Should food systems be more natural?

“Is a microbe less natural than a cow?”

This season we ask scientists, farmers, technologists and philosophers about how natural our food systems should be. In this age where industrial technology has profoundly transformed our eating habits and the landscapes around us, we explore whether we should let nature be our ultimate guide or fully lean into the technological innovations reshaping our world.

From the traditional milpa systems of Mexico to the cutting edge laboratories of food scientists, we bring together voices across the spectrum: an economist, an indigenous leader, a food technologist and an agroecologist. Each presents their perspective on the benefits—or drawbacks—of 'natural' food systems for both human health and the planet's well-being.

For more info and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/episode55

Guests

• Anna Lappé, Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food 
• Jayson Lusk, Dean and Vice President of Agriculture at Oklahoma State University
• Tania Eulalia Martinez Cruz, Director of the Food Sovereignty and Agroecology program at Land is Life
• Johan Jorgensen, Founder Partner at Sweden Food Tech

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew Kessler

Has food on our plates become... unnatural? Technology has completely changed how we make and eat food. Today over half of the calories people consume in the United States and the United Kingdom come from ultra-processed foods - foods that are created in ways our ancestors barely could have imagined.

Johan Jorgensen

Back in the day the watermelon was the size of a blueberry.

Neena Prasad

These are products that are created in labs and factories, usually wrapped in plastic.

Matthew

If you compare agriculture now to two hundred years ago, depending on the crop - we're harvesting double, triple or even ten times the amount, from the same piece of land. To achieve these high yields, farmers typically plant a single crop over a large field, also called a monoculture. This is an incredibly efficient way to grow food, and it’s one of the ways we’ve kept up with feeding a growing and urbanizing population. But it couldn't be further from the chaotic and diverse ways a landscape would naturally develop without human intervention.

But when you think about it, the roots of agriculture dating back 12,000 years, was never really 'natural' to begin with. It's all about us humans shaping nature to fit our needs. We've changed entire landscapes, domesticated wild animals and plants, wiped out some species and helped spread others – all to meet our own goals. Right now, half of the habitable land on this planet is used to produce food. 

So, what do you think? Have we pushed it too far, or not far enough? How do we maintain this relationship with the planet that feeds us - should nature be our guide or should we embrace the technological innovations reshaping our diets and landscapes?     

Welcome back to Feed, a food systems podcast presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler and I’m excited to jump into season three, where we speak with scientists, farmers, technologists and philosophers about how natural our food systems should be. 

Cor van der Weele

In every group there was always somebody who asked: well isn’t this very unnatural.

Bernd Blossey

Returning to a more natural landscape, the question always is what the hell is that, right?

Lauren Crossland-Marr

When I went to the grocery store this past week, I was just like, natural, natural, everything is marketed as natural. And certainly not everything can be natural.

Matthew

What is a natural farm? a natural diet? a natural landscape? And does 'natural' actually tell us anything about what's good for people and the planet?

In this season we’re going to look at the different ways we relate the natural world, and how that impacts our food and farming systems. To start this season off, we hear a sustainable food advocate, an economist, an indigenous perspective, and a technologist, all weigh in on the same question - should food systems be more natural?:

Jayson Lusk

Naturalness is neither good nor bad. It’s amoral.

Tania Eulalia Martinez-Cruz

When we talk about Indigenous Peoples food system, we talk about generation. We put nature at the center.

Johan 

Is a microbe less natural than a cow?

Matthew

Yeah, we’ll get right into it then okay?

Anna Lappé

Great, sounds good.

Matthew

Can you introduce yourself?

Anna 

I'm Anna Lappé. I'm the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food and author and a sustainable food advocate.

Matthew  

So we're exploring in this season and in this episode if food systems should be more natural, and many people argue today that food systems are completely unnatural, and that we should be working towards something more natural, advocating for more nature-based solutions, which sounds like a great idea, but is it?

Anna  

Well, I think there's the idea of nature based solutions, and what that term could really mean. And then there's how nature based solutions has been used in the world today. And so whenever we talk about nature based solutions, and food systems, and you started off by saying food systems are not natural.

I think it's important to kind of pull up to the 30,000 foot view, and understand just how much food systems are impacting nature. So food systems are 1/3 of all emissions, creating this climate crisis that we're faced. Food Systems are one of the biggest drivers of water pollution, air pollution, biodiversity collapse. So how we have organized our food systems, the policies that incentivize a certain way of growing food and producing food, have had an enormous impact on nature. 

Matthew

Anna Lappe is sympathetic for those calling for nature-based solutions. Given the huge impact that food systems have on nature, it seems obvious to her that food systems should be more aligned with nature.

Anna

What we're seeing is how that term has been used, as many have flagged, as a tool for real greenwashing across both the fossil fuel industry and the food industry. And I see it playing out in a couple different ways. So for instance here in the United States, where I'm based. About half of all corn acreage is now going to grow corn toward what some would call a nature based solution to grow corn to make corn based ethanol, which it's really clear that actually corn based ethanol has many times the emissions impact as just regular old gasoline. 

Matthew

Corn-based ethanol is a biofuel produced from fermenting and distilling the starches in corn kernels. Assessing the greenhouse gas emissions of corn-based ethanol is complicated. Different analyses show everything from half to nearly double the emissions of fossil petroleum, depending on what’s included in their analysis. But when you factor in that grasslands and forests have been converted to corn-based ethanol production, and how much water is used and the pollution that is associated with its production, Anna is skeptical of corn-based ethanol as a nature-based solution. 

Anna

So you've used nature to produce a fuel, but have you done it in a way that's actually good for nature? I would argue no, we're also seeing a lot of industry using nature based solutions as a tactic to try to deflect action around actually reducing fossil fuels. So you have fossil fuel companies saying we're going to use nature based solutions to offset our fossil fuel emissions. And none of us want to see that. We absolutely know we need a phase out of fossil fuels. And we don't need a kind of moving cups across the table and not actually making real change.  

Matthew

There's a lawyer who has sued food and beverage companies for the use of “natural” on their label. And he's done that 1000s of times.

Anna 

I mean, I think this point about the word nature, the word natural being used on food products is such an important one to make, because there is no official definition of what natural means. And so you could put that word on any packaging you want. When you see the word natural on a product, there's no official definition of it. It is not a third-party verified definition. There's no meaning behind it. Which, to me, is really sad, because nature does mean something and natural should mean something and it doesn't.

Matthew 

So nature and natural and naturalness. They've all been stripped of their meaning, if you could reclaim it, or redefine these concepts, what would you wish for them to meet instead?

Anna  

To me if we were to imbue these words: nature, natural food, natural farming with real meaning, it's quite simple. It is a way of growing our food that actually works with nature instead of fighting it. It's a way of growing food that's good for the planet. And as humans are ourselves part of nature, that's also good for people. 

I also would argue that globally, we now have some very powerful meaning-making around this idea of then what natural farming would look like. We have at the highest level principles of agroecology, we have these 13 principles of agroecology that have been agreed upon that have real meaning behind them. 

We have also some really powerful evidence looking at pretty significant deployments of these kinds of natural practices in farming and showing what kind of benefits they produce. Our organization in the Global Alliance worked with partners in India on a study of a huge project across the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, that calls itself Community Managed Natural Farming. And it's a way of farming that, again, takes out the synthetic inputs, synthetic fertilizers. Frees farmers from having to buy toxic pesticides in order to grow their food. 

Matthew

Is it possible to farm in a more natural way and could that type of farming be scaled out to feed a larger population? The state of Andhra Pradesh in India is trying to answer that question. Since 2016, the state has run trainings with 630,000 farmers to transition from chemical based farming to biological alternatives. And what did they find? 

Anna

We're not talking about one small case study, we're talking about a really significant number of farmers using these natural farming practices. What we saw was not only incredible improvements to farmer health and community wellbeing, and to the economic bottom line for these farmers, but we saw real great benefits for nature - things like biodiversity went up, water quality was better. So it really shouldn't surprise us that again, when you work with nature, you get results that benefit nature and get results that benefit community members as well.

Matthew

Anna knows that a completely natural food system, whatever that might mean, isn’t perfectly possible.

Anna

Look, you know, here we are, I'm sitting here talking to you on Zoom, with lights powered by probably this time  of year, not my solar panels, but you know, probably some dirty energy somewhere, honestly, sitting on a plastic chair. Right, like so much about our lives today are not natural, of course. And even when we talk about natural food, wanting to consume more food, again, aligned with nature, that's probably coming to us, in many cases inside plastic packaging. Are brought to us in ways that again, you know, have many synthetic components. But what I am talking about is, how do we support the food environments to enable us to have as much as possible more nature aligned food choices. 

That's ultimately, again, absolutely what we need to get not just for our own health, but if we're going to align our emissions with anything close to a stable climate, if we're going to protect biodiversity, if we're going to protect our water, our air, all of that will only be possible if we try again, as much as possible, to align our food systems with nature.

Matthew

Thank you so much for speaking with us Anna.

Anna

Thanks so much for having me. I’m a huge fan of the podcast.

Johan

What we need to get rid of is the massive monocultural practices of today. Animal farming factories. 

Matthew

Johan Jorgensen – who some in Sweden call Mr. Food Tech.

Johan  

So my name is Johan Jorgensen. I'm one of the founders of Sweden Foodtech. We call ourselves a think tank for the future.

Matthew

Johan reminds me of the origin story of Ben and Jerry’s - the two ice cream makers from the US. They’re a company formed by two innovative and down-to-earth hippies who run an incredibly successful, socially and environmentally responsible business.

Johan Jorgensen fancies himself a bit of a hippy food tech visionary - calling for a revolution, a systemic transformation of the food system. And he sees multiple paths forward. 

Johan

To me it’s somewhat of a fork in the road today, where you can take two paths.

Matthew

So one road is a nature-positive type of food production. A higher tech version of permaculture, where food systems and human settlements are designed to look like the ecosystems they are embedded in. 

Picture multiple layers of a forest, where you can harvest strawberries at your feet, berries at your waist, and nuts and fruit from above your head.  Where agriculture seamlessly integrates with the surrounding natural environment. And the other -

Johan

Then you take the high science road, using microbes and other types of technologies in order to grow food or grow nutrition in a new way, or a new and better way.

We have protein from thin air, such as Solar Foods or Air Protein, where you actually take carbon dioxide through the help of electricity and bacteria you can actually produce proteins as well. It's of course not that easy. But in an industrial process, and that's kind of fascinating, so you can take stuff that's essentially bad for us like carbon dioxide and turn it into something that's good for us. I love that.

Matthew

With either path - he sees technology and data driven solutions playing a big role.

Johan

And I mean, to me coming from the tech sector, unless you have at least the insight that data will change the game of every industry, I think you’re way out of it. Because it will, right. Once you introduce data, and tech into things, you realize that a lot of value or power seep up into the digital layers. And I think those layers basically transform sectors, not the least food. I mean, the food lacks so much of transparency, which means that we don't know anything about food, we just believe in food.

Matthew

There’s many food beliefs out there. Like food should be locally grown, or tomatoes grown from Italy are superior, but Johan wants to take those beliefs and verify them with data - to find solutions that are better for the planet and for personal health.

Johan

Show me the data then so I know what to consume. There are so many things that can be done with data. And in the positive sense. And I don't just mean that algorithms will take over the power of the retailers in defining what we will eat. I just think that we need to realize and embrace the revolution, and make the best out of it.

Matthew 

What we're exploring in this series is the question: should we be moving towards a more natural food system? So is a natural food system a good goal? Or is it getting in the way of innovation?

Johan  

What is a natural food system? I mean, nothing is natural in today's food system. We've tweaked it ever since we invented farming some 12,000 years ago. I mean, back in the days, the watermelon was the size of a blueberry, a corn or maize was a centimeter long. There is nothing natural about the food system we have today. So yeah I would love us to embrace nature more. But we haven't - we have embraced industry so far, using industrial technologies in order to grow the output. Extend and intensify have been the mantras over the years. And I'd love for us to go back to nature and see what nature can give us. But that would require a kind of fundamental systemic shift. 

I mean, if you look at it as a microbe, less natural than a cow? How can we only think that natural things are the ones we can see with our eyes? Whereas I mean, microbes are the ones who really feed us in our bellies. 

And mind you I'm not suggesting that everyone should just eat stuff that microbes have converted saw dust into, but I just want us to shed our mental images that guard what we think is natural in the world of food? 

If you look up and close, I mean, we've been fed these pictures since early childhood. And we're just supposed to believe that these images are true and good. Whereas they are mostly lies I mean. A farmer with a piglet in his arms - happy little cute piglet. I mean that piglet is born into captivity, with a death penalty at the end of it. And it's not that happy, I can assure you that neither our chickens, neither are the fish or caught the sea. And I'd say that neither are the plants that are farmed in vast monocultures. 

True nature to me is nature that is allowed to be nature on its own terms, not human terms.  

Matthew 

You're not one of the food tech people who wants to grow food on the moon or Mars and form habitats there and bring it back to Earth?

Johan  

Well why do it there and bring it back to Earth? We have plenty of opportunities to grow things here. But mind you air protein, for instance, that was based on NASA science back in the days, so? I don't know. So since we live on spaceship Earth, so let's use spaceship technologies.

Matthew  

Yeah, Buckminster Fuller right.

Johan 

Legend.

Matthew  

Johan Jorgensen, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Johan  

Thank you.

Matthew  

We'll just start with a quick introduction with your new title.

Jayson  

I'm Jason Lusk. I'm the dean and vice president of agriculture at Oklahoma State University.

Matthew  

So there are some out there calling to advance a more natural food system, say less processing less plastic, more ecological organic farming methods, fewer inputs. Do you agree? Is nature a good guide to advise the Future of Food and Agriculture?

Jayson  

In my view, Naturalness is neither good nor bad. It's amoral, meaning that it's not something that we should use to guide our decisions one way or the other. There are lots of things in nature that are good. We, as humans, I think, associate natural with good. And in the consumer research I do, I think that's the most common association, we ask people what first comes to mind when you hear natural, they'll say good. When you see a natural landscape, you think it's beautiful, those sorts of things. But there's also, if you just think, even for a moment about it, there's lots of things in nature that are bad too. Flesh-eating bacteria, arsenic, these are natural substances that we have to deal with as humans. And I think even culturally, if we think back in time in our history, there were lots of things that were perceived as natural at the time. Think of slavery, sexism - these sorts of things that at various points in our history, were seen as natural, the natural order of things. So in my view, nature, and whether something is considered natural or not, shouldn't be the primary guide to whether something is good or bad.  

Natural is an ever evolving concept. And we as humans have been interacting with nature for 10s of 1000s of years. And so most of what we have around us today is a result of those interactions with nature. And so what maybe another way of putting it as we humans are a part of nature and nature has evolved around us, I think, largely for the betterment in the case of our food system that if we had to live on the kind of nature that existed 50,000 years ago, we certainly wouldn't have the kind of population that we have around today.

Matthew  

To put a slight finer point on it. One of the divides and the debates around the future of food is around whether we should build out these more organic and agroecological systems. Ones that are perhaps using fewer inputs, recycling more nutrients, also using more land, perhaps getting a smaller yield. And then on the other hand, you have this more technological innovation. So I know where you stand on this. We've talked a few times. You've also written this fantastic book in 2016, Unnaturally Delicious, how science and technology are serving up superfoods to save the world. And part of that is countering all the negative messaging around the food system. And I really appreciate that hopeful message. And I think we need that. Can you say a little bit about what inspired the book and some of the innovations you'd like to highlight that might fall into this unnatural category.

Jayson  

Well, I think the title of the book Unnaturally delicious belies my biases and where they come from. That is, I think so much of what is good about our food system is not natural, it's man-made, woman-made, creations that we figured out over time, how to do better, get more with less. So again, I think, in my view, whether something is natural or not, is not the ultimate guide as to whether something should be pursued. So what I think we should really focus on our outcomes. 

And I think it's certainly the case that technology has helped us achieve better outcomes in many cases, not always. And often, there are trade offs and unintended consequences of technologies that we've developed. But I think in many cases we can be proud of the technologies that we've been able to create and develop in improving outcomes, whether it's food insecurity, environmental outcomes.

So maybe to give one very big example, an old example, it's not a new one. But the development of synthetic fertilizer. The Haber-Bosch process is one that we figured out literally how to extract nitrogen from  thin air, and apply it to plants. This is responsible for enormous increases in yields over time. In fact, there's a lot of estimates that suggest that maybe 50% of the world's population wouldn’t exist today, if we hadn't figured out a way to get more nitrogen, which is a limiting nutrient in growing crops. So that's a technology, wonderful benefits, there are also some downsides. And then we end up with too much nitrogen, sometimes it runs off in our waterways, it creates the deadly algae blooms. And so it's not a cure all, by any sense. 

Matthew

Considering that Jayson wants to see us able to produce more food more efficiently with less environmental impact, he returns to what technologies we could employ to reduce the negative impacts of using too much fertilizer.

Jayson

One is more precision application of fertilizer. These days, we have the ability to map our land better ways than we did before to connect data on both soil measurements, but also data on which parts of fields are more productive than others, and using modeling to predict. “Well, if I apply a little bit of fertilizer on this piece of land, would it actually be usable and available to the crop? Or is it just a waste and would either be a cost economically or run-off in waterways.” Our ability to make more precise applications rather than just a blanket application throughout the field, it is increasing daily. And I think is one of those unnatural solutions to deal with what is a modern problem that I think as long as we care about the outcomes, which is reducing the adverse effects of excess nitrogen on our land, we can bring digital agriculture, precision agriculture to bear whether it's drones, satellite imagery, yield monitors, soil sensing, all these things. I think are certainly on the table. 

Matthew

And here comes the really innovative visionary approach. Can we change the nature of plants? What I mean is, in order to meet some of these global challenges around food security and climate change, can we manipulate how plants photosynthesize, can we turn annual plants into perennials, or even.. 

Jayson

The other I think, really exciting technology on that front is finding plants that are able to be productive in terms of producing a crop but also can fix nitrogen. So you know one holy grail that's been out there is could you imagine a corn plant that could fix its own nitrogen from the air. That way, you didn't have to apply as many synthetic fertilizers. There are a variety of teams working on this. It's been something that's been developed for a long time, some of it is using genetic engineering, and biotechnology to try to build that some others is using different soil microbes. As far as I know, there's not an application that's even close to being commercially ready there yet, but it is a kind of research question that many people are working on. 

Matthew

But it would have the potential to improve farmers’ bottom line - since they wouldn’t have to buy fertilizers and it could reduce runoff from excess nitrogen.

Jayson

That’s just one example related to fertilizer use that articulates how I think about this interaction between “unnatural” technologies versus other systems that we bring to bear.

And so again I'm not going to argue that one of those solutions might not also have unintended consequences. But compared to some of the more ecological solutions that exist, I think we know what those tradeoffs are. And again, they come in the form of higher food prices, probably more land use. And, again, not to say they don't have some benefits, because they probably do. Only that there's probably not going to be a free lunch no matter how we go about it. And so I think we will really want to keep an eye out for what outcomes our different kinds of production systems, both ecological and more technological are going to produce.

Matthew  

And to even dial up the degree of unnatural, some of this large data is run through machine learning and AI technologies. I also want to follow up on the gene editing, CRISPR-Cas9 thinking about the possibilities that this is going to present in the future, right. This is also a relatively new technology that's been tested out across the labs, not only across the United States, but really across the world. So I was wondering if there are any other kind of exciting developments around gene editing that you wanted to share?

Jayson  12:09

I think the examples related to gene editing are almost endless in terms of potential application, but related to agronomic practices, disease resistance, but also in terms of consumer facing characteristics, whether it's kind of non-browning, apples, non-browning avocados, all those sorts of things. One thing that I think is very useful in the case of CRISPR-Cas 9 is It's a technology that allows scientists to be much more precise in terms of these genetic changes than we've ever been able to do in the past. 

So you just think about traditional plant breeding, and I'm now you know, overseeing a college of agriculture that has all kinds of plant breeders, that worked for decades trying to find new varieties to release to the public. Using traditional plant breeding methods. So it takes decades to find new varieties. But when they make a cross, often they don't know exactly what's going to happen. It's all kinds of genes interacting with each other in a quote unquote, natural way. But with something like a CRISPR-Cas9, you know exactly which segment of DNA is being targeted, you know exactly what's being inserted, you know what outcome is going to occur for the most part. And so it is a much more precise tool than we've ever had in the past, much more precise than some of our previous forms of biotechnology. And so I think to the extent people have had concerns about unintended consequences, in some ways, this is much more precise than even traditional plant breeding methods that we've long been using. 

Matthew

To wrap up I asked Jayson Lusk about some novel foods not grown on traditional farms. As in food that’s grown indoors rather than under natural sunlight, or food that’s grown in nutrient-rich mediums rather than in soil. And a few years ago there was a big debate in the United States in the organic movement about whether hydroponics, growing crops without soils, could be considered organic or not

Jayson

There's a big debate about that, and I think it does, sometimes that's what innovations do, they blur lines, and it makes you realize, sometimes what we think about as natural and organic is not always as clean cut as we think it is.

I think it's exciting. Let’s try lots of things. Doesn't mean they're all going to work a lot of times they'll fail. But I think that's the fun of getting to work in a research institution is trying to test out new things and see which ones may might really have a positive impact on us.

Matthew  

Jayson Lusk, thank you for finding the time to speak with us.

Jayson  

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. I really do appreciate it.

Matthew  

Can you introduce yourself? 

Tania  

So this is Tania Eulalia Martinez Cruz. Ëyuujk Indigenous woman from Wahaca, Mexico. I am also an interdisciplinary researcher, and currently serving as a director of the foods sovereignty agroecology program at Land is Life, which is an indigenous led coalition that works to advance Indigenous Peoples rights around the world.

Matthew  

So when we start to talk about what is the natural food or natural farming system, I think many people start their views with a handful of unspoken assumptions. And a big one that I've come across is how do you think about humans’ relationship with nature? Are humans either a part of nature or seen as separate from nature? What are your views on this? And how do you think this impacts food systems discussions?

Tania  

So to start with, I would say that we are a part of nature as humans. And I think one characteristic of Indigenous Peoples’ food systems in the way that we see it is that we put nature at the center. 

When we talk about Indigenous Peoples food systems, we say we don't talk about food production, which is generally the approach that conventionally comes in most of the food systems. Because then you have this idea, or why is that we rely mainly on three crops right, that provide 60% of the caloric intake: maize, wheat and rice.

But when we talk about Indigenous Peoples, we say generation. And the main difference with that is that we don't deplete resources. We talk about generation because then that means we take from the environment, what it is available. But also we know the seasonality of the places where we live and that's what allows us to live in these areas.

We eat according to the season. So now it’s winter. We eat something that is called chayote, which is like a mirlington squash, I think that's the scientific name. But even when we have cut everything from the Milpa field, or an indigenous maize intercropped field, you might think that everything is empty, and there's nothing there to eat. But actually you have to dig the roots and then you will find food. 

So when we talk about indigenous peoples with systems, we must bring the idea of place, of belonging, and the rights to lands. Yes, we are the champions of adaptation because we have managed to adapt even to these extreme environments. But this adaptation can only happen if we can enjoy the rights to our lands and territories.

Matthew

Often when we think about what’s natural - people turn to the past. Some real or imagined time before humans disrupted some natural balance. Tania pushes back on this idea and really centers indigenous peoples as constantly adapting and innovating to the conditions of the present. Indigenous food systems aren’t just rooted in traditions, but they use many tools and knowledges available to meet the challenges they face today.

Tania  

I think indigenous peoples are innovators by nature, and that's part of the key to be resilient and in having able to adapt to not only to the changing conditions, in terms of space, but also temporality, right? I generally have these debates with colleagues and peers, because generally, we tend to be extremely dichotomic. Either we want to modernize them entirely. Or we say no, they should be traditional and they should be untouched. But I think the experience in the field has taught me that, like I said, peoples are innovators.

We have adapted to many extreme environments. Let's go with the people living in the Arctic, with the Saami or the Selkup, you will see that in winter times when there's not enough light, they will get vitamin D from the foods that they eat. So there's like a lot of knowledge, that it's deeply rooted with a place.

For example, in the Mixteca region here in Oaxaca, Mexico, people live in areas that have poor soils and there's no humidity if people might think the traditional people that want to tackle food security by using improved seeds might say, “no, you cannot grow things there unless you have irrigation.” But what happens in these areas is that people have kept these native seeds that are adapted to the dryness or the drought, they take advantage of the residual humidity, so they go deep and put the seeds 30 centimeters. Also, they take advantage of the intermittent currents that are formed when the rain comes.

Matthew

Tania emphasizes that indigenous and conventional food systems operate under different logics and values. She shares an example of when an agronomist visited a community in Chiapas as part of a hunger reduction project. He wanted to improve the yields of maize and only after visiting the community, learned how maize was just a small cog in a much bigger system.

Tania

I'm gonna take you to the mountains of Los Altos in Chiapas. I was working many, many years ago for a food security program. And the rationale of the program said, if we want to ensure the country's food security, we must increase the maize production. When we got to that area, one of my colleagues said, “Why is people sowing maize every one meter? This is wrong.” If we aim to increase the food security following the rationale of the program, that means we should be using improved seeds, we should be increasing the plant density so we can have closer plants. And we get rid of that “dead space” that scientists say. After we spent the day in the community, he realized that actually, people was not only planting maize, because the food security did not rely only on maize. 

At the same time with the milpa, you might be eating green corn at a specific season of the year, green beans at a specific season of the year. You need the pumpkin or squash that you have there, you have fruit trees, and that gives you like a really rich diet.

There are milpa systems, the Maya millpa systems for example, that can have up to 250 different crops or foods within just one single food system. But that's just like within the milpa. If you project that to the whole system, to the whole forest, you can even have more because then we also have the medicinal plants, or the things that we use for our livelihoods. And the number can go up to 400 or 600. I invite you to check some of the materials that have been released by FAO but there are also some other researchers that have been doing work on that. 

This is just in terms of the nutritional part. But also, this system has a rationale itself. We need the maize plants for the beans to climb up in produce to be sustained. We know that if beans can help fixing nitrogen, we also know that the pumpkins with the leaves can help reduce erosion, when it rains when there's water. So it's a system that it's so rich, but people have undermined the richness of the systems. 

Matthew

Tania points out another important element of indigenous peoples food systems – which is using all the resources available. 

Tania

We say also that 30% of the food in the world gets wasted from the fieldto your plate. And another characteristic of indigenous peoples food systems is that we do not waste resources. And I love giving the example of my community. And I will go into that because I recently just performed some rituals in my community.

So we go and pray to some of the elements of nature that we are connected to. And as we do that, we use eggs, we use chickens, we use figures of maize, many things. But through the whole week, we will be eating something linked to the things that we use for these rituals. So let's imagine that on the first day, we will cook the eggs that we use for the ritual. The second day, we will be having like the huge feast and eating something that we call a Caldo Mixe which is like a chicken soup with tamales. The next day, we will be eating other type of tamales to reuse whatever that is left from the chicken. And then the fourth day, we will continue turning this food into something else. So you see a lot of circularity within these systems. And that's another different characteristic that makes these systems unique. 

I mentioned already with rituals that praising nature, putting nature at the center, it's an essential part. Because that's what gives you life. For example, in my community, we still have the usos y costumbres , which is like our own way of governance. But water, for example is linked to our forest. If we want to keep the water running in our community to be able to have like this rich soils, we need to preserve the forests. But also the water links to something sacred. Because when we assume our community service, we have to wash your wooden canes with that water. So if you lose that water, then that means you are not going to be able to protect or run this cleansing process. So everything is really interconnected. 

Matthew  

To wrap up here, what lesson or what piece of wisdom would you want to impart on the non Indigenous food systems, that perhaps you could link to a conceptions of how much we are a part of nature or separate from nature?

Tania  

So I think what we know for sure, is that we need to transform food systems, we say that 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions come from thel food systems. So we are living in an era of crisis, multiple crisis: displacement, climate change. I think we have, like I said, undermined for many years or centuries, these systems that have the answer to many of the challenges. 

80% of the world's remaining biodiversity, is in the hands of indigenous peoples.  And I always tell the audience, how come is that possible? If they are only 6% of the population? They are doing a lot of work to keep this world sustainable, and we haven't supported it enough. 

If you're a consumer, I think my invitation is also to think where your food is coming from, if you have the possibility to support local strategies to learn more about indigenous people's food systems, to rethink that we can do policies in a different way that are more inclusive, but also equitable. Just do it. And I think I don't know if that answers your question, but I think that that's an invitation that I would make to people. 

Matthew  

Tanya, thank you so much for speaking with us.

So what did we learn about naturalness? Should nature be our guide like Tania Eulalia Martinez-Cruz suggests, or should we embrace the unnatural technologies as pointed out by Jayson Lusk. 

Admittedly, 'should food systems be more natural' is also sort of a fuzzy question. Still, I didn’t get satisfying answers to what does it actually mean to work with or against nature? What farm inputs count as natural and which don’t? Does certified organic farming count as natural?

A related question: how scalable are these natural farming practices? Can they work with a planet’s population exceeding 8 billion? We heard about a pretty big case study in Andra Pradhesh in India. What would that look like across Europe? 

And from an eating, not a farming point of view - will people accept different diets that are more nature-aligned. In essence having less choice year round, where you’d be eating seasonally based on where you live.

We’ll dive into some of these questions throughout the season. And I want to know what you think. Which of the guests do you agree or disagree the most with and why? Are you drawn more to natural or unnatural food solutions? Shoot us an email or record a voice memo in a quiet room and send it to us at podcast@tabledebates.org

A big thanks to our guests today. We’ll link to their work and resources that you heard throughout the episode on website: tabledebates.org/. And thanks to you for listening. Whether you’re just joining us or have been with us since our local and global season 3 years ago. 

As of this year, TABLE has expanded its collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University in the Netherlands  to the Americas. We now welcome the University of the Andes in Colombia, National Autonomist University of Mexico, and Cornell University in the US. You can follow our work by subscribing to our newsletter Fodder.

This episode was edited and produced by me, Matthew Kessler with special thanks to Tamsin Blaxter, Rye Hickman, and Tara Garnett. Music by blue dot sessions. We’ll be back in a week where we explore whether we should be eating more invasive plants and animals.