Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

animal products City life Europe ship
Day and night
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For centuries urban populations have cheerfully ignored one of the most basic phases in the rhythm of the planet’s life, thanks to rapidly evolving technology. It is paradoxical, but completely normal, for millions of people around the world to treat the hours of day and night as interchangeable. In the twenty first century, the electric light switch rewrites all the rules governing what can be done at different times of day. For all practical purposes, such rules have no current application.

City life is 24/7, thanks to artificial lighting. A trivial gesture over a light switch is all many of us need to turn night into day. But this has not always been the case and if we make any serious progress with choking off climate change, we will have to rethink our energy expectations, too.

Before the widespread use of electric light, the availability of town gas pipes determined the extent of street and domestic lighting in industrial towns and cities. Go back a century and the demand for animal fats and oils to make candles and run lanterns was significant, if waning. But go back further and a gaping chasm re-appears between those who lived in sparsely-lit houses and those who could afford to routinely light their homes and entertain guests to dinner or dance the night away at elaborate balls.

Alaskan dockside scene, circa 1911.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Dig a little deeper into history and the lighting fuel of choice was whale oil, initially processed in dockside refineries around the world, later produced on board ship as whaling vessels became large enough to accommodate the necessary equipment and tankage. From being a rough and ready battle with nature and the elements, fraught with danger for the dinghy crews, whaling became an increasingly ruthless war of attrition that drove whole species to the brink of extinction. As well as extracting all the oil from a huge carcase, the whaling industry earned substantial money from whale meat, with some cuts sold on for cheap food products and the rest sold to feed urban cats and dogs. In this context, the dog’s dinner was a secondary by-product from the days of lucrative barrels of whale oil.The whaling industry went into a long term decline as a direct result of its impact on whale numbers.

City life cultivation food production
City life 2.1
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Is the writing on the wall for hydroponics? Vertical Farming Daily reports on trials for aeroponics in an adapted hydroponics line. The new technology has to fit in with existing installations to stand a cat in hell’s chance of being considered, but rises to the challenge of producing crops faster using less water. The plug and play modification showed increased yields of just over 20% in trials organised by aeroponics developer Lettus Grow, using the firm’s Aeroponics Rolling Beds (ARB).

These replacement growing trays keep seedlings suspended in the air, receiving nutrients in a carefully controlled fine mist at fixed intervals. To eliminate any risk of blocked nozzles, the Lettus system uses ultrasonic technology to shake droplets of growing solution into the roots of the crop, generating a fine mist.

The application of the nutrient mist can be very closely controlled, keeping the growing medium dry and making the crop easier to manage. The technology is being trialled in widely varying situations. Farming family business GH Dean & Co Ltd in Kent is partnering with grower Ro-Gro in a bid to speed up the development of a new revenue stream, redefining the rate at which a return can be earned on a new agricultural activity.

HM Prison Hewell is using aeroponics to train inmates in the new techniques. As well as growing fresh food for inmates there is enough to sell outside the establishment, too. Local action group Cultivate is creating a local food network to feed communities around Newtown, Powys, while Grow It York is looking to develop food strategy with aeroponics.

Vertical farming has much to commend it. By focussing on one stage of plant development it is easy to miss one important detail, though. Since it does not complete the plants’ life cycle, it does not generate seed stock for further crops. This remains as an input in the sector’s otherwise admirable environmental credentials.

City life cultivation food production
City life 3.0
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On the surface, urban life appears to be very deeply compartmentalised, when large populations find themselves living cheek by jowl while maintaining social separations, such as class, race or status. However, there is no separation in nature, the planet has a single atmosphere, a single ocean, not to mention shared land masses. Ultimately, all nature’s resources are shared, with an often over-generous share being taken by humanity. The planet does not respond or challenge this phenomenon, but continues to meet all demands made of it, by human and animal alike, on a first come, first served basis.

Wherever humanity has left the by-products of its plundering, such as ash, exhaust gases or radioactive residues, these have accumulated and degraded down the centuries. Nature does not judge polluters, just keeps their dirty little secrets on view for all to see. To avoid eternal shame, humanity actively needs to work in harmony with nature, instead of emptying the sweet jars in the planetary candy store.

There have been civilisations which have lived in harmony with the natural world, spanning millennia, sadly we have very limited knowledge of their cultures, or indeed the roots of their eventual demise. Managing soil fertility was doubtlessly a cornerstone of their endeavours, making a closer study of the Indore project a high priority. It is time for subscribers to unpack Sir Albert Howard’s legacy.

City life cultivation monoculture
City life 2.0
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Food production has to compete fiercely for space in any urban environment. In a bid to escape these constraints, some food producers have gone up in the world, literally. Welcome to the world of vertical farming, a high tech adaptation of hydroponics, in which plants are raised in row upon row of troughs, each level illuminated by a blend of artificial lights that add up to a passable semblance of continuous light. Vertical farming has the squeaky clean credentials of a rising star in the food industry, earning extra points for season-free crops of strawberries, salad leaves and baby spinach leaves.

Converts and supporters of vertical farming point to the careful use of environmentally friendly electricity, the green credentials of the indoor space management in commercial growing operations that can supply high grade salad crops to supermarkets in a continuous production cycle.

The BBC has visited a leading exponent a number of times. Here is what they reported in August 2022 (https://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-62491123). The Bristol-based Jones Food Company is preparing to launch the biggest vertical farm in the UK. There is a lot of high tech green know-how at work in the business. However, while its carbon footprint is doubtless beyond reproach, one is left wondering whether there is any role for nature in this high tech warehouse. After all, there is no commercial requirement for nature to be a part of any business plan.

The Jones Food Company website argues that its core business is farming sustainably, without some of the “hazardous substances” associated with field farming. By cleaning and reusing water up to 30 times, water intake is one tenth of what a conventional field crop would need. JFC also argues that in-house water hygiene allows the company to operate without toxic crop treatments, saving money and improving the flavour of crops.

This is an activity that sets out to be part of the solution, if not all of the solution, rather than any kind of problem. The basic assumption that what goes on in the wider world is either too distant or irrelevant does not hold water. There is a duty of care to the planet to give some thought to the whole ecosphere, when planning what goes into a growing space, however small.

Seen from that angle, the emphasis changes in a subtle shift towards a planetary view. To be sure, assuming that the vertical farmer is so close to her customers that food miles cease to be an issue, whereas procurement of fluorescent tubes probably requires a longer trip around a continent or two. It may be that the calculation of food miles needs to be done on the basis of inputs as well as outputs.

City life cultivation domestication
City life 1.0
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The foundations of any society must needs be its harmony with, for want of a better term, nature. There is simply no way we can live outside nature, so we have to recognise that we are part of it and live accordingly. This is easier to say than to do, so my apologies for not having ready answers to the torrent of issues such a line of thought unleashes.

The inescapable paradox is that our cities are built to normalise anthropocentric lifestyles. Nobody is to blame for such a situation, it has just happened this way and would probably do the same again if we were to reinvent industrial society. In simple terms we lack the skill set needed to give the natural world a proper hearing and it is a moot point to suggest that we just need time to do so. We have had an incentive to learn for millennia and have spent that time dipping into finite planetary resources in the process.

The earliest settled cities devised elaborate systems for governing both city and hinterland, documenting their transactions with painstaking detail. Literacy was restricted to the ruling class, but every citizen had to be environmentally savvy if the metropolis was to survive, let alone prosper. History bears witness to the long term success of Sumerian cities such as Girsu or Ur, where archaeologists talk of habitation during millennia, an achievement that is unlikely to be matched by the modern industrial economy. Stumbling from environmental crisis to ecological impasse, the industrial economy has played fast and loose with nature, not to mention urban food chains, the subject of this blog.

More pressing than to understand the fate of early agrarian societies is to understand what they did correctly for centuries. There is good reason to suppose that they had sustainable sanitation of a sort that Sir Alfred Howard envisaged while working on the Indore project. A renewable, natural cycle producing humus within a month would go a long way to explaining the soil’s fertility in the world’s longest-surviving agrarian societies.