Nature’s strategies for abundant, healthy, resilient, sustainable food

On this episode, we are going to dive into Nature’s strategies for abundant, healthy, resilient, ecologically sustainable food. 

I have had my frustrations with food and food systems since I was a teenager, the concerns at that time were food colourings and additives, and later I had concerns about animal welfare in industrial farms. In university, I added the equity of people around the world to the list, as well as the environmental impacts associated with food systems. And my frustrations have been growing over the years, the more our food is being messed about with. Frankly, I just want simple foods that are grown and prepared with the health and wellbeing of the customer, the people and animals involved in the food systems, and the health of biodiversity, and nature’s cycles in mind. 

Here is a quote I found that sums it up for me. This quote was made by Gerda Verburg during the 2021 Food for Earth: 24 hour global marathon for sustainability. The quote says “A healthy Earth is the foundation for life in general, and healthy food is the foundation for a healthy life.”

A few years ago I went back to first principles to develop a framework to distill my own thoughts on the key parts and connections of food and food systems. My own framework came from observations of nature and my own body, revisiting ecology textbooks; growing, storing, processing, preparing and eating food, as well as reading and listening to action-taking visionaries. 

My framework is a visual representation for me, of how to create abundant, healthy, resilient ecologically sustainable food systems. One of the key parts of this framework are six strategies that all work together to produce this outcome. The six strategies in no particular order are: local, seasonal, variety and diversity, low input, whole and finally, enjoyable. These strategies are pretty simple,. BUT, the difference between the majority of our human systems and nature, is that humans tend to pick one or two of these strategies, whereas nature uses all six strategies at once. If we are going to create abundant, healthy, resilient, sustainable food systems we too, need to learnt to use all six strategies at once.