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Food – an energy issue

(Originally commissioned by Place Northwest, May 2010)

The food industry is often overlooked in debates about energy and the environment. Mostly, people worry about the price of their food, its quality, and the contribution it may – or may not – make towards their health. But that’s about it.

The irony is that food, which gives us each our energy, is one of the most energy intensive and wasteful of all our industries. It consumes vast quantities of fossil fuel in growing, transportation, the production of fertilisers, pesticides and feedstock, storage, packaging and preparation.

This has been understood for decades – at least since the phrase ‘eating oil’ popped up following the first global oil crisis of 1973. Yet things have got worse.

Two decades after the seventies, the volume of food transported within the UK had increased by 16% and the distances travelled by 50%. Petrol price protests, unusually heavy snowfalls and volcanic eruptions have all threatened our food supplies and demonstrated just how dependent we have grown on processed petroleum and long supply chains.

The food industry accounts for one fifth of all our carbon emissions, without taking transport from abroad into account. It takes 127 calories of fuel energy to transport the 1 calorie of energy in an iceberg lettuce across the Atlantic. And the food business is not just wasteful, it’s absurd. For example, each year Britain imports around 61,000 tonnes of poultry meat from the Netherlands and exports 33,000 tonnes back to the Netherlands.

This situation can’t be sustained – and when the oil runs out, so could our food supplies.

The answer is to produce more food closer to where it’s consumed – and, happily, the idea of ‘local food’ is taking off in a big way. Gardeners are growing more fruit and vegetables; the demand for town and city allotments can’t be met; adventurous souls are taking on the hard-grind of community-based farms. At the other end of the chain, there are farmers’ markets, specialist food shops, and restaurants serving only or mainly local produce.

In Liverpool, the city’s economic development company, Liverpool Vision, has launched a ground-breaking scheme to bring land owners, food growers and food outlets together in a city-wide alliance aimed at developing and coordinating local food activities within the city itself. The ‘Greater Liverpool Food Alliance’ will aim to make urban agriculture a central plank of development and land use strategies on the part of the public, private and voluntary sectors.

Potential growing spaces are in plentiful supply – just look around and you’ll find it. According to the New Economic Foundation, the market is there, too; half the people questioned in a recent survey said they’d prefer their food to be grown locally. It’s just a question of allowing growers to work the land, and getting its produce to the market.

Liverpool Vision is confident that the trick can be done and will reduce the city’s energy needs and carbon footprint while keeping it supplied with healthy, fresh and tasty food.