Part 3: The Power of Small®
- Omachron
- 3 hours ago
- 8 min read
The Food We Eat
Globally, farming is becoming a less attractive career choice for young people with each passing year. According to 2022 data from the World Bank Group, only 26% of the global population is employed in agriculture, a number which has been steadily decreasing since the early 1990s.
Somehow, the pride of growing food locally has diminished and many have fallen into the trap of thinking that it is someone else's job. A global race for lower costs and an acceptance of lower food quality has created an absurd situation where food is regularly shipped from one continent to another for processing and packaging and then shipped to another continent or all the way back to save a buck, often to the detriment of the nutritional value of the food. In reality, this “false shipping economy” consumes valuable fossil fuel reserves to try to save pennies. Some food trade makes total sense to widen the variety available to certain nations due to climate limitations. As an example, importing bananas to Canada is a good idea, but selling beets in Canadian grocery stores in September, which were grown in India, is as equally bad and unsustainable as selling tomatoes from Canadian greenhouses in January to the Bahamas or Cayman Islands.
Many studies show that when produce travels a greater distance, its nutritional value diminishes proportionally. In addition, the amount of energy expended to transport food increases with the distance traveled and quickly becomes a multiple of the energy which could be spent to grow it locally and is therefore ridiculously wasteful. In recent years, this wasteful transportation of food has resulted in a measure called the “food mile,” which defines the distance food travels from the location where it is produced to the location where it will be consumed. The food mile measurement is one of the methods used to evaluate the sustainability of the global food system in terms of energy use. Studies estimate that in the United States, fresh produce travels over 1,500 miles before being consumed. The food mile is also indicative of the pollution created in this transportation.
As a society, we do not properly value our fossil fuel and other energy resources, and we ignore the potential negative impacts on global warming and general pollution while simultaneously diminishing the caloric and nutritional value of the food. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Dole sliced peaches travel a minimum of 14,500 miles to a store in Iowa. That’s how they come up with this estimate: the peaches were grown in Italy, then shipped to Thailand for processing, then shipped to a United States distribution facility, and then eventually transported to a store in Iowa.
In 1965, there were 787,000 combination trucks registered in the United States, and these vehicles consumed 6.658 billion gallons of fuel. In 1997, there were 1,790,000 combination trucks that used 20.294 billion gallons of fuel. A recent study conducted by the California Agricultural Technology Institute (California State University) indicated that in California alone, more than 485,000 truckloads of fresh fruit and vegetables leave the state every year and travel from 100 to 3,100 miles to reach their destinations.
The Canadian Waterloo Region study estimated that sourcing a selected 58 food items locally and regionally rather than globally could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 49,485 tons annually. This is the equivalent of removing 16,191 vehicles from the road.
While many of these numbers are frightening, they are not as bad compared to the food miles for food sold on Caribbean islands and the further nutritional degradation said produce undergoes. The majority of these islands rely heavily on food imports mainly from the United States and Canada; therefore, the produce travels by land, sea, and air like a wayward tourist traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles from farm to consumer, which is clearly not a sustainable way to feed a nation. For instance, the Bahamas imports approximately 80% of produce, of which half is spoiled by the time it reaches final consumers.
Although products look saleable, the nutrients they contain are only a fraction of what a field-ripened fresh fruit or vegetable would contain. This food transportation “economy” seems unsustainable both economically and from a health perspective. Somehow, the simple notion of taking responsibility and being proud of growing our own food has fallen from favor, but it must again become part of our daily lives to ensure a healthy future. According to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, between 1968 and 1998, world food production increased by 84 percent, population by 91 percent, while food trade increased by 184 percent. And these numbers associated with food miles directly affect product freshness, quality, nutritional value, and taste.
The mineral composition of fruits, vegetables, and food crops is influenced by multiple factors, and one of the main contributors to nutritional value is the genetic makeup of the crop species and the extent of ripeness of the plant at harvesting. Many crops grown by commercial growers prioritize the durability of the species over their nutritional numbers (this topic will be further discussed in future posts), and the less ripened the plant is when picked, the less good stuff it has to offer to the consumer. Furthermore, during the time the produce travels, it uses its energy and nutrients to ripen, and once these units of energy are spent by the fruit or veggies, they are gone forever and never get to the consumer. What the consumer gets out of this deal is a good-looking fruit with minimal nutrition. On the basis of available nutrition data, it was concluded that in the last 30-40 years, the nutritional dilution is as high as 80%. According to numerous studies in many countries, the nutrient density and taste quality of fruits, vegetables, and food crops have fallen extremely low.
All this overwhelming amount of bad news is matched with an even worse amount of nutrition deficiencies in food problems.
Important commercial high-yielding fruits such as apples, oranges, mangoes, guavas, bananas, and vegetables such as tomatoes and potatoes have lost their nutritional density by up to 25–50% or more during the last 50 to 70 years due to environmental changes, genetic modifications, and changes in field soil conditions due in part to the overuse of chemical fertilizers.
Fruits and vegetables start the journey with lower nutrition as they are picked before peak ripeness and consume stored energy and nutrients as they “ripen en route” without the meal the plant provides to feed them. University of California studies show that vegetables can lose 15 to 55 percent of vitamin C, for instance, within a week. Some spinach can lose 90 percent within the first 24 hours after harvest. It is clear that freshly picked fruits and vegetables are many times more nutritious!
"Many people think that if the produce looks good, it has nutrients." LaBorde associate professor of food science, and Srilatha Pandrangi, graduate student, both at Penn State, said. "So people will stick the spinach in some ice water to fluff it up to look nice" but this action does not restore the irreversible nutritional loss.
Ironically, the globalization of food growing and distribution has made a less diverse range of produce available all the time, rather than having traditional seasonal changes in the availability of different, fresher, locally grown produce with only limited imported varieties. Most people eat a less diverse and less nutritious diet of “pretty produce.” Most produce on our grocery shelves suffers significant nutrient loss of approximately 30% within 3 days of harvest, including but not limited to losses of vitamin B, C, folic acid, carotene, and more. It’s estimated that it takes at least 5 days for picked produce to reach the grocery store; therefore, even local produce distributed conventionally suffers significant degradation but is at least picked closer to peak freshness. If produce sits on the shelf for a few days before you bring it home, you would need to eat 2-3 times more to get the same nutritional value versus fresh-picked food from a home garden or local farm.
We are on the verge of a perfect storm that can turn a bad situation into something far worse. The potato famine in the mid-19th century resulted in a perfect storm of poor choices, poor communication, and a lack of understanding of pathogens. It devastated Europe, but the worst was in Ireland since they were extremely dependent on a single crop - potatoes for their nutrition. In this regard, many nations are as much at risk today as the Irish were in the 1840s.
In recent years, in order to taste real tomatoes or strawberries, people shop at farmers' markets, participate in community gardening, or build container gardens in their backyards. Hydroponic methods of growing some foods are becoming more and more popular. Quality over quantity empowers the notion of the power of small. Community gardens are producing much more than food.
The Power of Small® in these smaller gardening settings promotes health and financial security. It rewards the effort with fresh produce filled with nutrients and flavor levels rarely, if ever, present in grocery store produce.
Community gardening activity is usually seasonal, and crops must be selected to suit local weather conditions. In order to have a constant year-round supply of produce, hydroponic systems are slowly being adopted by individuals or small local entrepreneurs. Large-scale hydroponic operations will always suffer from the harvest-to-table time lag and the associated significant losses of nutrients. We need a better balance between locally grown healthy grains and vegetables, which can be reasonably stored for winter, locally or at-home grown greens and fruits, and imported fruits and vegetables to minimize supply chain risks and improve food security in every nation. We must ensure that our food chain is more robust, nutritious, healthier, and free of chemicals as much as possible by growing at home, growing locally, and limiting how much we rely on global sourcing given the geopolitical and climate instability we are seeing.
I believe that a combination of growing critical fresh produce at home, sourcing local produce in season when possible, canning and preserving foods sourced locally or grown in your garden, combined with sourcing some international produce, can create a healthier world where less food needs to be grown per capita because what we consume will be more nutritious and less will be spoiled during transportation and distribution. These ideas will be one step towards improving the hunger problems in our communities and in the world.
The key is that growing food in a small garden in summers, if you have the space, combined with hydroponic growing year-round, can give you some measure of personal control over the food quality and food security for your family!
Check out the incredible wonders we’ve grown with hydroponics!
