Sustainable Urban+Regional Food Systems

Challenges to our FS

Currently, our food system does not make sense. Consider:

• In a market-place inundated with low-fat foods, the obesity epidemic in North America is costing the health care system billions of dollars.
• We use more energy in growing, storing, packaging, and transporting our food than we get from eating it (1 food calorie vs 10 calories it takes to produce it)
• We need investigative journalists like Michael Pollan to tell us where our food comes from.

Symptoms of an unhealthy food system can be observed by looking at trends over time. Some examples of such trends include:

• The plummeting of food quality and nutritional content in the past 50 years.
• The increased risk of livestock pandemics and the rapid increase of antibiotics in used in producing meat.
• The more than doubling of childhood and adult obesity in North America in the past 30 years due to diets high in fats, sugars, salts, and carbohydrates in combination with sedentary lifestyles.
• The researched connection between diet, lifestyle and other diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some cancers. (In Canada, the treatment of these diseases is estimated conservatively to be two billion dollars )
• The sharp increase in the cost of grains and cereals that is causing major civil unrest, starvation, and panic around basic needs.
• A lack of stewardship of farm land has resulted in soil erosion, salinization and desertification.
• Independent farmers have been undermined by making land unaffordable and the processing of their market goods unviable.
• Food sources have been centralized in large stores, often only accessible by car, leading to a disconnect from where food is grown and who has grown it.