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Food Production and Consumption: Summaries

Sustainable Farming
Fred Kirschenmann, PhD, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa State University

 

Food from the Land: Moving Beyond 'Steady State' Sustainability

In recent years we have approached sustainable agriculture from the perspective of "steady state" sustainability. In other words we try to determine what is not sustainable in our present food and farming system, what we need to change to make it more sustainable, and then we assume that we are sustainable! But what we have learned from ecology and evolutionary biology over the past decades is that agroecological systems are part of ecosystems and that all ecosystems are dynamic, constantly changing, and that therefore the only reasonable way to achieve any degree of sustainability in agriculture is to adapt our farming systems to ecosystems. Shifting from control systems to adaptation systems, using whole systems approaches, and utilizing "thermodynamic full life cycle analysis" (Fiksel) in designing our food production systems of the future is an essential ingredient to providing food security. This approach will become increasingly critical in the 21st century when we will be facing major changes that will profoundly affect our food and farming systems, namely: climate change, water depletion, ecological degradation, and the end of the era of cheap energy. We will examine how these changes will affect our current agriculture system
and what options may be available to us.

Nutrition and Human Health
Joan Gussow, Med, EdD, Columbia University

JUST EAT FOOD

Given that the human organism is made up of chemicals and embedded, like all living organisms, in a sea of other chemicals which it interacts with in a variety of ways, how do we decide, out of the combinations of substances that surround us, which to ingest—in other words, how do we learn what to eat? 

Traditionally, humans have learned from their “tribes” which of the objects they hunted, or gathered, or grew should be eaten  This fact, of course, urgently raises the question of how contemporary citizens of the United States—inheritors of wildly diverse tribal customs and living in a sea of commercial inducements and novel chemicals—decide which set of the 30,000-odd items in the supermarket will make them healthy.  From whom, and on what basis do they learn to choose healthful foods from the thousands (17,000 last year) of new items that appear each year on grocery shelves, and the counters of 7-11’s, gas stations, airport food courts and fast food restaurants? 

Science is unable to tell us which mix of macro-nutrients—fats, proteins, carbohydrates—is most likely to be associated with long and healthy life.  We are even more stunningly ignorant about which are healthful levels of the mixes of micronutrients and newly popular phytochemicals currently being added to foods for commercial purposes.  Meanwhile, U.S. health statistics tell us that our bodies are not successfully coping with this glut of novelty that has been glowingly described as “the most abundant food supply in the world.”  With so much bewildering information, and with so many of our choices pushed by commerce and the ceaseless innovation of the food industry, what is the old-fashioned human organism to do?  Since it will undoubtedly remain impossible to determine which combinations of chemicals, consumed at which doses, should constitute the diets of each of us, the only rational way to eat, it will be argued here, is to consume ordinary foods in as whole a condition as is possible.