7. Transitioning to fossil free food

What would a food system free of fossil fuels look like by 2050? What insights surprised the experts featured in this series? And what trade-offs must we navigate to shape this future? In our final episode, we shift from acknowledging the 'fossil fuel problem in food' to exploring actionable solutions.

Visit the episode webpage for more resources.

This series is powered by TABLE, IPES-Food and Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Guests

• Raj Patel, IPES-Food
• Anna Lappé, Global Alliance for the Future of Food
• Darrin Qualman, National Farmers Union (Canada)
• Galina Angarova, SIRGE
• Molly Anderson, IPES-Food

Produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Cover art by The Ethical Agency. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Anna 

I think it's helpful to hold visions of the future that are, for lack of a better word, utopic. A we had within our power to change everything. What could it look like?

Nnimmo 

We need to dramatically do something about how we see the world, our vision of the world. Our vision of food, what is food?

Christine

And it's always good to try and forecast in a more positive sense so that we can see our way to that future.

Raj

To break with fossil fuels and the power that the fossil fuel industry, along with other industries and philanthropies and financiers have over our food system is to crack open our imagination fairly radically.

Darrin

Some people really have trouble imagining how this can be. 

Navina

I can describe parts of it. I think the reality is no one ever experienced it.

Matthew

Welcome back to Fuel to Fork, where we expose the fossil fuels in our food and imagine a future without them. I’m Matthew Kessler, your guide throughout this series.

This is the final episode in our journey exposing and exploring the fossil fuels in our food. We've toured through every step in the food supply chain, and revealed some surprises - like the fact that more than 40% of fossil fuels used in food are in the processing and packaging stage. 

We’ve explored options at every stage to either tweak or revolutionize the system to go fossil fuel free. And so in this final episode, we thought we needed to bring some of the expert contributors together, to reflect back and map a path forward.

Part 1: A future for food free of fossil fuels 2050

Matthew

How do we get there... and where do we start?

Anna

It's going to take funding. It's going to take actually resourcing the transition that we need to get from where we are today, which is highly fossil fuel dependent food system, to one that is fossil free. 

Jennifer Clapp 

Governments played a huge role in facilitating the development and spread of industrial agriculture, they can play a huge role in facilitating the development and spread of non -fossil fuel dependent agriculture.

Navina 

If we're imagining the system that actually like works for people and the planet and we're willing to invest in that system, there's nothing to stop us from making them worker -based cooperatives.

Anna

And to make that transition, I will not lie. It will not be cheap

Rashid

In fact, the harmful subsidies can be redirected to help communities to adjust, to even pay them salaries that will get them above the poverty line.

Anna 

We are putting money into the system, it’s just not going into the direction that will help us transition off of dependency and create more vibrant food systems. 

Matthew

Not only do we need to invest differently, we actually need a clear vision of what that desired future could look like, and how farmers could be supported.

Lisa

In a fossil fuel free world, farmers would be enabled to grow local seed varieties, to grow them without any external inputs, independently from any corporations. I dream of a food system that is a lot healthier, not only for the planet, but also for us human beings.

Pat

So I think we could have a much more diversified food system by 2050, which is more nutritious, more secure, supply chains would be much closer at hand, much more innovative than the system is today.

Darrin

If they were using organic methods and not using nitrogen fertilizer and say they had access to, you know, early access to small electric tractors, they could actually produce the food with zero emissions.

Christine

At least in let's say the developed world, you'd hope to have quite a significant reduction in the consumption of animal protein, in particular the red meats of beef and lamb.

Anna

The kinds of diets that's better for our bodies, so eating more whole foods, less processed foods. Those are also the kinds of dietary shifts that are going to help us phase out or help us reduce the amount of fossil fuels we're seeing in the food chain.

Errol

That’s the thing, if folks are cynical or skeptical, of course you're skeptical. But as Bertholt Brecht said, the job of the citizen is to keep their mouth open. What are you doing about it?

Matthew

I imagine hearing this montage sparks different reactions.

Some might wonder: Would small-scale, decentralized food systems necessarily be fossil fuel-free?

Others may hesitate: My life is hectic—I like the convenience of packaged and processed foods. In fact, these have been revolutionary in the last century, especially in reducing domestic labor that largely falls on women.
And others might think: What they're talking about sounds great but how feasible is it?

Let’s start with the system we have now. Could governments and industries be doing more?

For example, we could replace dirty inputs in food and farming with greener ones: diesel tractors with electric, gas stoves with electric. We could power the grid with renewables instead of coal and gas.

These fixes aren’t perfect, but they could and should be part of the solution.

Some say this is the best way to cut our dependence on fossil fuels. But others point out that even as renewables grow, fossil fuel use—and the exploitation of vulnerable communities and ecosystems—continues unchecked. That’s why they call for a full-scale transformation of the system.

To be clear, this kind of systems change that many of the speakers talked about isn't without trade-offs. Without massive government support - like the kind that goes into subsidizing the current system - moving away from fossil fuels would raise food prices and hit those already struggling with food insecurity the hardest.

And it wouldn’t stop there. This kind of change would also mean lifestyle shifts—especially in the global North - and not everyone would welcome them equally. More time spent in the kitchen. Fewer off-season and on-the-go options. Food would likely take up a bigger slice of our budgets. In other parts of the world where convenience means local street markets and street foods, the impacts would be felt less.

To bring it back to the beginning of the series, I guess it means confronting the fact that the simple bag of potato chips isn’t so simple.

So, how do we move forward? One answer lies in shifting our culture.

Part 2 - A different relationship with nature

Matthew

Listening to these guests talk about reimagining our food system, it got me thinking. Radical change is something that we’ve already lived through.

Molly Anderson

One of the things is the rapidity with which fossil fuels have totally infiltrated our food system over only about 75 years. We have become totally dependent on fossil fuels.

Matthew

That’s Molly Anderson, IPES Food panel member and chair in Food Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. 

Molly

The growth in renewable energy is really impressive, but fossil fuel extraction is also growing. And until we can stop fossil fuel extraction, we are going to be stuck. Renewables are just augmenting fossil fuels for now, not replacing them significantly. And it's up to governments to cut demand for fossil fuels and to stop the extraction.

The fossil fuel companies are making record profits, making trillions of dollars over the last decade. So they don't have any incentive to stop extraction and processing. It's got to be us who force that.

Matthew

Throughout the series we’ve been exploring different ideas—policies, technologies, and experiences—that could guide us toward a fossil-free food system. For some, like Molly, the first step is clear: we need to change our relationship with nature before real change can happen.

Molly

Any food system that's based in that extractive model of controlling nature and taking away from nature without reciprocity, without recognizing the sacredness of nature, without recognizing the intimate connection that humans have with nature. If we are extracting from nature, then we are destroying our home. 

Matthew

When I think about how we get from today to a better food future, it seems there are two main paths: we tweak the existing industrial food production system and make it more efficient, or we scale out ecological production systems and more sustainable consumption patterns. One is easier than the other.

Cutting out processed foods one day a week, for example, is far simpler than removing them entirely from our diet. Similarly, for farmers reliant on synthetic inputs, trying a new fertilizer that works with existing machinery is easier than overhauling practices to grow diverse crops in entirely new ways.

One of the obstacles to broader systems change is our cultural norms - how we relate to food and nature. Changing this in any meaningful way, requires rethinking deeply ingrained values and norms. Again, which isn’t easy.

For some inspiration, we turn to Indigenous communities.

Galina Angarova

My name is Galina Angarova. I am an Indigenous rights activist, a Buryat woman from Siberia.

Matthew

Galina Angarova is the executive director of the SIRGE coalition, securing indigenous peoples' rights in the green economy. Galina shares a story on how shifting culture can shift reality.

Galina

So I would like to share my reflections and stories from my childhood as I grew up with my grandmother in a village of 400 people. Most of whom were my relatives, both close and distant. So my first understanding of my culture was witnessing my grandmother who would wake up in the morning and predict the weather for the day.

She would know what the harvest of wild strawberries, blueberries would be like in the spring way before the time for the harvest itself. And she knew so many things that are hidden from the regular eye just because she was of our land and of our culture. When my grandmother had an excess of milk, sour cream, farmer's cheese, butter, she would always share that with other families, and in return, other families would share their excess of wild strawberries, blueberries, mushrooms, and meat. And that's what the economic system and the food system looked like when I was growing up. 

Most of our food came from our land through hunting, fishing, gathering, and a little bit of  growing. And we practiced the so-called gift economy, and gratitude was our main currency.

Matthew

8 billion people can’t all hunt and gather and steward our own piece of land on the planet. Not in the 21st century. Not when we’ve already converted half of the habitable land on this planet for agriculture already.  And Galina knows this. Her community has experienced major cultural shifts. She shares some lessons that can be taken from her experience.

Galina

Of course, a lot has changed since I grew up. Unfortunately, the cycle has been broken to some extent in my community, but to the largest extent in the so-called Western world.

The money has become the main conduit for exchange, relationships and exchange become transactional. 

So whereas gifts come from the place of abundance, the concept of scarcity is embedded in the current economic and food systems that we're currently having.

The change in the culture will determine the change in our environment, ecosystem, and the soil itself. And I'm not saying that we have to necessarily all move back to the village, but we do need to have the absolute overhaul and reimagine the current systems of oppression, colonialism, and take, take, and take. 

Matthew

Galina poses a question to us all: how can indigenous food systems' serve as a model for reducing fossil fuel dependency in modern agriculture? She starts to provide an answer.

Galina

Indigenous food systems provide a blueprint for reducing reliance on fossil fuel inputs. We need a diversity and multiplicity of small systems, closed loop food systems that are interconnected with each other, interconnected and autonomous, and have the sovereignty and are dependent on the cultural, political context of the place that they're in. 

Matthew

I love this description: diverse, close looped, interconnected food systems. In any future, dialing up diversity and increasing circularity on our food and farms isn’t just a nice to have, it’s essential, and will in fact make systems more resilient. 

Though the question I keep coming back to, as a guy who grew up in the suburbs in New York without thinking twice about where my food came from,  is how far do we turn up that dial on regional food systems? Will people in all walks of life be on board with this vision? 

In the final part of our series, we take a critical look at the current political and economic landscape. We bring together a roundtable conversation with past guests and  explore the challenges and opportunities of achieving a just transition to a fossil-free food future.

Part 3: A conversation on capitalism, transition, and collective action

Raj

My name's Raj Patel and I'm a research professor at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Darrin

Darrin Qualman, Director of Climate Crisis Policy and Action with the National Farmers Union in Canada.

Anna

I'm Anna Lappe and I'm the executive director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Matthew

One of the things this series has tried to do is put a spotlight on the fossil fueled inputs into the food system. And I've realized this is quite different and new, as there's normally so much focus on the outputs of the system, the emissions. And so I'm curious to ask all of you what surprised or even shocked you about the series?

Darrin 

I think what struck me was this duality between solutions and problems. There are so many solutions, yet in spite of those solutions, to a very significant degree, we continue to do the wrong thing and we continue to do the wrong things in ways that will have very long-term consequences. So we're building nitrogen fertilizer factories right now, fueled by natural gas that have maybe a half century lifespan that are going to continue emitting well into the 2070s. We're building tractors and combines and I'm seeing them show up on the farms around where I live that will be around for 20 or 30 years. So there's never been so many solutions at hand yet. We haven't really grasped them yet. And in some ways we're not moving toward those solutions. We're moving away from them. So we're not doomed, but we're choosing doom.

Anna

Yeah, Darrin, that really resonates with me. In listening to the podcast series, thinking about how this conversation is kicking up. And yet at the same time, you're precisely right. When you look at the direction of travel for so much of the global food system, it's precisely in the not right direction. I was just looking at the figures of the increase in petrochemical use in agriculture, specifically pesticides. When you look at certain regions of the world, we're seeing an incredible spike and a predicted increasing. So South America, we saw pesticide use go up almost 500% from 1990 to 2017. In Brazil alone, we saw pesticide sales grow 1000% between about the same period. 
Well, I think for me listening to the podcast series, I was really struck by how much we know about alternatives to a pesticide dependent, input intensive food system, how much we know about how to move on that path, how exactly right you are Darrin that we have this kind of lock-in in another direction. And that's precisely what I think many of us are trying to disrupt and transform.

Raj

Yeah, I mean, I was reflecting Darrin on your observation about your calculations on how inefficient the food system is. I believe you said it was 13.2 calories in for every calorie out. And also that you'd been noticing that despite all this rhetoric about no till is better for the soil, fossil fuel use and the use of tractors, as far as you could see from your family farm, doesn't seem to have abated.

And I think part of the problem is that the solutions that get marketed are the ones that are profitable. And so what we see is not a reduction in fossil fuel use because fossil fuels are absurdly cheap. We're subsidizing them to the tune of $7 trillion a year. And so of course they're cheap. And what we have is the sort of interlocking systems of increased fossil fuel use to try and make it look as if we're using less. 

And I've just been reading this fantastic book, which I'm very pleased to recommend everyone read by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. It's called More and More and More. And it's just a history of fossil fuel use, of energy use rather. And it sort of points out that the way that our energy system works is the history of fossil fuel use, or energy use, is at odds with the story that we get about transition like we were told all we transitioned away from wood to coal,  and then we transition from coal to oil and now we're transitioning from coil to oil to natural gas to electricity and that's nonsense because the transition means suggests that that other thing has gone away. 

But that's not the case. In fact, what we see is that the fossil fuels are now sneaking their way into other kinds of places in the food system that they weren't before so I was also really taken by this observation that 42% of fossil fuels go into processing and packaging. And that in some way is the solution to the food waste problem, right? If food is wasted, then what we need to do is package it better. And therefore we will reduce our food waste. But of course, food waste on the consumer end has just gone up. And it's been enabled by the fossil fuel use and not displaced by it. And that enabling rather than displacement is, I think, the story that I'm, I guess I'm agreeing with everyone else, that is the sort of shocking thing that comes out, time after time as we think about living the transitions that are necessary. These are transitions that enable more and more and more and not less. And we're not talking about that.

Matthew

I was just reading an article in New Scientist Weekly where the scientist Vaclav Smil was being interviewed and he was talking about fossil fuels in food. And he said, imagine a beautiful tomato on your plate. Now pour six tablespoons of oil on that. That's roughly kind of the energy conversion that we're talking about here. And I thought that was just such a vivid description.  It sounds like we agree that with a lot of the things that the series was talking about and what it's pointing to. But are there any bones you have to pick with it? Is there anything you want to contest? 

Raj

Well, comrades, I think we need to talk about capitalism. It's the word that doesn't appear, and it's the word that makes all this possible. If we don't say the word, then we'll be mystified by why it is that these solutions, the kinds of solutions Darrin was talking about, are the ones that are presented. But if we bring the word capitalism in, then all of a sudden we get to have a name and an understanding of the dynamics that are at play here. And I worry a little bit that if we just say, well, you know, these are mysterious forces or the market, we don't get to put names on the faces of the agents that drive us towards increased fossil fuel use. So, you know, it may be an awkward word to say, but I think we should just say it a couple of times. And once we say capitalism enough, we'll recognize it as a word that's okay and in fact, analytically quite helpful.

Anna

I'd be happy to say it, Raj. I don't mind the C word. 

So one of my pieces of feedback was kind of a thread of the capitalism story that Raj, you're introducing here to me is a thread of how much corporate influence we've had over the story that we hear about food. And so in the natural gas, mean—even the term natural gas, we should be contextualizing that, that was a corporate construction. But in the episode about cooking with gas: Why is it that we created a norm around cooking in our home kitchens with a toxic gas? That norm got created because the industry marketed cooking with gas and marketed this as totally safe.

They also influenced in the US our regulatory environment. So we do not monitor indoor air quality. We have no regulations around that. They worked to suppress a lot of the evidence about indoor air pollution from cooking with gas. They worked with influencers to make it look cool and amazing to cook on gas stoves. So much so that even I, as somebody who really tracks these issues, when I had to replace my stove at home, my first instinct was to replace it, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, was to replace it with natural gas. It only was because I started absorbing the investigative reports about how much the industry influenced the narrative and the science around natural gas that when it came time to replace my stove, I had luckily gotten hold of a lot of that data and totally switched from thinking that the ultimate stove would be gas to being a happy owner of an induction stove that I cook with now. 

What is the mechanism by which capitalism controls our economies? One of those mechanisms is a very elaborately designed and funded public relations system that shapes what we believe about what is good, what is healthy, what is safe. And that to me is an important piece of the story about how it is that we're locked into a system that none of us would individually choose for ourselves.

Darrin

I think the theme that's come out is this constantly being encouraged to do the wrong thing, whether it's cooking with gas or using more plastics in food packaging and on the farm the same thing, using more fertilizer, more chemicals. And it does come back to what Raj said about capitalism, about agribusiness, about corporate power through the system. And that's really why we seem to be moving away from these solutions. We're not in this kind of neutral flat space where we can sort of choose our own adventure and we can choose solutions. We can choose to make it better or choose to make it worse. Rather, we're on this incredibly tilted plane or unequal power structure where the multi-billion dollar players in the system keep urging us toward their high cost pseudo-solutions. And you know, from a farmer's point of view, there's this great quote out of the US from decades ago and that is the shortest possible history of agriculture is this: “non-farmers learning how to make money out of farming.” And that's increasingly what we're seeing an increasing set of products being sold to farmers ostensibly as solutions and so many of those products sold to farmers have at their base their main feedstock fossil fuel energy, whether it's fertilizer or actual fuel or agrochemicals or plastics, etc.

Matthew

For me, this is all really clear that our current path has these tremendous consequences, these quite known risks. Maybe what's less known are the risks and the trade-offs of this alternative vision. And I think I'd like to kind of talk about that a little more explicitly. So, we talk a little bit in the series about trade-offs, but we do it maybe more in a technical way. So like when you use plastics on the farm and you're using these large mulches to cover your soil, you're gonna increase your efficiency and reduce water usage, you're gonna suppress weeds, and then at the end of the season, you're left with this giant big pile of plastic waste. That's kind of a technical trade-off. But then there's, I don't know, there's bigger issues. There’s who bears the cost of a transition away from fossil fuels? 

Darrin 

That is something that farmers are really struggling with because farmers are kind of in a narrow chute here and there's risks on both sides. And I think a lot of farmers would like to do things differently, do things with fewer inputs and find a way to use fewer inputs and thus increase margins, et cetera. But the system is really moving them in a certain direction.

So it's going to take fairly ambitious and long-term government action to help make some space because agribusiness has got farmers in this narrow chute, more inputs, more output. And if we as a society want to transition to a different kind of food system, I'm not just making the self-interested case for incentives. I'm making even a broader case for regulation and constraints on corporate power to give farmers and the entire food system some latitude and some room to move to make these transitions.

Anna

When I think about this question of trade-offs, I think the only way that we're ever really able to look at them clearly is if we're doing an accurate accounting for what's the current price that people pay in our current systems. And sometimes when I hear about trade-offs, I feel like they are happening a little bit in a vacuum or not fully understanding the true cost of our current system. So to really measure the trade-offs, you'd really want to understand what is the impact of those workers and in the communities where those inputs are being produced? Those who are living in the shadow of fertilizer manufacturing plants or living in the shadow of chemical manufacturing plants, living in cancer alley here in the United States? What about the communities for whom they're seeing overuse of nitrogen fertilizer and experiencing nitrate pollution? This toxic toll of fertilizer in the US, starting with the manufacturing in the Gulf Coast, talking about how it gets used, overused in communities linked to suites of health problems. Then the impact of that fertilizer overuse down through the Mississippi back into the Gulf impacting aquatic foods there, impacting fisher communities. For me, sometimes when I hear  about people bringing in the trade-off conversation, they're only doing it in a narrow way and actually not looking at the full picture and the communities that are impacted in our current system and how many benefits then would accrue as we shift into different ways of thinking about our food system.

Matthew 

So clearly we have a bit of an uneven panel in terms of geographic representation. We're North American, I'm based in Sweden, but still Northern European. Part of the trade-offs and the consequences as we know throughout the climate crisis is the people who have been polluting and emitting haven't been the ones who have been bearing the costs in the same way. And we know this is no different in the food system, which is directly linked to the climate crisis. What does a more just future look like 30 years from now? 

Raj 

When you think about the burden of trade-offs, as Anna suggested, there are some people who are almost forgotten about, even though they are the ones on whose backs the climate crisis has been carried. If you look at the maps of vulnerability to climate change and the climate crisis, you see a couple of things. I mean this idea of vulnerability is really interesting, because it's not just that the weather will be crappy, but that the social infrastructure that's required to recover from that has been atrophied and been, in some cases, intentionally destroyed through the politics, for example, of structural adjustment loans. The consequence of that is that healthcare systems were decimated, education systems weren't allowed to flourish, and the sort of infrastructure that you need to bounce back from horrific extreme weather has been really denuded.

And so we're recording, for example, right now, just a couple of days after some horrific floods where a year's worth of rain fell in a day in Valencia in Spain. And over 100 people have died so far, and we know that that horrific number is going to go up. We also know that there is infrastructure there to help people recover. Vulnerability is this admixture of not just will the weather be bad, but to what extent are there social supports in order to help parts of the world be robust in face of this extreme weather that we know is coming. And part of what I see as thinking of the trade-off is it's already the case that in the global south, we take more from the global south than we give. 

It may be that in our current rhetoric it's like, yes, we've got these poor people and they sort of succubi on the public purse. We should stop giving them money because America needs to be great again. Or other parts of the global north. And we're seeing this everywhere, right? Even in Canada, God forbid, that the far right are sort of coming up with these sort of nationalist stories about, we shouldn't help those people. 

But the fact is that actually the global north siphons out more from the global south than it ever comes close to giving, just in terms of interest repayments on these horrific and illegitimate loans. 

So when we think of the trade-offs, already this calculation of trade-off is skewed by amnesia, by our obliviousness and our willful blindness to the extraction that's going on through loans that our governments allegedly democratically have imposed on the global south.

So I do think that if we're interested in rebalancing the scales and thinking about these trade-offs, we do need to think very hard about what the global north owes the global south for creating this catastrophe in the first place.

Darrin

Yeah, I'll just add one of the conversations that is quite alive in North American agriculture is this choice between adaptation or emissions reduction. Should we focus on helping farmers produce in a destabilized climate or should we help farmers reduce emissions in order to make a contribution to stabilizing the climate? And there's a real ethical and moral issue here. And this is what Raj was getting at and said very well, in that if we don't maximize emissions reduction, we then create climate impacts in places where people don't have the resources to adapt. They don't have the resources to be resilient. It's okay for us to focus on adaptation because in the rich world, we have a lot of resources to do that: to adapt, to recover, et cetera. But our emissions go places and create climate impacts where people don't have those same resources. So I think we really have to make sure we're dealing equally with adaptation and emissions reduction here.

Matthew

So we started to broach this idea of a just transition and our different roles and responsibilities. Who should be doing what to move our food system in a more just, fair, resilient direction? If you can name the stakeholder and what exactly they should be doing right now.

Anna

So Matthew to your question of how can we ground this conversation? For those of us who can take individual action, we should. Not because I think each individual action is going to change the world, but that by aligning our own personal choices with ways of growing food, and with farmers and farm workers and others who are using practices that are better for the climate, better for our health, that is one thing we can do. So I know, personally, as a mom, when I think about feeding my family, I am choosing food as much as possible that has not been grown with petrochemicals. In part because I know that's better for my family, but also because I don't want any of the choices I make in the marketplace to be linked to food that was grown in a way that harmed the farmers or the farm workers who produced that food. 

It's important that we remind ourselves that most people don't have much choice in the marketplace to be choosing food aligned with climate, biodiversity, and health, but for those of us who do, that is certainly one thing we can do while we can also be advocates for systems change.

Darrin

In terms of who needs to do what, I think federal governments really need to take a lead role here. We've got a food system polycrisis. And we really need our federal governments, our national governments to push back very strongly against that corporate directed system that's currently steered purely by profits and in a way kind of blindly by profits. And leading to all of these adverse outcomes. I think it has to start with our national governments who have many of those tools, not limited to them, the NGO sector, philanthropy, others clearly have a role to play. But I think the space and the leadership really needs to start at the national level.

Raj 

I wonder if I can push back against that. I'm thinking about groups in, for example, in Andhra Pradesh in India, where over a million farmers have transitioned to agroecology. And it's been driven by, I mean, essentially driven by women who noticed that their pregnancies were much more difficult when they were exposed to fossil fuel agrochemicals, and kids were better fed when they were fed through agroecological farming. And what the organization that has sort of emerged through this process has done is both create a sort parallel set of marketplaces for farmers to be powerful because the industrial agriculture system is so tilted against the farmers doing the right thing that you could spend your entire life, and many people have, trying to sort get the Department of Agriculture to do the right thing and it won't because that's not what it's for. And instead what's necessary is creating a sort of parallel institution that's much more accountable through government to the people.

And so essentially, I think what I'm offering is a friendly amendment to say that we need both the pushback against the most egregious things that the federal government's doing wrong and national governments are doing wrong and create the marketplaces in which it's possible for farmers to be paid well and for consumers to be able to buy sustainable food less. And when those consumers are perhaps the local school system or the local clinic system, then you've got a pipeline of purchasing food from farmers at top dollar or top rupee or whatever it is and the farmers get paid well, their labor is recognized, the soil is healed and you get people eating better through public procurement and this new infrastructure will require philanthropic investment, it will require protests to stop the fossil fuel money going into the crappy system and it will you know it will require direct action. Maybe my theory of change is the one where our friends in the federal government are persuaded to do the right thing because they've tried everything else. And that persuasion comes through the alliances that we're able to build through people's movements, through NGOs, through unions, but also by creating the alternative and demonstrating, particularly in times of polycrisis, that it is much more robust than the fossil fuel dependent system that breaks whenever there's some sort of fluctuation in the environment.

Darrin 

Yeah, very grateful to Raj for the friendly amendment. Well taken.

Matthew

That’s a pretty great place to wrap things up. And I thought we could just put a bow on the series there - individuals, governments, funding orgs, NGOs, and collective action. They’re all needed. But listening intently on the call has been Adam Titmuss, our wonderful sound engineer who did the vox pops in London in episode one. And Adam had one more really important question. 

Adam

Right, so for context, so I am the audio engineer on this series, but I also have been studying sort of media and sustainability and communications. And I think listening to everything that I've heard so far in the series and in your conversations, it's quite daunting because I'm coming to it from the perspective of a sort of a consumer and an individual. And it's sort of like I'm on this threshold where I look into this system that seems sort of destined to fail at the moment, eventually, certainly in my lifetime. And that's what's really uncomfortable about it. And I don't really feel like I see people caring about it as much as they should. And I don't think that's people's fault because what can you do as an individual? 

So I suppose it's like about problem ownership, like as an individual, like how much of the problem do I own and how much can I do about it? And I think like a lot of the people who listen to this series are going to be, unfortunately, going to be individuals. I think it's very unlikely that we're going to have Mr. Nestle listening in and going, that's a great idea. And I think it's like, it's working out, yeah, what's the call to action as an individual, off the back of this series?

Because I think a lot of series like this come and go, you know, and I listen to a lot of this kind of climate content now and the one thing that it feels like is it's almost just becoming normal content, and it's like at the end of every show I go, well, that's crap.

Raj

I'd love to respond to that because you mentioned that the world around us is destined to break in your lifetime, but it already broke. And an acute example of that is under Covid, where you saw fossil fuel driven supply chains snapping. And what did people do? Well, it's not like they went out and shopped for a better supply chain.

In that COVID moment, we stepped out of being consumers and we became something better. We became these, you know, the folk who cared for one another and made sure that the neighbor was OK and made sure that, you know, we started planting things, we started looking out for one another in ways that hadn't become habit. And so now, three years later, we've completely forgotten that we were those people. But we are those people in our heartbeat when we need to be.

And that moment of understanding that actually, although the sort of habits of capitalism live in us for as long as we allow them to, and every time we hear a podcast that makes you feel shit, you're like, “Oy, I can't do anything.” That's not you talking, well, that's not the whole you talking. That's just the you that sort of stuck in this world of consumer choice where the only thing you can do is shop better. But the minute the world called on you to become a better person under COVID, you did. 

And I think that's the invitation here is, Look, yes, this is just a podcast and you can just switch over to something else. But the invitation is to follow a whole bunch of other people who've lived through some transformative moment and realize that the supply chain is not good for me, for my kids, for the planet. And here's how we're going to become better.

Darrin

And I would just underscore it is very difficult to imagine how any of us individually fix this. So we have to come together, we have to join together, you know, whether it's an environmental group or community group. And when you come together with those other people, even if you're not immediately winning, it immediately feels better.

Matthew 

I love Adam’s question: Who owns the fossil fuel problem? But I’d take a step back and ask: Who’s even acknowledging it? Another global climate gathering has come and gone, and yet we’ve seen language around transitioning away from fossil fuels softened—or even erased entirely.

By 2050, a fossil-free food system will likely be - and need to be - a patchwork of solutions, There will be: scaled-out agroecological farming, drastic reductions in food waste, more efficient production systems, less processed foods wrapped in plastic, dirty energy replaced with renewable energy to power our food system, more localized food distribution, and diets that shift to align with the planet’s limits. 

Achieving this will require a broad coalition—governments, financiers, farmers, industry, civil society, and grassroots action—working together and committing to transformative change at every step of the food chain.

And we need to show some willingness to compromise, for action, rather than the sort of compromise that is diluting, because it leads to the continuation of the status quo.

If there’s one thing this series has underscored, it’s that reversing our dependence on fossil fuels in the food system, demands not just vision but substantial investment and the will to put resources toward the transition. 

This is not a spectator problem; it’s a collective one. And for any hope of change, we must move together from acknowledgement to action.

So we've reached the end of our journey through the food chain exposing the fossil fuels in our food and imagining a fossil free future. 

If you've made it this far, thank you for listening. Please give this series a review, and recommend it to a friend or colleague. 

You might be interested to hear that the Fuel To Fork podcast will be hosting a question and answer debate about the issues raised in the series, at the brilliant Oxford Real Farming Conference and online 9-10 January. So if you have a burning question for one of our experts, please email podcast@tabledebates.org, or if you'll be there in person  , come and say hi.

There are an incredible number of people I want to thank who’ve helped make and shape this series, starting with the three partner organizations on the project. IPES food, the international panel of experts on sustainable food systems, Global Alliance for the future of food, and TABLE. TABLE is a food systems collaboration between U. Oxford, SLU, Wageningen, National Autonomous University of Mexico and University of the Andes.

If you’ve enjoyed Fuel to Fork, I hope you stay subscribed and check out our other seasons of Feed, TABLE’s podcast, that explores where power lies in the food system, how natural should our food be, and what’s a good future for meat and livestock.

This series was produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Edited and hosted by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. We’ve received funding from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Cover art and design was done by the Ethical Agency.  Music by Blue dot Sessions. 

A special thanks for amazing behind-the-scenes work that went into sharpening the series: Robbie Blake, Chantal Clement, Jack Thompson, Jackie Turner,  Tara Garnett, Anna Lappe, Amanda Jekums, Pablo Thorne, Tamsin Blaxter, Errol Schweizer, Molly Anderson and many, many more.

I hope you stay tuned for some bonus episodes coming next year.