preoccupy us at Doors of Perception 9. The encounter will be held in New Delhi from 28 February to 4 March 2007.

Doors 9 begins with a two-day Project Leaders Round Table. This might involve you if your project is concerned with:
- Innovative ways to share, prepare, cook and eat food;
- Urban farming, new links between producer and consumer;
- Practices that transform urban-countryside interactions;
- Sustainable packaging and distribution scenarios;
- Effective uses of new technologies in relation to food.

The deadline for receipt of proposals is Friday 8 September 2006. Projects should be informed by a real location or situation and engage multiple disciplines and dimensions. Hypothetical, conceptual, and unrealizable proposals will not be favoured.

Proposals will be reviewed in September based on a concise project description. Send us an email (Subject header: “juice project”) on these five points:
a) title of your project;
b) 10 word description;
c) 100 word description;
d) name(s) of author(s);
e) URL

Your proposals will be reviewed by:
Aditya Dev Sood, Centre for Knowledge Societies (CKS);
Debra Solomon, culiblog.org;
Juha Huuskonen, PixelAche;
Amy Franseschini, futurefarmers;
John Thackara, Doors of Perception.

Notification of finalists will be by Friday 22 September. If invited, you will need to pay for your travel to India, but we will cover your accommodation, food, and basic event costs, as well as your registration fees for Doors 9. Send your project description to: editor@doorsofperception.com

Posted by John Thackara at 08:21 PM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2006

Doors 9: design and architecture schools

If you are a design or architecture student, or recently so, we have teamed up with the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and Designs of the time (Dott07) to offer travel-included scholarships to Doors 9 for the winners of this year’s RSA Design Directions competition. The two themes we have set are on Food Info Systems and on Sustainable Tourism. These documents are previews of the official Call which comes later in July at the RSA site.

Posted by Kristi at 02:08 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2006

Rural design

What are the key design tasks facing the new post-agricultural rural economies and settlements? A conference in the UK in September will map out a new role for the arts and design in response to new social, environmental and economic regeneration priorities. Among the strands and seminar topics currently being developed are:
• Arts and agri-tourism, artists projects in B+Bs, farm barns and cattle marts
• New rural media, digital art, design and the new rural knowledge economy
• Rural arts and design festivals, rural performing arts and touring projects
• Rural community broadcasting, convergence and cultural applications of ICT
• New urban-rural business partnerships, and arts-led rural cultural diversity
• Future farms, art-farms, rural art workshops and agri-design industry clusters
• Rural Biennales, proposal for a European Region of Rural Culture & Design
• Designing the new rural settlements; rural housing and architectural initiatives
• Investing in rural community-led design, crafts and arts as cultural capital
• Designing alternative land uses, renewables and new energy & fibre crops
• Food as cultural economy, urban agriculture and urban-rural foods initiatives
• Contemporary rural, innovative crafts and design-led rural regeneration
• Rural textile/fashion design and smart clothing interfaces with agriculture.
The conference is being developed by the Rural Cultural Forum, Arts Council England, LEADER+ UK, Culture NW, LITTORAL Arts, and the Lancashire Economic Partnership. 10 – 13 September 2006 at the University of Lancashire. The event is listed here along with other events to do with the changing rural economy and land use.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:59 AM | Comments (1)

January 05, 2006

Pigs and cubic cities

If humans can live in skyscrapers, why not pigs and fish? When the Dutch architect Winy Maas first proposed that 600 metre-high skyscrapers, filled with pigs, could supply most of Europe�s pork needs, he was accused of proposing �concentration camps for animals�. But why should agriculture be restricted to the countryside, and organised horizontally? Would it not be efficient, and ecologically sounder, to move food production and consumption closer together? This is one proposal in 1,400 page book called KM3 by MVRDV. (Winy Maas is the M).

KM3 asks two questions: How much built space would be required in a world supporting ten times more people than it does today - 65 billion? And, how would such a city be organised? Maas and colleagues designed a hypothetical city that accomodates one million people and all their needs in the most compact possible form. For the purposes of the exercise, their city is autarchic: It has no neighbours, and must meet all its needs internally. As design inputs, the team assembled an extraordinary list of spatial reguirements - from the amount of volume needed for food production (20 percent) to the average volume of a psychiatric hospital (446 square metres).

Although startling in scope, KM3 is an extrapolation of existing trends. Among familar urban areas designed to be highly dense are Les Halles and La Defence in Paris, the Barbican in London, and Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam. These examples do not inspire joy at the prospect of a KM3 future. The French sites, in particular, are so ghastly that they feature endlessly in dystopian gangster and science fiction movies. But for Maas, these contemporary examples are imperfect not because they are dense, but because they lack "programmatic diversity". They are monocultures. 3D cities will only work, Maas argues, if they contain a rich mix of acitivites: Not just work, or sleeping, but all forms of production, especially agricultural.

Hence the vertical pig cities scenario. What started as a design provocation has taken on a life of its own. Maas' proposal has fed into an emerging proposal for a total reshaping of agriculture - at least in man-made Holland. A Dutch think tank, the Innovation Network for Rural Areas and Agricultural Systems, proposes the transfer of agricultural production to industrial areas near large populations of people. KM3, Excursions On capacities. MVRDV, 2006. Actar, Barcelona

Posted by John Thackara at 07:52 AM | Comments (2)

November 07, 2005

How fast is fast food?

"Quick-serve restaurants are having a tough time keeping the fast in fast food, as menus become more complicated. At San Diego-based Jack in the Box restaurants, for instance, it takes an average of 228.9 seconds – 3.8 minutes – to get burgers out the drive-through window after an order is taken". This startling information comes from a new study by the trade magazine QSR which rates burger, chicken and taco chains. QSR analysts estimate that speeding up delivery by as little as six seconds can improve sales by 1 percent or more. That's because about 70 percent of all fast-food transactions occur at the drive-through window, and the busiest two hours at most restaurants are during lunch. To enhance (and enforce) efficiency, "many chains use digital timing systems, software and headsets to keep the packages of onion rings emerging with lock-step predictability", the report says. "Indeed, some chains can monitor individual stores instantly from their headquarters to make sure the clock isn't ticking too long on each order". Who said the command-and-control economy was over? That last charming add-on probably came from Wharton Business School, whose banner ad features prominently on the QSR site.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:35 AM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2005

Infra for food

If we are to re-localise food, a new generation of information systems will be needed as support. Many of today's food systems rely on closed networks in which access to information is controlled by entities (such as supermarkets) that are not keen on cooperatives and localisation. The good news is that open source software for food systems are already emerging. A story in Indymedia shows the People's Food Co-op in Portland, Cascadia, ringing out items on an entirely free open-source point-of-sale system (or POS) - the software needed to run a cash register and manage the pricing of all the items in a store.The story describes the project as a 'world's first', but several commenters list comparable systems that, they say, already exist. The "I was first! No, I was first!" bickering is tiresome, especially considering the vast amount of design work still to be done . We need, for example, to exploit the potential of RFID systems to give citizens far more information about about a product's history (where product = carrot) than might be comfortable for the the company selling it.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:32 AM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2005

Insects of the new economy

An eminent insects expert is to study aspects of biological and religious diversity in order to find ways of conserving the natural environment. Until recently Head of Entomology (the study of insects) at London’s Natural History Museum, Dr Dick Vane-Wright is the recipient of a NESTA Fellowship. 'I suspect that taking a more sustaining role, acting as nature’s steward, is something which most belief systems support' says Vane-Wright, who has studied the relationship between biodiversity and value systems over several years. It's sounds like a fascinating project, but I'm not sure Dr Vane-Wright has been much exposed to the belief systems of the new economy. Biological metaphors were frequently used by its boosters to justify ruthless behaviour that paid scant attention to the interests of the environment. That story is well-told in Metaphors of Life and Death in Silicon Valley.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2005

Food that heats us up

Food 'miles' in the UK have risen dramatically over the past 10 years, are still rising, and have a significant impact on climate change, traffic congestion, accidents and pollution according to a report published yesterday, and reported in today's Guardian. Food transport accounts for 25% of all the miles driven by heavy goods vehicles on British roads. The use of heavy trucks to transport food has doubled since 1974 (in southern Europe, it's growing even faster). The dramatic increase has resulted in a rise in the amount of CO2 emitted by food transport: 19m tonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted in the UK 2002 in the course of getting food to people, a 12% increase on 1992, the report says. Airfreight, the most polluting form of food transport, is growing fastest. Tim Lang, (one of the world's leading critics of industrialised food systems, and author of Food Wars ) is quoted as saying: "If the government doesn't take action to tackle this, all its proposals on climate change will be so much nonsense." A minister called Lord Bach, who launched the report in London, promised that the British government would "work with the industry to achieve a 20% reduction in the environmental and social costs of food transport by 2012". The words 'breath', 'hold', 'your', and 'don't' spring to mind: no British government is going to take meaningful action against an industry that combines food, logistics, massively powerful retailers, and spoiled consumers. We'll have to wait for a couple of massive eco-shocks before the policy framework will change. In the meantime, there's a lot of interesting service design to be done in support of the massive move towards sustainable food systems that is already underway.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:42 AM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2005

Unexpected campaigners for privacy

A few days ago I commented that managers have not thought through the potential of RFID systems to give customers far more information about about a product's history than might be comfortable - at least, for the company selling it. A forthcoming book flagged by Institute For the Future, does include a chapter on RFID and Authenticity of Goods. But so far as I can see, the applications discussed will refer more to the protection of Louis Vuitton from knock-offs, than of ordinary folk from dodgy food. It suddenly dawns on me: we can expect the biggest, baddest players in agribusiness to come out strongly against RFID on the grounds of ....protection of privacy.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2005

Reading your lunch

What happens when citizens are able to 'read' product-specific information directly from a package’s RFID tag using a camera phone? Few business people that I've met have thought the consequences through. The widespread deployment of RFID tags is seen mainly as a way to improve the efficiency of supply webs - not as a way for customers to find out more about a product's history. But consider the following: The Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), together with the University of Kuopio and the Helsinki School of Economics, have developed a prototype for a service that can help people make better food choices by reading product-specific information directly from a package. The service shows the energy and nutrition information of food, and also offers the possibility to use a food diary and an exercise calculator. But that's just a start: that same infrastructure could be used to tell the readerphone-wielding citizen where the food came from, and when; how it was grown; what it was fed or sprinkled with; and so on. Finnish test groups experienced the pilot system as "rewarding". But vicious fights for information control between citizen groups and corporations are inevitable when they realise that RFID tags have the potential to give more of the game away than might be comfortable for some players.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:57 AM | Comments (2)

April 16, 2005

Nomadic Banquet

A reminder that among numerous archives of Doors 8 stuff not on this site is Debra Solomon's Nomadic Banquet. We are still receiving presentations and other material which will be posted here in due course.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:06 AM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2004

Needed: Nomadic Banquet benchmarks

One of the pre-Doors 8 field projects we're supporting is an India leg of Debra Solomon's ongoing quest to enable "nomadic banquets". The idea is that people move round a city from street vendor to street vendor - each one being th best at, for example, dumplings, noodles, vodka martinis, whatever.
We're keen to hear about any other locative media projects involving food, rating, mobile phones, GIS and so on that we can learn from and maybe connect with. Check out Debra Solomon's Culiblog - and then tell us about lo-food projects we need to know about. Thanks.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)