Here is a recipe for a thought-provoking, if not wholly appetising, snack: slice up a large tomato and pour over five or six tablespoons of your favourite cooking oil. Depending on where you got your tomato, that oil represents roughly the amount of diesel fuel needed to grow and deliver it to your plate. Bon appétit!
The influential environmental scientist and historian of energy – he recommends using dark sesame oil in your salad for the best visual effect. His aim was to highlight the utter dependence of our current food system on fossil fuels, used to run farm machinery, make fertiliser, heat greenhouses, power ships and even generate the electricity that keeps your fridge cool.
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As he explains in his new book, How to Feed the World, this makes our food system productive enough to feed 8 billion people and rising. It also leaves it rife with inefficiencies and waste, so that food production takes up more than a third of all land not covered in ice, slurps most of the water we use and generates nearly a third of our global greenhouse gas emissions.
Based at the University of Manitoba in Canada, Smil is best known for his work on energy use throughout human history. But several of his more than 30 books have focused on what we eat, including Feeding the World in 2001. His latest returns to the topic and lays out some pragmatic steps needed for us to adequately feed our growing population – which is projected to rise to 10 billion people this century – without destroying the planet.
James Dinneen: Why has food been of such enduring interest to you, and what spurred you to write another book on it now?
Vaclav Smil: I’m an old-fashioned scientist, so to me everything is energy, deep down. And the most fundamental form of energy is, of course, food. Besides, I’m a lifelong cook. So I have this close relationship with food. Why I revisited this topic is simple: everything is so polarised these days and that includes the scientific discourse about food. On one hand, you have people telling you, “Oh, we’re all going to die by 2030.” On the other, you have people saying, “Oh, don’t worry, AI will solve everything.” I wanted to show that we are not going to die, but that we have problems – and we had better solve some of them.
In the book, you seem frustrated by some common proposals for improving the food system.
Yes, one of the most simplistic examples is the suggestion that we all go totally vegetarian. It’s utterly impractical. Most populations will never be vegetarian unless you force them. As soon as people’s income goes up, they’ll massively increase their consumption of meat. Even India, which is as close to being a non-meat-eating country as it gets, is now eating more. From a very low base, Indian meat consumption has doubled in the past 10 years.
Another proposal is “Let’s be totally organic.” Well, if you want to have 70 or 80 per cent of people distributing manure on farms, then you can be organic. These are extreme, simplistic solutions – it’s not going to work like that.
What aspects of the global food system do you wish were better understood?
One of the most important is that food production is so fundamentally tied to fossil fuels. Without them, the system wouldn’t work. These fuels are embedded in things like fertilisers, agriculture, machinery; they are also used directly as fuel for the ships and trucks that move food around. We have kind of a double fossil fuel habit – to produce and to distribute food.
Think of blueberries. Until a few years ago, more or less the only blueberries we had in Canada were from British Columbia. Now, we get blueberries from Peru because they grow them year-round almost on the equator. When we transport blueberries that distance, we are basically moving a little bit of skin and roughage – and the rest of it is 90-plus per cent water. In terms of energy consumption and environmental impact, it’s absolutely insane.
Apart from fossil fuels and the associated emissions, what other environmental issues does food production cause?
Nitrogen, which is the crucial ingredient in fertiliser, is one of the biggest problems we have. We have too much of it being applied to farmland in many places, but it’s a particularly massive issue in the Netherlands. That country is floating in nitrogen that hasn’t been absorbed by crops or animals. In other places, we have too little nitrogen. Think of sub-Saharan Africa, where they are using less than 10 per cent of the nitrogen people are applying to crops in Europe, and as a result many of the countries in that area are food insecure.
At least as important as nitrogen, if not more, is water. Again, the problem here is about unequal distribution. Some areas simply don’t have enough water, yet despite that, the amount being used is increasing. Look at the characteristic circular farms in the Saudi Arabian desert. They have giant diesel pumps, consuming close to 100 litres of fuel per hour, sucking water from ancient aquifers to irrigate crops, which are then fed to cows to produce milk.
These seem like serious challenges, but you are sceptical of claims that our food system is on the verge of collapse. Why?
In the mid-90s, the environmentalist Lester Brown wrote a famous book called Who Will Feed China? He predicted that China wouldn’t be able to feed itself. At the time, I wrote a short reply to it, saying, oh, yes, it will. One of the reasons I wrote this book now is that I’ve been proven right: China is feeding itself. Most people don’t realise the Chinese are now producing more food per day per capita than in Japan. More than 3000 kilocalories per day per capita, and they are importing more in order to feed animals. My argument is: if China, with 1.4 billion people, can do it, other countries can too.
How important is waste to this story?
There is what I call “slack in the system”, and that slack is tremendous. Let’s take the average Western adult living a sedentary lifestyle. If you had 2100 kilocalories per day per capita, that’s plenty. But most nations in Europe have about 3500 kilocalories available per person.
Similarly, most Western countries now have a supply of meat available per capita of 70 kilograms per person per year or more. In Spain, it’s now about 90 kg of meat per year per capita. You can go down to 50 kg or even 30 kg and be better for it. So, yes, inefficiency and waste in the food system is everywhere.
There is one thing that I call great attention to in my book, and that is simply the wasting of food. You know, globally, 30 to 40 per cent of what we grow will be wasted. What we put our fertiliser, machinery, irrigation and breeding of crops into will be wasted. This is nothing short of criminal. Now, it isn’t easy to reduce it massively, but we should be using every means to reduce waste at every point.
Globally, 30 to 40 per cent of what we grow will be wasted. This is nothing short of criminal
What other steps could we take to make food production more sustainable?
The food system is so complicated that you cannot have one or two big solutions; it has to be multifaceted and incremental. Better management of water. Better management of nitrogen. Better management of pasture and croplands. Eating less meat. It’s also about eating better-quality food rather than the empty nutrients of processed food. There are thousands of steps that you have to take – and this is true of energy as well. It is true that this is difficult and frustrating. But it’s also encouraging because we can attack the problem in so many different ways. Simply eliminating the practice of importing blueberries from Peru isn’t going to save us, but it will help a little.
How significant are our personal dietary choices for the sustainability of the global food system?
What individual people eat is inconsequential, it’s only when a combination of dietary changes reaches a certain percentage of the population that it makes a difference. Now, some countries have already reached that point. People think about France as a country of wine and meat, both of which are energy-intensive products. But strangely enough, consumption of these in France has actually been declining. A very significant percentage of French people eat meat more or less like we do in my own family – in other words, small amounts and not every day. I did Indian curry last night and cut up little pieces of meat, maybe 100 grams per person. You may even have leftovers.
Could new technologies help make agriculture more sustainable – what do you think about lab-grown meat, for example?
Frankly, I don’t think about it. Look, globally, we need hundreds of millions of tonnes of meat every year to meet current levels of demand. Think about how cultured meat is made at the moment, where somebody produces a tiny piece of it on the lab bench and serves it experimentally. Scaling this up isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
What might happen sooner, although it’s very difficult, is having plants that are like the legumes, in that they coexist with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and so produce nitrogen fertiliser for themselves. That will be a great step. But we’ve been working on it for decades and we still have a long way to go.
Much closer, in fact we’ve already succeeded, is to produce, via breeding efforts or genetic modification, more drought tolerance or more salt tolerance in the varieties of crops we already grow, from rice to wheat to potato. If you have a little more salt tolerance, you can irrigate with brackish water. So that’s the way to go, to breed the crops with higher tolerance to extreme environmental conditions.
You suggest in your book that we are effectively eating fossil fuels. Do you foresee a day when we could instead talk of eating wind and solar energy?
It is a tricky question because there is no shortage of fossil fuels. We will never exhaust them, we will simply stop extracting them when it becomes environmentally unacceptable or they get too expensive. But yes, eventually we’ll get to the point when fossil fuels will be the minority of our supply and eventually they will be negligible. But certainly not before 2050, that’s for sure.
