Balancing Food Production
We do not live in a perfect world.
We may have dreams of living on acreage and being self-sufficient, but for most, that is just a dream. If it is any consolation, I did just that for many years, and let me tell you, it is really hard work.
Many people have a reasonably sized garden and can grow enough food to build a balanced diet, with careful trips to the Supermarket to buy the energy food we need, plus enough metabolic food to keep us healthy. (See following articles which explain metabolic food.)
But the reality is that most people now live in cities with either a very small garden or an apartment, hopefully with a balcony to enjoy a bit of fresh air, and limited space or time for growing any food.
But these city dwellers need healthy food just as much as people with large gardens in rural areas.
How can these people get the benefits of eating metabolic food while still expecting to live a long, healthy life? And let us add at a reasonable cost in terms of both time and money.
They will need at least two Gbiota worm boxes, but more is better.
In my home with four people, I have six worm boxes, but I am experimenting, so one Gbiota worm box per person may be a good starting point.
Next, we need to rethink food waste. We waste billions of tonnes of food each year, all containing valuable nutrients, most of which can be readily reprocessed back into fresh and healthy food.
We are the last generation that can live off ingredients extracted from synthetic fertilisers, most of which we get by processing oil.
But we can create a sustainable food supply with a three-stage strategy.
First, we can start by reprocessing the enormous quantity of waste food we send to the tip, which contains significant nutrients but ends up as greenhouse gases.
Secondly, we can change our attitudes to weeds. They may be a pain, but that is because they are highly efficient at extracting nutrients from the soil. They can grow in poor soils where our food plants cannot survive.
Instead of poisoning them, we can use them as a nutrient source in our Gbiota worm boxes. We just need to take advantage the natural recyclers – the worms, larvae and beetles who have been providing this service for free for millions of years – for free.
Thirdly, we can take advantage of volcanic rocks. They contain a wide range of nutrients; specifically, they are high in potassium, phosphorus, and magnesium. They contain useful quantities of magnesium, calcium, sodium and sulphur, plus trace amounts of manganese, zinc, copper and boron.
The two that are missing are nitrogen and iodine. We can capture nitrogen naturally from the air using legumes, and we can get iodine from seaweed.
The key point is that if we continue as we are, we will run out of essential nutrients within a generation, but if we change the way we grow our food by recycling and using the natural recyclers the fungi, bacteria, worms, larvae and beetles we will have a food system that is sustainable way into the future.
In the next article, ‘introduction’, I start to look at why our food is unhealthy.
It is fine to diagnose the problem but what matters is finding a solution to these twin problems of unhealthy and unsustainable food production. I explain my solution to these in the series of articles in the Why section in the menu.
