What is a Sustainable Food System?

Imagine sitting by a pond, quiet and peaceful. Now listen and watch. Do you hear all the buzzing and chirping around you? Do you see the fish darting in the shadows? The more you look, the more you see—thousands of different kinds of plants and animals all making up this little ecosystem.

Now imagine someone decides to make the pond more “efficient.” One type of fish, bird, and bug. The best and the brightest. One variety of tree, bush and flower. What happens to the pond? This particular fish eats only green algae, leaving the red algae unchecked. It’s not long before the pond is overrun in red goo and neither fish nor fowl can live there.

I know this a simplified picture, but it’s similar to what is happening in our food system today. We’ve focused on efficiency, producing vegetables at the lowest possible cost, and we’ve constructed an impressive system to accomplish it. However, now we are beginning to see the damage it is causing. Our huge, centralized food system is actually reducing our ability to grow food in the long term.

Sustainability means providing for today and investing in tomorrow. It means valuing the land, the people who work it, and the food they produce. A sustainable food system is one in which we foster diversity, take care of the soil, eat what’s grown closest to home, and manage our waste.

Cultivate Diversity
Diversity is nature’s standard. A sustainable system is a diverse system. This means more smaller farms around the country, rather than a few enormous agribusiness corporations. It means numerous varieties of fruits and vegetables, rather than the select handful that are currently chosen based on yield, cost, and transportability.

Replenish the Soil
If we feed the soil, it will continue to feed us. With crop rotation and cover crops, we prevent soil erosion, whereas monoculture and row-cropping leave large tracks of land barren for much of the year. Cover crops and green manure actually put nutrients back into the soil, while our current chemical fertilizers and pesticides not only deplete the soil, but pollute our rivers and contaminate our groundwater.

Eat Locally
When we support our local farmers, our food is fresher. It was picked this morning, not flown in from Chile or trucked thousands of miles from out of state. We learn to eat what’s in season and to really appreciate strawberries when they arrive.

Our food is healthier. The recent outbreak of e. coli in spinach points out the flaws in our centralized system. With these huge processing plants, if one batch of spinach is contaminated it ruins the entire production. When we eat locally, if there is a problem, we can track it down quickly and correct it.

Our economy is healthier. When we buy our food from local farmers, we turn those dollars more times before they exit the state. Not only that, our money is actually spent on food, rather than on the fuel it takes to ship it to us.

Convert Waste to Food
In nature, all waste is reused; it becomes food for another part of the system. We are continuing to see how to apply this principle in agriculture to replace petroleum-based products. We are finding ways to use plant and animal waste (even used cooking oils) to create adhesives, lubricants, electricity, even fuel for our cars. The more we produce here at home, the more we reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Imagine our farmlands, alive and buzzing again. Imagine fresh local vegetables and clean homegrown fuel for our cars. Imagine what we can do.