What sustain us is not sustainable

I’m vegan for two years now and vegetarian for many years. Although my whole family is made of meat lovers, we respect and care about each other’s food. And when together, of course we share food. When it comes to eating habits, the thing can get really emotional. So we can always find a way to start, to think differently that we are used to, until we start to see changes.

I believe we should start from here then. Respect, share and care. Well, all that is just a very particular point of view from someone who loves to cook, loves to eat and loves to share food — and have access to all kinds of food.

My relationship with food comes from my time as a girl playing with food cans from my mother’s kitchen, putting my hands in every recipe my grandma kneaded with her hands. From that time, getting milk straight from the cow at my grandpa’s farm, that whole soybean truck and the cattle being branded in the same timeframe that my uncle raised a calf in his yard.

Coming from a woman who lived most of her life in the major metropole of Latin America. Ordering food seems like the fastest way out when it comes to a busy day. What about an instant noodle?

The journey through a hostile world

We are a combination of experiences. Excuse me, it’s gonna take more than 3 minutes to get this done. How poetic could be saying that we are also a combination of flavors? Aromas, textures and colors that follow us throughout life and build our palate? May I say that our relationship with food also builds our individual and collective history?

The biggest fraud of humanity according to Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was the agricultural revolution.The author claimed that it caused more harm than good, alienating people from each other, avoiding our species of having emotional connections. Saying that the farming lifestyle decreased human happiness.

Now, about 12 thousand years later, one of the major triggers for human unhappiness is the heavy use of social media. How weird is that?

In The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers?, Graeme Barker portrays life before the agricultural revolution as “nasty, brutish, and short, a precarious journey through a hostile world in an unceasing search for food”.

Seems like nothing changed much, right? Since we are still on a journey through a hostile world in an unceasing search for food. Even though you might be doing that from the comfort of your sofa, swiping some delivery app feed.

For Graeme, agriculture was an “enormous leap forward in human progress”. Allowed humans to live more comfortably due to the surplus of food. It changed the structure of the society, it welcomed the beginning of property ownership and capitalism.

Leap forward into human progress

Human behavior changes far too often for someone to comprehend what actually people need, as well as the environments in which people place themselves. We adapt. I guess we were born to conceive. Maybe sounds like a strange statement, however, have you ever thought about it? We came to this world, we learn by doing and copying. We adapt and we create. Everything is made up, and we truly believe in it. If we give a name to something, it exists. So how come the food industry became what it is today?

We started cooking for a few: our family, our tribe. Using simple and inherited recipes, made with foods that we could grow or find nearby. Food was a basic necessity to keep us alive. The flavors were real and powerful.

Industrialization rises, and the need to feed a large population has turned the act of eating into a complex problem. Taste took a back seat to the necessity to add a huge amount of preservatives to a simple recipe. It is clear that the appearance of the ultra-processed food was necessary so a large part of the population could eat.

Technology has saved us from diseases, while led to the emergence of other ones. Just like a dance, going back and forward. We conceive to destroy and then we conceive again to repair.

So how can we keep feeding ourselves in a way that is sustainable for the environment, convenient to our personal needs and effective for the supply chain? How can we collaborate to shape the future of the global food system?

The increased global awareness on environmental issues, nutrition, hunger and food waste is pointless without actionable measures. What comes first? People behavioral changing in scale? Or established systems redesigning the way they work in order to provide better access to food with less effort, cost and waste?

The important role played by family farmers in promoting food security and nutrition, strongly contributes to the construction of more inclusive and equitable societies. By establishing family farming at the centre of agriculture, environmental and social policies, we recognized them as the main contributors to food security, management of natural resources and cultural heritage.

They produce the majority of the world’s food. By accessing and connecting those suppliers and data sources through an AI based system to provide quality food, effortlessly and with less ecological impact as possible.

The future is already here

We reached 2031. Eleven years after the 2020 pandemic, we faced a reality that proved, definitely, that:

• When used wisely, technology can be a win, capable of connecting people and food, facilitating the way we produce, distribute and consume food
• Nothing replaces empathetic and affective relationships between people, doesn’t matter how much technology we may have

On the other hand, 2031 also brought an unexpected challenge. Today we have more information and more tools on hand. Although we are more skilled to provide new solutions, autonomous systems themselves are not enough, we still count on emotional and social aspects to connect all those dots together.

We already know our goals regarding the system we want to fix. Respect, share and care in order to make the wheel move in the direction of tangible and sustainable changes.

Sources:

HARARI, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2011.
BARKER, Graeme. The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory, 2006.
FAO and IFAD. United Nations Decade of Family Farming 2019–2028. The future of family farming in the context of the 2030 Agenda. Rome, 2019.