A food security counter-argument using my body
I am not a foodie or a prepper or an off-grid lifestyle enthusiast. I never thought I would become engaged in the wider debate of food sovereignty — much less in such an fantastical location in Canada’s far north. But here I am, and I’ll explain below what my concerns are and what my project is all about.
I am interested in scientific, tech-based innovation as an integral part of sustainable food security for communities in the north. This includes exisiting tech such as the Soylent meal replacment system straight out of Silicon Valley, to near tech such as growing artificial meat in a lab, to far tech such as printing food.
My concerns about present conversations is what I see as a lack of realistic models of sustainability that seem to occupy extreme, polar opposite positions i.e. factory/corporate/GMO farming versus organic/artisanal farming all within a hundred miles of a community.
Both approaches have issues.
From wide spread environmental impacts for industrialized food to, well, environmental impacts for local food production also. For me, there are social and philosophical concerns that have emerged as well. I’ll touch upon this later.
For next two months I will attempt to feed myself through available tech that is meant to address food shortage areas both nutritionally and low cost of production and distribution. To avoid an extreme position as per my criticism above, I will moderate this approach by having one ‘regular’ meal a day of available items from the local grocery stores.
So, with two tech based meals and one conventional meal (breakfast) for two months, I can provide both an experiential and observational account (i.e. my health, my weight) as well as generate a dataset for calculating cost and environmental impact i.e. carbon footprint of shipping my tech food to me.
It is my hope that this approach can provide a valuable alternative perspective on the very real issue of accessiblity and sustainability of nutritious food in the north. Along the way, I hope to learn and research avenues and concepts about emerging food security solutions.
One disclaimer I must state right away is that in no way does my project or my opinions address First Nations or other indiginious peoples, including current and/or traditional lifestyles, methods, rights and practices. This is way out of my scope for many reasons, and my work here is meant to only address settler-derivitave systems of food consumption.
So that is the summary of my project. If you want to know more of my thinking leading up to this, I’ll be posting about that soon.
Stay tuned for weekly updates.
Next post: What did I order and how did it arrive? (akin to “Who is your Daddy, and what does he do?”)
