Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

domestication draft animals food production
Horse sense
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A cornerstone of Urban Food Chains crystallised this evening. Fundamental to the structure of a supply chain is the basic unit of transport and energy. Taking three major themes of this blog, let’s unpack the topic. First, before the dawn of time, generations of early agriculturists worked for millennia to domesticate species and crops that we would recognise today. They also tamed fire, an evolutionary trump card. Their lasting achievement was to breed forerunners of today’s strategic ungulates: cows, pigs, sheep and horses. Fast forward to the early twentieth century, when the first world war slaughtered millions of draft animals.

This high tech cull of horses, in particular, damaged the bedrock of the agricultural world. Livestock numbers would take decades to restore, if indeed there was either the economic resources or the political will to do so. The first world war was a reset that made way for change on a global scale, for humans and animals alike. Thousands of years spent establishing stable working relationships turned to dust in the heat of battle.

The penny dropped when I read Christopher Turnor, an author of the time, complaining that the UK had too many pastures, they were blocking food production. The origins of all this empty grassland are to be found in Edwardian England, but the wartime cull of draft animals accelerated the trend. The rest is not so much history as a race to plug the economic gaps left by the ravages of war.

cultivation domestication fish pre-history raw
Food values
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To paraphrase Saint John, in the beginning was the meal. And the meal was with God…

We live in a world with more explanations than questions, more doubts than answers, more belief than knowledge. What sustains us is an unseen chain of events that conspire to make human life happen, whatever it takes. Our dependence on this process is total. Welcome to the world of food.

Our shared origins go back to the beginning of time before crops or livestock had been domesticated. There is general agreement once hominids had domesticated fire — tamed is probably a better word — there was a further four to six millennia before domesticated animals and crops emerged on the scene. Scholars may disagree over when this change came about, but we can be sure that until it was a fait accompli, everything else in the story of civilisation was on hold. There are quibbles about when exactly such a change can taken as read, but everybody is counting in millennia.

The rest is history. The trouble with history is its dependence on written records and sometimes incorrect attribution of artefacts. The reason we know so little about early agrarian populations is because they had neither written records nor surviving artefacts to bear witness to their passing. This is a pity, since what we do know about these groups is that they lived in harmony with nature and were environmentally enlightened. We are indebted to some of the world’s most dedicated and skillful archaeologists, who have traced the remains of villages that were built in the trackless alluvial wetlands. At this time, hominids and animals fed future generations of flora and fauna. Man was still bound to the laws of nature at this time.

When the world’s first states emerged, they were expressions of an agrarian social structure. Their dealings with the world around them were probably more extensive than we will ever know. What matters is that we learn and understand from such scraps as we can glean, to focus on value without being diverted by units of account.

datacrumb fish
It’s a wrap
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Researchers at Portland State University (PSU) have confirmed high levels of microplastics in five species of wild fish caught inshore by local fishermen. Some 180 out of 182 samples analysed for the study showed signs of contamination by microplastics, which can be persistent and harmful to many species, including humans.

crunchy numbers datacrumb
Fewer shops, fading footfall, future gloom?
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Up and down the UK, we see Big Issue vendors on the high streets of Britain, clutching a bundles of magazines in a bid to sell an incisive vision of consumer society. As an example of the high standards of news writing that fills the pages of the magazine, issue 1060 published at the end of January carries a well-researched snapshot of the decline that is tightening its grip on British high streets and shopping centres. A downpage panel records the 2.2% year on year drop in footfall, as fewer shoppers venture out in 2024. Some 13,500 shops closed during the year, nearly one third more than the previous year’s 10,494 retail closures. This averages 37 shops closing every day, according to the Centre for Retail Research. Figures from the Altus Group record that there are now 38,989 pubs still trading in the UK, after 400 closed in 2024. Some of this decline could be laid at the feet of online shoppers, but the figures tell a story of dwindling economic activity.

crunchy numbers FFCC food manufacture UK economy
What can £38/week buy?
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The impact of Government policy to improve the national diet comes with proportionally higher costs for poor households. This would apply to any government, of any stripe and any motivation. Structural change in food policy throws differences in earnings into sharp relief. When the Food Standards Agency published the Eatwell Guide in 2016, a headline price rise of £38 a week would mean a doubling in food bills for poor households, compared to increases of just over a third for affluent consumers. Using Eatwell data on a national scale, the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) researchers calculate that legislating for a healthy, sustainable national diet would come with a £57 billion price tag. This is not unreasonable, indeed it is good value, given that the direct cost of healthcare arising from diet-related illness is running at £91 billion, lost productivity is costing the economy an estimated £116 billion a year and the human cost a further 60 billion a year. The numbers basically accuse the food industry of being more interested in making money than feeding people. However, the scale and scope of the money extracted from UK health authorities by pharmaceutical corporations is several orders of magnitude greater and no less reprehensible.

If the market economy functions as one might have hoped, would this ever have occurred in the first place? Part of the problem with economics is that its practitioners quite cheerfully play “what if?” games as they go along. The problem is not that a variable might be unreliable, but that the outcome can change in so many ways that it is impossible to attribute a given outcome with a single input. Treating the food/health sectors as a series of events, for example, creates a dislocated view of the biosphere, with more gaps than development. Some gaps are inevitable, but you can have too much of a good thing.