There will be live social media reporting via this blog: http://newoptimists.com/blog and via twitter, #TNOfood.

Professor of Primary Care and GP Jim Parle first raised the subject of food deserts in Birmingham at the Forum event on 2nd November. We felt it was a topic we needed to explore further, in particular the scope and scale of the issues — hence this conversation.

Please do join in and add your views and comments. Indeed, if you want to help shape the conversation beforehand, start your commentary now!

And . . . it won’t be a food desert on the night for these guys. They’ll be sitting round my kitchen table, chomping their way through a vegan meal prepared by the Change Kitchen, a very interesting social enterprise based here in Brum.

Could Birmingham do an industrial-city version of what’s been achieved on the Isle of Eigg; i.e. become energy self-sufficient?

The islanders have achieved much through the demand side. Here in Birmingham, we’re about to do something radical on the supply side.

Aston’s EBRI looks set to be the beginning of a game-changer — and in the first instance for Birmingham.

Talk with Professor Andreas Hornung, as I did on Wednesday, and you begin to get a glimmer of the exciting possibilities in having a distributed system to provide heat and power in a city such as ours.

Post-industrial cities like Birmingham have swathes of derelict land, plus the detritus of its people, in our case, about a million of us. This land and our waste are both resources which, with imagination and investment, can provide us with much of the heat and electricity we need — and by a carbon negative process.

The EBRI power plant, under construction next to the Sack of Potatoes at Gosta Green, will go live this autumn.

It’s a small building, and this will include both the power plant and some labs. The power plant itself will be roughly 10x12m, and about three storeys high, the size of a modest house —  you can’t scale the process up much, so you need small-sized plant.

Plonk another 12-15 of them in a ‘thermal ring’ around the city which, technically, can easily be done by 2026. If this happens, the City Council’s consumption of £25M/year worth of power is sorted, plus waste disposal costs of £40M are saved as this ‘waste’ is now valuable fuel for the power plants.

The city’s total import of electricity is £1.6bn every year, a sufficiently large market to interest suppliers. The build-cost for an EBRI-style plant is currently around £24M, an amount that should drop to around £14M over the next decade or so — a modest investment for the likes of a power company.

There will also be the opportunity to build very small-scale power plants, coming in at around £1.5M (the price of a posh home in this city or a banker’s bonus in London). These power plants would be particularly cost-efficient for sites that have biomass ‘waste’ of some kind or other.

But (and it may be a big “but”), this presupposes people would be happy to have a small power plant close by, perhaps literally at the bottom of the garden.

There’s also an absolute limiting factor on Birmingham becoming heat and energy self-sufficient by a distributed system based on the EBRI carbon-negative process. It’s fuel; i.e. how much biomass the million of us create.

Not enough . . .  nonetheless, the million of us produce a great deal. The thermal ring itself could single-handedly achieve the city’s 2026 target to reduce the city’s carbon footprint by 60%. We could go far beyond it — and thereby keep our lights on.

Keeping the lights on? On a national level, there’s a very different story.

Last night Professor Martin Freer engaged a Lunar Society audience in a interesting if sobering assessment of energy security; i.e. what’s needed to keep UK citizens in the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed.

There are two main drivers: increasing energy use by consumers, and the Climate Change Act 2008 which commits the UK to an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases from a 1990 baseline.

The supply side in a nutshell: To achieve carbon emission targets and keep the lights on, we need a substantial investment in nuclear power; coal and gas will have to be phased out and renewables just won’t do it. But to date, no organisation will invest the £5bn a pop that’s needed just to replace our existing aged nuclear power plants, let alone think about building more.

This is “the energy gap”, a gap that’ll first hit our pockets when much higher energy prices kick in and then, some say, it’ll be lights-out from time to time.

Unacceptable?

Expect a change in the Climate Change Act 2008 sometime around 2015.  Most of us won’t notice the politico-manoeuvring of clause this and clause that. But it’d create a searingly difficult time for our children and grandchildren.

Even if Birmingham does become largely energy self-sufficient, the impact of the national energy gap would be felt hard here too, really hard.

I have no idea what the implications of all of the above would be on Birmingham’s food futures in 2050. And that’s exactly why I met with Andreas this week.  In April or May, the New Optimists Forum will explore What It Could All Mean.

I’ll be posting more info about the part Andreas and some of the other scientists will be playing as and when we do the detailed planning.

See also:
Martin Freer’s presentation (as a pdf)
Climate Change Committee Renewable Energy Review published in May 2011
Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air — the hugely informative book by David MacKay FRS. Or you can download a pdf version for free from here.

By 2050, the world’s population will be around nine billion. So will we all be fed? And if so, what will we be eating?

The January 2012 edition of the Observer Food Monthly carried an article The Future of Food by John Vidal.

In it, he suggests we could be eating algae, artificial meat, new crops from conventional plant breeding (from Zhikang Li’s “green super rice” to GM plants), the produce from desert greening (from seawater greenhouses to the Great Green Wall of Africa) and, what’s already commonplace in some cultures, namely, the eating of insects.

A couple of days ago, I re-read the conclusions to the less eye-catching and a tad more sober Royal Society report Reaping the benefits: Science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture published in 2009.

Their two basic conclusions are that (a) food demand will increase substantially by between 50 and 100%  and that (b) for the most part this increased food production has to be without the cultivation of additional land, without further damage to ecosystems or use of non-renewable resources; i.e. an enormous challenge — a constant area of land with reduced inputs — involving both new crops (through conventional breeding and GM) and radical crop management techniques and processes.

Where John Vidal talks of algae and insects, the Royal Society talks of matters such as these:

• The modification of the metabolism of crops in order to increase the efficiency of solar energy conversion and storage.
• Remodelling the architecture of plants with radical effects on photosynthetic efficiency or by roots that more efficiently acquire mineral nutrients.
• Converting annual production systems to those based on perennial types.
• Modifying the reproductive biology of plants to effect the availability and production of the seed of high-yielding varieties
• Enriching the genetic diversity in the breeding pool.

It features the likes of Colin Tudge and Todmorden’s Mary Clear —
see all the links below.

The work of such people makes our world a better place and their particular communities lively, convivial, fun and hey! let’s do similar stuff everywhere we can.

• Carrotmob (www.carrotmob.org)
• Chagfood Community Agriculture (www.chagfood.org.uk)
• Colin Tudge (www.colintudge.com)
• Cultivate (www.cultivateoxford.org)
• Incredible Edible Todmorden (www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk)
• Making Local Food Work (www.makinglocalfoodwork.co.uk)
• Plunkett Foundation (www.plunkett.co.uk)
• Raj Patel (rajpatel.org)
• Sustaination (www.sustaination.co.uk)
• The Oxford Real Farming Conference(www.oxfordrealfarmingconference.org)

Hence on Friday I joined a meeting of four people, Dr Farida Vis (@flygirltwo), Andy Mabbett (@pigsonthewing), Andrew Mackenzie (@DJSoup) and Brian Prangle (community organiser for OpenStreetMap in Birmingham, aka Mappa Mercia), who together know more than a tad about (a) mapping, (b) data and (c) allotments and growing local food.

Here’s what I learned:

• There’s a dearth of data about allotments. (See this Guardian article by Farida and her colleague Yana Manyukhina last November; see also allotmentdata.org)

• Solihull recently opened two new allotment sites, with great services — proof it can be done!

• It’d take a day of a coder’s time to add a pop-up window so info about any item could be added by users.

Chatham House, along with the EPSRC and Cardiff University, began a project called ‘UK Food Supply in the 21st Century: The New Dynamic‘ in 2007.

In May 2008, they published four global food supply scenarios (see above), and related them to EU/UK stakeholders.A briefing paper a few months earlier said “Some of the interactions involved would create only a limited degree of change in Britains’s food supply arrangements; others could indicate a shift to a quite different UK supply dynamic“.

So here we are, four years later. Are we closer to understanding whether it’s business-as-before regarding food supplies, or are we entering a “quite different UK supply dynamic”?

The two 5-year scenarios Just a Blip and Food in Crisis look unlikely to happen in 2012.

Scenario 2 Food Inflation looks most similar to where we’re at mid-way on its 10-year track. But it’s not the same as today. We haven’t got stagflation, although oil prices look settled around $100. Food production is high, notably of the world’s staple cereal crop, but prices are volatile as well as high. If this is indeed close where we’re at, then the system structure will remain fundamentally unchanged over the next five to six years.

The other 10-year scenario is Scenario 3: Into a New Era. There are some weak signals that the future might have elements of this scenario: The Durban climate change deal will presumably translate into more environmental regulation over the next five years, although the impact of climate change isn’t “stark” and, on a global level, weather-related crop losses haven’t happened.

Returning to Scenario 4: Food in Crisis: As with Scenario 3, there are weak signals that this scenario or elements of it might happen in the next 5-10 years. There are already grave water shortages in some parts of the world (even in parts of the UK) but these shortages haven’t affected global production. There have been some civil disturbances over high food prices in some places, and repeated risk of serious famine others. There is also increasing concern that supply constraints will have big impact on some societies; the effect of this can be seen large-scale investment projects in low-income countries by overseas purchasers looking to boost the security of their food supply. But, on the upside, we haven’t had to deal with widespread disease.

It’s worth remembering that both Scenario 3 and Scenario 4 involve system structure changes, either steady transformation (in the case of scenario 3) and crisis mode discontinuity (in the case of scenario 4).

Will there be system changes? Technology almost certainly guarantees a steady transformation over a decade or so, and often in unexpected ways.

Of the already-known factors, it looks as if precision agriculture will have increasing impact over the next five years along with GM crops outside Europe and later, quite possibly within Europe itself.

Experimental perennial grains might well begin to be used within the decade. The economics and environmental trade-offs associated with vertical farming might move into the black leading to scale up of aquaponic fish farming and other experimental hydroponic systems within that time-frame too.

So what might this mean for Birmingham over the next 5-10 years, let alone in 2050?

With luck and a lot of hard graft, and without a major shock to the global system, quite possibly all of the above or the beginnings of them, plus becoming a land-based transport hub for the UK, a gourmet centre for fusion as well as ethnic foods . . . and many of us, perhaps all of our youngsters,  involved the fun and enjoyment of growing food — and preparing and sharing it with family, friends and neighbours.

(Sure, locally grown food won’t make much odds to the city’s food supply requirements, but if other places from Toronto to Todmorden are anything to go by, it’d have all sorts of beneficial knock-on effects.)

notes:
1. Following on from the publication in 2008 of the food scenarios, Alex Evans wrote the Chatham House Report The Feeding of the Nine Billion: Global Security for the 21st Century in 2009.
2. The Royal Society produced a report Reaping the benefits: Science & the sustainable intensification of agriculture in 2009.
3. There’s a useful chapter on food in Jon Turney’s The Rough Guide to the Future (2010).
4. I also recommend Jennifer Clapp’s book simply called Food, Polity Press (2011).

She reckons that what they’ve done in Todmorden can be done anywhere. Hundreds of Tod people grow veg and fruit in their front gardens just for other townspeople to pick and eat.

Todmorden is a small place, only some 15K people. Pam doesn’t think they’ll achieve their self-sufficiency target in Tod by 2018,  but it didn’t seem too unrealistic for them to set it . . . In contrast, could Brum feed its citizens?

Not possible in the foreseeable future . . .

And here’s the nub of it. According to Wikipedia, Birmingham is 267.77 km2 and there are just over 1M of us, packed in at 3739/ km2.

For the sake of simple arithmetic in this argument, let’s say the average person chomps their way through the produce from a thousand square metres or a tenth of a hectare (that’s assuming, incidentally, damn good soil and pretty intensive farming).

Translated into feeding all of us million Brummies, we need 1000Mm2 (1000km2, so nearly four times an area of the city itself) under the plough to keep all of us going.

(It’s calculations like this that leads me to think that Tod won’t actually ever become self-sufficient as they’ll need 1,500 hectares of fertile highly intensively farmed land to be so, which they don’t have. (Yet?!) Plus, the Pennines might be great for growing lamb, eggs and some veg and fruit, but it ain’t a paradise for, say, bananas, oranges or rice.)

Back to Brum. What could we do in self-sufficiency terms?

Allotments. We have more than any other city. Around 7K of them. Assuming each is 253 square metres, our allotments total 1,771,000 square metres; i.e. 177.1 hectares. Each hectare can feed 10 people, so that’s nearly two thousand of us sorted.

So only another 998,000 to feed . . . From gardens? Foraging? Incredible Edible-style propaganda gardening? Come on!

It’s these kind of rough and ready calculations that tell us feeding a city population just won’t happen through growing-your-own. And even with exciting technologies such as hydroponics, vertical farming and the like, we’ll still need to bring in a lot of what we need.

So why bother at all?

Here are two sets of arguments. The first is the every-little-counts argument. Clare Devereux of Brighton & Hove reckons their allotments and gardens produce 0.14% of what they need.

What if that could be nudged upwards to, say, 1%? Add in vertical farming and nudge local supplies up a tad more to, say, 2% or even 3%?

What impact would that have on their economy? On the tastiness of their food? On society as a whole?

That leads me neatly to the second set of arguments, those to do with our psyche, our conviviality, wellbeing, our sense of rootedness, literal as well as metaphorical.

Planting, nurturing, harvesting are all great activities. And if they don’t take your fancy, then preparing and sharing tasty fresh food is bloody fantastic.

The Todmorden Incredible Edible has blazed a brilliant trail, vividly demonstrating just how wonderfully dramatic an impact a light-touch, help-yourself, kind focus on food can have, and what we can learn from their generosity, enthusiasm and sheer hard work.

(The photo above is of some of the people involved on Aston Villa’s allotment.)

Yet how will we solve the massive problem of ensuring a resilient food supply to a city? Indeed, how will we feed  9 billion on the planet in 2050?

Whether you agree or not with Matt Ridley’s views on a whole host of matters, this extract from  The Rational Optimist  is a thought-provoking take of what it would take:

At least a doubling of agricultural production driven by a huge increase in fertiliser use in Africa, the adoption of drip irrigation in Asia and America, the spread of double cropping to many tropical countries, the use of GM crops all across the world to improve yields and reduce pollution, a further shift from feeding cattle with grain to feeding them with soybeans, a continuing relative expansion of fish, chicken and pig farming at the expense of beef and sheep (chickens and fish convert grain into meat three times as efficiently as cattle; pigs are in between) — and a great deal of trade, not just because the mouths and the plants will not be in the same place, but also because trade encourages specialisation in the best-yielding crops for any particular district.

If price signals drive the world’s farmers to take these measures it is quite conceivable that in 2050 there will be nine billion people feeding more comfortably than today off a smaller acreage of cropland, releasing large tracts of land for nature reserves.

Imagine that: an immense expanse of wilderness throughout the world by 2050. It is a wonderful goal and one that can only be brought about by further intensification and change, not by retreat and organic subsistence. Indeed, come to think of it, let’s make farming a multi-storey business, with hydroponic drip-irrigation and electric lighting producing food year-round on derelict urban sites linked by conveyor belt directly to supermarkets. Let’s pay for the buildings and electricity by granting the developer tax breaks for retiring farmland elsewhere into forest, swamp or savannah. It’s an uplifting and thrilling ideal.

- Hanifa, Helen, Eugenio and David

Far from going ‘in front of anything’ as our speakers above exclaim, there are identifiable recurrent patterns in the way that particular words are used.  In order to examine the patterns associated with food, I generated a list of its most frequent collocates (words that co-occur) using WordSmith Tools. The word cloud below shows the words that appear most frequently to the right of food. As the ManyEyes visualisation illustrates, the most prominent theme to emerge in relation to food is education, as demonstrated in the following extracts:

My food education element that I was thinking of there was actually ensuring that kids  as they ’re growing up  are actually able to know what they can get together to make a decent meal…  

So I would say in the food education and the health education side  you’re getting large vested interests Tesco ’s are powerful  who have got the psychology the information about families  what they buy  what they might buy…

It is also evident from the Word Cloud that food is discussed in relation to two interrelated themes: availability, e.g. supply, distribution, production, waste;  and accessibility, e.g. stores, costs, prices, policy, security. Food ethics is also a significant collocation, and a closer examination reveals that it is a phrase used within the talk with a wider meaning than would perhaps first be assumed:

I think food ethics is nice  is a good phrase actually cause that encompasses quite a lot in terms of availability as well  but I mean  food ethics or not  I guess what will  to a certain extent  determine where our food comes in years’ time is what’s happening in the rest of the world and whether the rest of the world still has enough food to supply us…  

The interactive word tree below allows you to zoom in on the text to the right of all occurences of  food, and examine the context in more detail – have fun!

There’s bags of evidence that food planting, growing and harvesting has massively beneficial impact on citizens’ health and wellbeing, plus surprisingly, on dramatically lowering crime rates, increasing kids’ literacy, lowering truancy, all sorts. So putting How to Feed the City at the core of everything is a brilliant thing to do.

And here’s what I learned about lots of opportunities Birmingham has from the APPG Agrocecology Group meeting earlier this week:

• Put food and food issues at right bang slap as core of Birmingham’s strategic planning. (There are already indications that this will be a-happening, of which more later.)
• As Lambeth has done, Birmingham could and should make it the default that permission is given to grow food on waste land, and to support people in doing some of the heavy work.
• Birmingham should set up a Food Network on some such, a focal space where everyone can see what’s happening. (In fact, there’s already quite a lot, just no-one knows about it . . . )
• There should be a a mapping project on what’s grown where. (There’s also interesting BCU people doing interesting spatial planning, including Mike Hardman’s stuff on guerrilla gardening; s.a.interesting health/diet mapping project at Staffordshire University, and s.a. Food Vision.)
• The Planning Department to ensure developers every new development has space for growing food.
• Birmingham’s superb Parks Service people to plant and tend veg, herbs and fruit growing in each park and, importantly, in the beds in the city centre and along the main arterial roads. Each plot to have a ‘pick’n'eat’ sign to encourage people to use the produce.
• Ditto police stations, fire stations, hospitals, PCTs and doctors’ surgeries, social housing organisations, leisure centres, universities, colleges et al.
• Ditto schools — who I’ve listed separately as I learned they can get a lot of support from this DEFRA task force to achieve just this.
• Enlist the Calthorpe Estate to plant and grow food. Plus Hortons. Who else?
• Birmingham Refuse Collection to have a composting collecting service — which some local authorities already have.
• Supermarkets having to provide a community growing plot on each site (a new form of planning gain?).
• Any big city, Birmingham included, has bulk buyers of fresh produce, some of whom could be informal starters for 10 in creating a local market (e.g. schools, works canteens, social housing communal eateries, hospital caterers, universities and colleges) . . . and there’s a need to create larger scale initiatives.
• All local authorities have powers to create allotments. Birmingham should have a target of n-allotments within, say, 10 years in wards where poor health including obesity is highest.
• Some authorities have smallholding responsibilities under an Act of Parliament. Has Birmingham? Have any of the surrounding authorities? if so, what are they doing?
• Taking advice from farmers in the area, plus from all the expertise within various institutions — there are some great people at University College Birmingham and Harper Adams University College who immediately spring to mind.

And not to forget

• Growing food is about eating, the fun part for everyone not just those with green fingers. So pick’n'eat parties.

And here is the big challenge:

1. Local food produce distribution has little infrastructure in most parts of the UK, and almost none here. What impact bottom-up initiatives could have is up for grabs — might be diddley-squat without tenaciously careful nurturing.