Food, Society, and the Environment: Coupled Human-Natural Systems

“We are what we eat.” We’ve all heard this common expression and may think of it in nutritional and biological terms: for example the way that the chicken or beans we consume are turned into muscle tissues. However, this simple phrase has a deeper meaning: Food production, food culture, and organization of food transport and consumption loom very largely in the way that our society "is". These food-related activities also strongly impact the earth's fundamental surface processes and ecosystems. So, we are what we eat, but in a societal as well as an individual sense. This wider vision of food as a driving presence within society is increasingly relevant as groups and individuals like you become more interested in the ramifications of their food for themselves and for the environment. This course is designed to provide you with the tools to understand the combined environmental and human dimensions of food production and consumption. To do so we must start with some simple questions and reflect a bit on how we can address them.

Figure 1.1.1. The above image of a food festival in the United Kingdom captures both the excitement food creates in our culture, the varied cultural influences leading to different types of street food, and behind the scenes, the pathways of production and transportation that keep food moving to consumers' plates at all times.

Credit Helen (Afeitar), used with permission, Flickr: Liverpool food festival [5], Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0 [6])

Where does our food come from? And, how can we make our food supply more sustainable? These two questions may seem simple, but they lead us to a range of considerations that are covered through the remainder of this course. As we consider these questions in each module, we'll explore a model of food systems as human systems in interaction with natural systems, or coupled human-natural systems (Fig. 1.1.2). As the name suggests, the concept of Coupled Human-Natural Systems (CHNS) tries to describe two major components that are involved in the production and consumption of food. The first component is the natural world and a set of interacting natural factors. Some of you may know the term ecosystem, and ecosystems developed from interacting natural components such as water, soils, plants, and animals (e.g. Fig. 1.2.1 in module 1.2) are the context for most food production. Throughout the course, we may also refer to the elements and processes of ecosystems as the earth system and earth system processes, or simply as the environment. These natural systems are a basic foundation of the food supply that we will learn more about in modules four through six (Environmental Dynamics and Drivers). The continued productivity of natural systems is evaluated as being crucial to sustainability, as you will see in the short reading below.

On the other hand, the two questions posed above involve the role of people, both as individuals in groups such as communities, institutions (including colleges and universities, farm and food processing businesses, and farmer organizations, for example) and political units such as countries. To introduce this dimension we often refer to this globally as the "human system" within a coupled human-natural system (Fig. 1.1.2.; a complete definition of human and natural systems are given in Module 1.2). Within the human system, factors such as styles of farming and food choices, tastes, economic inequality, and farmer and scientific knowledge that inform humans' management of ecosystem emerge from human cultural, social, economic, and political influences.

Figure 1.1.2. A simple illustration of coupled human and natural systems with reference to food production. The list of human (households: urban and rural, businesses, governments, knowledge and science, diet and food traditions, belief systems) and natural system components (water, atmosphere, soils, plants and animals, biodiversity) on each side of the diagram is not exhaustive, and the diagram will be revisited throughout the course. The reciprocal arrows represent the mutual effects of each subsystem on the other, and are highly schematic, although they can denote specific impacts or feedbacks that will be addressed in module 1.2 and beyond.

Credit: Steven Vanek, adapted from the National Science Foundation (NSF) [7]

The end result of these interactions between human and natural systems are what we call a food system, which has has also been called an "environment-food system" (see the introductory reading on the next page) with "environment" pointing to the natural components and the "food system" pointing to the human organization needed to produce, transport, and deliver food to consumers, along with a host of cultural, regulatory, and other aspects of human society that relate to food. In terms of geography, the interactions of environment-food systems exhibit a huge range of variation across the world. As we all know this variation exists between countries, so that food and farming types can be associated with “Chinese food,” “French food,” “Peruvian food”, or scores of other examples. Farming and food also vary a great deal among regions within a country and sometimes even among local places, as we know if we compare a large dairy or grain farm with a fresh vegetable farm serving local markets here in the United States. Understanding the geographic variations of environment-food interactions is key to recognizing their increased relevance and importance to people and places.

Guided Introductory Reading: Why Environment and Food?

Introductory Reading Assignment:

1. Read the brief section (pp 1-7) of Colin Sage's book "Environment and Food", entitled "Why Environment and Food? [1]" (see the assignments page). The author explains why we are interested in considering food's relationship to the environment (the latter is what we are also calling "natural systems"). He presents a provocative and critical account of our relation to food in modern societies (human systems) and the need to think about food production and consumption patterns in relation to the environment.
2. As you read, try to identify three to five main points of the reading, which is always a good practice when you read in this course and other courses.
3. After reading the assignment, continue reading below and see whether your perceptions of this author's analysis agree with the main arguments we have noted below. You may have noted similar points, or additional ones not noted here.

Consult AFTER Reading:

First, consider the list below of some of the main ideas in the reading. Do these roughly agree with your list of main points? You may have identified additional points in the reading.

1. The essential need of humans to eat has defined the relation of all societies to food production and the environment through history.
2. Transformation of food production systems in the last 100 years has dramatically changed diets and societies' impact on the environment:
   • Yields have increased with industrial methods and food for many in the world has become more available.
   • However, diets have worsened in many cases so that human nutrition has suffered.
   • Inequality in access to food based on wealth and poverty of consumers has continued.
3. Negative impacts on the environment have multiplied, which is expressed in the large amounts of water needed to produce food, the strong dependence of food production on fossil fuels, and the contribution of food production to CO₂ methane, and other greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
4. A sustainable food system, which is increasingly the vision promoted by some food producers and consumers, involves reducing fossil fuel use in food production, cutting waste of food in transport and consumption, and increasing the just distribution of food to consumers at all levels of wealth.

We can also think of the way that these main points fit into a diagram, sometimes called a concept map, like the one that is drawn here. As part of the final assignment or summative assessment for module 1, and in the capstone assignment for the entire course, you will be drawing concept maps of a food system example. This diagram may get you started on visualizing human and natural components of food systems and their interaction. You'll note that a concept map can start from a very preliminary drawing or rough draft (like this one), and gradually be reorganized as you learn more about a topic use an organizational principle like the coupled human-natural systems concept we present in this course.

Figure 1.1.3. An example of a concept map applied to the concepts and relationships presented by Colin Sage in the guided introductory reading for this module. Note the attempt to understand whether components of the food system are part of human vs. natural systems.

Credit: Sketch by Steven Vanek

Drastic Impacts of Food Production on Planet Earth: The Anthropocene

After reading Colin Sage's brief introduction to the modern-day issues surrounding environment and food, you should be aware of the fact that food production by human societies has transformed the earth's natural systems. In fact, it is very difficult to understate the enormous impact that food production to support human societies has had on the surface of our planet as the earth's population has grown. Here are some of them:

• Humans have replaced permanent forests and wild grasslands with farm fields that allow much higher rates of soil erosion where the soil is not covered year-round. This has led to trillions of tons of soil being washed into rivers, lakes, and oceans, where it is unavailable as a key resource for food production.
• The expansion of farming and grazing has contributed to the reduction and elimination of wild forest and grassland species of plants and animals: the loss of earth's biodiversity.
• In some cases, previously unproductive dryland areas have been made highly productive through the movement of irrigation water into desert areas, allowing the expansion of human settlements.
• In other cases, elimination of forest in favor of farmland has contributed to the expansion of desert areas and worsening droughts.
• Humans have intensively fertilized cropland to make it more productive with manures and chemical fertilizers, leading to excesses of nutrients and pollution in many of the world's waterways.
• Farming and the other human activities that support modern food systems are major contributors to changes in earth's climate linked to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

One term that is used to summarize these human impacts within the history of the earth is the Anthropocene, from Anthropos (human) and cene, a suffix used within the geologic timescale to denote the recent past. The Anthropocene has been proposed as a new geologic epoch because of the profound and unprecedented human alteration of earth's natural systems that we point to above. Scientists researching the Anthropocene tend to agree that it was the beginnings of agriculture that probably marked the onset of the Anthropocene. We will introduce you to the history of agriculture in Module 2. The concept of sustainable food systems that Colin Sage points to in the introductory reading are currently a major topic of debate and discussion in human societies and are a consequence of the sustainability issues that are a key feature of the Anthropocene. The idea of sustainable food systems is also a major topic of this course, and you will be asked to contribute to this discussion in your capstone project. The term Anthropocene helps us to appreciate the epochal change of the extent and degree of these changes. Yet these changes do not suggest or imply that all is lost, or that all cropping and livestock-raising are pervasively damaging to the environment. As you’ll see throughout this course there are already well-developed options worth considering and pursuing in order to expand sustainable environment-food systems.

Studies of the changes in the type of ecosystems that cover different areas of the earth or land cover (e.g. crop fields versus forest versus desert) allow us to appreciate the impact on earth during the Anthropocene (Fig. 1.1.4 below). We can see in the bar chart reflecting changes over time in land cover that farmed and grazed areas involved in food production for rising populations have expanded from less than 10% of earth's usable (ice-free) surface in the 1700s to over 50% in 2000, a stupendous change considering the size of earth's land area (similar expansion of human influence in food production in earth's ocean fisheries has also occurred).

Figure 1.1.4. A graph showing the global allocation of the ice-free land area, on all five continents, to human land use versus wild (bottom stippled bar section) across three centuries from 1700 to 2000, during the rapid expansion of human population in the Anthropocene.

Click for a text description of Figure 1.1.4

(Approximate estimate of the percentages of global allocation in ice-free land area)

Year 1700:

• Wild (uninhabited) ≈ 49%
• Seminatural (e.g. inhabited forests) ≈ 45%
• Rangeland (grazed livestock, non-cropped) ≈ 1.5%
• Cropland ≈ 3%
• Villages ≈ 0.25
• Urban ≈ 0.25%

Year 1800:

• Wild (uninhabited) ≈ 45%
• Seminatural (e.g. inhabited forests) ≈ 45%
• Rangeland (grazed livestock, non-cropped) ≈ 5%
• Cropland ≈ 3%
• Villages ≈ 1.5%
• Urban ≈ 0.5%

Year 1900:

• Wild (uninhabited) ≈ 35%
• Seminatural (e.g. inhabited forests) ≈ 35%
• Rangeland (grazed livestock, non-cropped) ≈ 19.5%
• Cropland ≈ 8%
• Villages ≈ 1.75%
• Urban ≈ 0.75%

Year 2000:

• Wild (uninhabited) ≈ 24.5%
• Seminatural (e.g. inhabited forests) ≈ 20%
• Rangeland (grazed livestock, non-cropped) ≈ 32%
• Cropland ≈ 14%
• Villages ≈ 8.5%
• Urban ≈ 1%

Credit: Steven Vanek, adapted from Ellis et. al. 2010. Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700-2000; Global Ecol. Biogeogr 19, 589–606.

Similarly important is that the Anthropocene, or the "human recent history of the earth" if we translate the word slightly, brings to our attention to not only the changes in natural systems or the environment but also the significant alterations of the human dimension of human-natural systems related to food. It’s safe to say that for nearly all of us this human dimension is significantly different than it was for our grandparents or even our parents. Some basic examples can be used to illustrate this trend. In the United States, for example, the population of farmers has continued to shrink. It is now less than 4 percent of the national population. At present this fraction, though generally declining worldwide, is somewhat higher in European countries and much higher in Asia and Africa. The continued importance of food-growing agriculture among large sectors of the populations in Africa and Asia, for example, creates different patterns of livelihoods (Fig 1.1.5a) and landscapes (Fig. 1.1.5b).

Figure 1.1.5a.Farmer Cleaning Soybeans, Malawi

Credit: Max Orenstein; used with permission.

Figure 1.1.5b. Rice-growing landscape, Vietnam. This photo illustrates the intensive interactions that exist between human habitation and farming communities in the background and food production which occupies the entire foreground.

Credit: Tommy Chiu, used with permission under a creative commons license.

One important point: familiarity with environment-food systems through immediate experience among human populations, including you and your fellow learners in this course, is presumably at an all-time low. It’s also an interesting reflection on the human dimension of the Anthropocene. Other statistics could be quoted to show related trends. For example, the average amount of time being spent on food preparation is roughly one-quarter the standard allocation of time devoted to this activity 40-50 years ago. This course takes these statistics as a challenge and opportunity since environment-food interactions are both less-known than previously and, at the same time, have a very high level of importance to the environment and society.

Sustainability: Environments, Communities, and Economics

The guided reading in this module on concerns around "Environment and Food" and our consideration of the Anthropocene as an era defined by the dramatic expansion of food production on earth's surface lead us naturally to the concept of sustainability, which is a common term in much of our discourse in the present day, in many different settings from the coffee shop and classroom, to dinner tables and company boardrooms, to government offices. As we think about the increasingly obvious impacts of our food system on the global environment and on the social dynamics of global society, we are concerned that this food system needs to (a) be part of society and communities with adequate opportunities for all and just relationships among people and (b) not compromise the future productivity and health of earth's many different environments. As part of the introductory work of this first module, we ought to consider a definition of sustainability that is broad enough to encompass both human and natural systems, and geographic scales from communities to single farming communities to the worldwide reach of food production and transport in the modern global food system. We present below in figure 1.1.6 one relatively common definition of sustainability as a "three-legged stool" (we will return to this concept later in Module 10 when we return to food systems).

Figure 1.1.6. Three-legged Stool of Sustainability

Credit: Steven Vanek, based on multiple sources and common sustainability concepts

Click for a text description of the three-legged stool of sustainability image.

A green three-legged stool. The seat is labeled Sustainable Food System. One leg is labeled Environment, one leg is labeled Community, and the third is labeled Economy. There is a list for each as follows. Environment: reduce pollution and waste, use renewable energy, conservation, restoration. Community and Social Sustainability: good working conditions, health care, education, community, and culture; Economy: employment, profitable enterprises, infrastructure, fair trade, security.

In the model of the three-legged stool, environmental sustainability reflects protecting the future functioning, biodiversity, and overall health of earth's managed and wild ecosystems. Community and social sustainability reflect the maintenance or improvement of personal and community well-being into the future, versus relations of violence and injustice within and among communities. In the case of food systems, this reflects especially the just distribution of food and food security among all sectors of society, the just treatment of food producers and the rights of consumers to healthy food, and the expression of cultural food preferences. Economic sustainability within food systems has often been conceptualized as relationships of financial and supply chains that support sufficient prosperity for food producers and the economic access of consumers to food at affordable prices.

Dividing the concepts of sustainability into three parts of an integrated whole allows us to think about food production practices or food distribution networks, for example, are sustainable in different aspects. Excessive water use or fossil fuel consumption, for example, are aspects of environmental sustainability challenges in food systems considered further on in this course. Meanwhile, issues of food access, poverty, and displacement from war, and their impacts on human communities and their food security are issues that combine social and economic sustainability, which will also be considered by this course. The three-legged stool is a simple, if sometimes imperfect, way to combine the considerations of sustainability into a unified whole. As you consider the sustainability challenges at the end of module one and in your capstone project, you may be able to use these three different concepts along with the concepts in the guided reading to describe the sustainability challenges of some food system examples. You may want to ask yourself, is this practice or situation environmentally sustainable? socially sustainable? economically sustainable?

Increasing Interest in Food Systems and Sustainability

Individuals, Communities, and Organizations Taking Action on Sustainability: Information Resources on Real-World Efforts

The interest in the sustainability of environment-food systems, as we've just defined them -- see the "three-legged stool" on the previous page -- has skyrocketed in recent years. A brief sampling of these issues involves the following:

• Health and Nutrition concerns over the nutritional quality and nutrient content of food and food-producing environmental systems
• Food security among approximately 1.1 billion persons around the world with low income and other limitations that do not allow them to access sufficient food.
• The need to design food and agricultural systems that can respond successfully to climate change.

We aim that this course will allow you as a learner to this rapidly expanding suite of interests while it offers background and the capacity to understand better and more fully these issues. You will pursue this aim through the readings and evaluations in this course, and also in completing a capstone project on the food system of a particular region.

One way to begin learning about this expanding interest is to consider the activities of individuals, communities, and governments as well as organizations ranging from nonprofits to international and global groups. In the case of individuals and communities, much interest is being generated by local food initiatives, such as farmers’ markets, and other local groups of producers and consumers seeking to improve environment-food systems. A variety of government agencies in the United States and other countries have also become increasingly involved in environment-food issues.

The United States Department of Agriculture [8], for example, now offers a focus on environment-food issues such as responses to climate change and dietary guidelines in its range of research and science activities. The USDA website also includes the compilation of data through its different research services that you will use in this course.

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) [9], which is based in Rome, Italy, is one of a number of international organizations focused on environment-food issues. It addresses nearly all the topics raised in the course, as well as many others. The statistical branch of the FAO, known as FAOSTATS, is an important source of information on the international dimension of issues involving food and the environment.

Numerous non-profit organizations are involved in environment-food issues in the United States and in other countries. One of these organizations in the U.S., which is called Food Tank [10], periodically provides the lists of other organizations that it considers leaders in environment-food issues. In 2014, for example, Food Tank named the "101 Organizations to Watch in 2014 [11]”. This interesting list, complete with brief descriptions, includes a number of both well-known and lesser-known groups active in environment-food issues. Other organizations have greatly expanded their environment-food focus. National Geographic, for example, now has a major focus on environment-food issues. Its website includes an important section on food and water within the organization’s initiative on EarthPulse: A Visual Guide to Global Trends. This section includes a number of excellent global maps of environmental and food conditions, challenges, and potential solutions.

These resources may be a help to you as you consider not just the learning resources we present in this text, but the real efforts to promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability in food systems, which you will address in the final section of the course and in your capstone project.

Formative Assessment: Environment and Food Issues

Instructions

Look over Food Tank's "101 organizations to Watch in 2014 [11]".

Choose one organization from this website that treats the combination of environment-and-food issues. You'll need to be selective since some of the organizations specialize in food-related issues but have little emphasis on environmental one. Also, read the assignment from Colin Sage, pp. 1-8 on "Introduction: Why environment and food? [1]" in Environment and Development that is one of the required readings for this module (see the assignments page)

Then,

1. Write a brief overview description of the organization you chose from the Foodtank [12] [12]website, its summary goals in relation to the environment and food issues - distinct from the more detailed description of issues and factors below, funding source or sources, location and scope (local, national, and/or global), longevity (including when it was founded), and what you perceive as its intended audience and/or client or target population.
2. After addressing these overview questions for the organization, continue and address briefly the following two questions where you can draw on the assigned reading from C. Sage:
   • What factors or issues of importance to environment-food systems does it address - a more complete elaboration of its summary goals in the previous overview? (1 paragraph)
   • How is sustainability defined and addressed by this organization? (1 paragraph)

Your writing should be between one and one and a half pages long, and no longer than two pages. When appropriate, you can relate the work of this organization to the other material in this introductory module regarding multidisciplinary approaches or the concept of the Anthropocene. Be sure to describe what types of environmental and food issues are being addressed by this organization, as well as the wider factors and sustainability questions.

Submitting Your Assignment

Please submit your assignment in Module 1 Formative Assessment in Canvas.

Grading Information and Rubric

Your assignment will be evaluated based on the following rubric. The maximum grade for the assignment is 25 points.

The Systems Concept

What defines a system?

In this course, we will refer to the term "system" repeatedly, so it is worthwhile to think about how systems are defined. A basic definition of a system is "a set of components and their relationships". Rather than dwelling on this definition in the abstract, it's probably best to immediately think of how the definition applies to real examples from this course. An ecosystem is a type of system you may have heard of, in which the components are living things like plants, animals, and microbes plus a habitat formed of natural, urban, and agricultural environments, and all the relationships among these component parts, with an emphasis on the interactions between the living parts of the system and their interactions, for example, food webs in which plants feed herbivores and herbivores feed carnivores. A food system, as we have just begun to see so far, consists of food production components like farms, farm fields, and orchards, along with livestock; food distribution chains including shipping companies and supermarkets, and consumers like you and your classmates, with myriad other components like regulatory agencies, weather and climate, and soils. In the case of food systems we have already pointed out how these can be considered as human-natural (alternatively, human-environment) systems, where it can help to see the system as composed of interacting human components (societies, companies, households, farm families) and natural components like water, soils, crop varieties, livestock, and agricultural ecosystems.

Fig. 1.2.1. A simplified diagram of a typical ecosystem. Ecosystems are a common system type analyzed by geoscientists, ecologists, and agroecologists. The black rectangular outline is one way to define a boundary for the ecosystem, where climate and sunlight fall outside the system but provide resources and define the conditions under which the ecosystem develops. This diagram can also be considered a type of concept map where for example 'sun', 'plants', and 'climate' are components, and the arrows connecting the components are relationships in the system. These relationships are now labeled as either flows (of energy, food, nutrients) or causal links, like the way that dead plants and animals end up feeding soil microbes, or the ecosystem affects the climate over time. You may be able to see how this simplified diagram could represent a far more complex system containing hundreds of plant and animal species and thousands of types of microbes, interacting in complex ways with each other and the environment. Keep this diagram in mind as a possible example when you think about completing your preliminary concept map of a regional food system at the end of unit 1.

Credit: Steven Vanek

Click for a text description of the ecosystem image.

A diagram of a typical ecosystem. Soil resources is on the bottom. The sun is at the top. There is a black line (ecosystem boundary) drawn around four boxes and the soil. The four boxes are carnivores (including humans), herbivores (including humans), plants, and microbes. Lines from carnivores, herbivores, and plants go to microbes and say "feed". There are "feed" lines from plants to herbivores and herbivores to carnivores. A line from the sun to inside the ecosystem boundary says, "sunlight energy for plants". A line from soil resources to microbes says, "supply nutrients, water, habitat. A line from microbes to soil resources says, "replenish and cycle nutrients". A line from soil resources to plants says, "supply nutrients and water stored in soils". Lines from plants to microbes and plants to soil resources say, "replenish organic matter". Outside the ecosystem boundary is "climatic conditions". A line from climatic conditions to the ecosystem says, "provides basic conditions, rainwater". A line from the ecosystem to climatic conditions says, "impacts on climate change".

Behavior of Complex Systems

Systems that contain a large number of components interacting in multiple ways (like an ecosystem, above, or the human-natural food systems elsewhere in this text) are often said to be complex. The word "complex" may have an obvious and general meaning from daily use (you may be thinking "of course it is complex! there are lots of components and relationships!") but geoscientists, ecologists, and social scientists mean something specific here: they are referring to ways that different complex systems, from ocean food webs to the global climate system, to the ecosystem of a dairy farm, display common types of behavior related to their complexity. Here are some of these types of behaviors:

• Positive and negative feedback: the change in a property of the system results in an amplification (positive feedback) or dampening (negative feedback) of that change. A recently considered example of positive feedback would be that as the arctic ocean loses sea ice with global warming, the ocean begins to absorb more sunlight due to its darker color, which accelerates the rate of sea ice melting.
• Many strongly interdependent variables: this property results in multiple causes leading to observed outputs, with unobserved properties of the system sometimes having larger impacts than we might expect.
• Resilience: Resilience will be discussed later in the course, but you can think of it here as a sort of self-regulation of complex systems in which they often tend to resist changes in a self-organized way, like the way your body attempts to always maintain a temperature of 37 C. Sometimes complex systems maintain themselves until they are pushed beyond a breaking point, after which they may change rapidly to another type of behavior.
• Unexpected and "emergent" behavior: one consequence of the above three properties is that complex systems can display unexpected outcomes, driven by positive feedbacks and unexpected relationships or unobserved variables. Sometimes this is referred to as "emergent" behavior when we sense that it would have been impossible to predict the behavior of the system even if we knew the "rules" that govern each component part.

To these more formal definitions of complex systems, we should add one more feature that we will reinforce throughout the course in describing food systems that combine human and natural systems, which is that drivers and impacts often cross the boundary between human or social systems and environmental or natural systems (recall Fig. 1.1.2). Our policies, traditions, and culture have impacts on earth's natural systems, and the earth's natural systems affect the types of human systems that develop, while changes in natural systems can cause changes in policies, traditions, and culture.

For more information on complex systems properties with further examples, see Developing Student Understanding of Complex Systems in Geosciences [13], from the On the Cutting Edge [14] program.

On the next page, we'll see an interesting example of complex system behavior related to the food system in India.

Complex Systems Behavior: An Example from India

The Indian Vulture Crisis: An Example of Complex Systems Behavior

The "Indian Vulture Crisis" may or not be a familiar term to you, but it is important enough to the history of modern India that it has involved dozens of research experts as well as major changes in wildlife, human health, and government policies, and now has its own Wikipedia page (Indian vulture crisis [15]) that you can browse. It is also an interesting example of complex systems behavior that involves food systems and unintended consequences of veterinary care for animals. The main causal links are outlined below in figure 1.2.2, and the narrative of the crisis goes as follows:

Beef cattle are hugely important to Indian food systems even though they are usually not consumed by adherents of the majority Hindu religion (however, Indian Christians and Muslims, for example, do consume beef). Cattle are also widely used as dairy animals (think: yogurt and clarified butter as important parts of Indian cuisine) and are even more important as traction animals (oxen) to till soil for all-important food crops by small-scale farmers across India. Because of their importance and to treat inflammation and fevers in cattle, in the 1990s the drug diclofenac was put into widespread use across India. However, timed with the release of this medication, a precipitous drop in the population of Indian vultures began, which became the fastest collapse of a bird population ever recorded. Vultures are not valued in many parts of the world, but scavenging by vultures was the main way that dead animal carcasses were cleared from Indian communities, especially in the case of beef cattle where the meat is not consumed. It was not until the 2000s that the cause of vulture population collapse was discovered to be the diclofenac medicine administered to cattle, which is extremely toxic to vultures eating dead carcasses. However, the consequences of this population collapse did not end with the solving of the mystery of the vulture population collapse, which was already a tragic and unforeseen consequence. Rather, the fact that vultures are a key part of a complex system resulted in further unforeseen consequences in both human and natural parts of the Indian food system. A few of these are shown in figure 1.2.2 below: first, since vultures are in fact an ideal scavenger that creates a "dead end" for human pathogens in rotting carcasses, and since they were no longer present, water supplies suffered greater contamination from carcasses that took months instead of weeks to rot, leading to greater human illness. Second, populations of rats and dogs, which are less effective carcass scavengers, expanded in response to these carcasses and the lack of competition from vultures, which resulted in dramatic increases in rabies (and other diseases) due to larger dog and rat populations and human contact with wild dogs. This is significant since more than half of the world's human rabies deaths occur in India. Finally, the vulture crisis even had implications for religious rituals in India: people of the Parsi faith, who practice an open-air "sky burial" of their dead where the body is consumed by vultures, were forced to abandon the practice because of hygiene concerns when human bodies took months instead of weeks to decompose. A final consequence of these problems was that the drug diclofenac was banned from use in India, Nepal, and Pakistan in hopes of helping vulture populations to revive. This final turn of events is an example of the human system responding to the unforeseen consequences. Additionally, alternatives to these drugs have been developed for veterinary use that have no toxicity to vultures.

Figure 1.2.2. Diagram of the causal chain leading to the Indian Vulture Crisis. This crisis contains several examples of complex system behavior and unforeseen consequences.

Credit: Steven Vanek

Click for a text description of the causal chain image.

A diagram using boxes to show the causal chain leading to the Indian Vulture Crisis. Box 1: Cattle as essential milk and traction animals in the food system. An arrow goes from box 1 to box 2: Veterinary use of diclofenac (diclofenac highly toxic to vultures). An arrow goes from Box 2 to Box 3: Collapse of vulture populations. From box 3 there are two arrows. One leads to a comment box that says, "Banning of diclofenac and alternative developed in India, Nepal, and Pakistan." The second arrow from box 3 leads to box 4: Crisis of unconsumed carcasses. A comment box that says, "vultures as honored, efficient, and most sanitary practical method of carcass disposal", also has an arrow to box 4. From box 4 there are three arrows pointing towards comment boxes as follows: dogs and rat populations expand; lack of vultures for ritual consumption of bodies in Parsi faith; contamination of drinking water in rural areas. There is also an arrow from, dogs and rat populations expand, to a comment box that says, greater incidence of rabies.

Note the properties of complex systems and human-natural systems exhibited by this example. Farmers sought mainly to protect their cattle from inflammation and speed healing in service of the food system, while pharmaceutical companies sought to profit from a widespread market for an effective medication. The additional, cascading effects of the human invention diclofenac, however, were dramatic, far-ranging, and in some cases unexpected, because of the many interacting parts in the food systems and ecosystems of Indian rural areas: cattle, groundwater, wild dogs, and human pathogens like rabies. The crisis eventually provoked responses from the human system, with impacts on human burial practices among the Parsi, laws banning diclofenac, and development of alternative medications. The search for sustainability in food systems, like those you will think about for your capstone regions, involves designing and choosing adequate human responses to complex system behavior.

Complex Systems and Interdisciplinarity

One final note on this example is to point out that to fully understand the Indian vulture crisis a large number of different disciplines were brought to bear: we need cultural knowledge about the beliefs and practical usefulness of both cattle and vultures in India. We also need biological knowledge about drug toxicity to wildlife, pathogens, groundwater contamination by microbes, and rat and dog populations. We also need policy expertise to think about transitioning food systems to less toxic alternatives to current practices. And all of these disciplines needed to be brought together in an integrated whole to assemble the diagram shown in figure 1.2.2. The purpose of this text and this course on food systems is to help you to develop some of the skills needed for this sort of interdisciplinary analysis of human-environment or human-natural systems.

Food Systems as Human-Natural Systems

Food System Examples from Household Gardens to Communities and Global Food Systems

Some of you in this course, perhaps even many of you, have had the experience of growing herbs or vegetables (Fig. 1.2.3) or keeping chickens for eggs or animals for meat. Although dwarfed by the enormous dimensions of the global food system, home food production is still a significant part of the food consumed by billions of earth's inhabitants. In other cases, small-scale fishing and hunting provide highly nutrient-dense foods, and coexist with modernized and industrial food systems, as any fishers and hunters in the class may be able to attest. These experiences of food production for personal or family consumption show natural-human interactions in a very simple way. To grow vegetables or hunt or raise animals means bringing together natural factors (seed, animal breeds, soil, water, fishing and hunting ranges, etc.) and also human factors (e.g. knowledge of plants, livestock, or wild animals, government policies) to gain access to food, as well as food storage and preparation, markets for tools and seeds, or human-built infrastructures like a garden fence or a chicken coop. This same interaction between natural and human factors is evident at a larger scale in the photo in Figure 1.2.4, which shows a landscape that has been transformed by a human community for food production.

Figure 1.2.3. This diverse home garden includes lettuce, kale, beans, sweet corn, peppers, squash, carrots, and garlic, among other crops. During the growing season, it offsets food expenses in an urban setting and offers extremely fresh food as well as an excellent way to recycle kitchen wastes as compost.

Credit: Steven Vanek

Fig. 1.2.4. Landscape near Acobamba, Huancavelica, Peru. This Peruvian landscape has been almost completely transformed for food (and firewood) production.

Credit: Steven Vanek

Beyond these experiences of auto-sufficient food production and consumption, however, most of humanity also currently depends on global and local versions of the food system which features a web of suppliers, producers, transporters, and marketers that supply all of us as food consumers. Compared to gardening, catching trout, or keeping chickens, these food systems together form a far more complex version of the interactions between natural and human factors that produce and transport the food that we then consume as part of global and local food systems.

One way of viewing these regional and global food systems is that they can be divided by the type of activity in relation to food, and dividing them into components of food production, food transport, and food consumption (Fig. 1.2.5). Like other diagrams we've seen so far, this diagram can be considered a concept map showing relationships between the different components of a food system. The main arrows show the flow of food through the system from the managed natural environments used to produce food and the end result of nutrition and health outcomes. There are some unseen or implicit relationships here as well, like the way that farming practices, technology, communication and education, and other attributes of human societies support the functioning of a food system, and are included in the outer system boundary.

Figure 1.2.5. A simplified diagram of food system components, depicting a linear progression of production, transportation, and consumption of food. It’s helpful to think of this more linear version in conjunction with the interacting natural and human and systems in figure 1.2.6 to remember that food systems are not just linear conveyor belts delivering outcomes.

Credit: Figure adapted from Combs et al., 1996.

Click for a text description of the food system component image.

Simplified diagram of food system components. The diagram is within a circle. At the top, is the heading, Natural Resources, and Environments. From here is an arrow pointing directly below to an oval with the word, Production. From Production, there is an arrow pointing directly below to another oval with the word, Transport. From Transport, there is an arrow pointing directly below to a final oval with the word, Consumption. From the consumption oval, an arrow leads direction below it to Nutrition and Health Outcomes. On the left side of the circle are the following items listed from top to bottom: Farming Practices and Agroecology; Food Processing; Policy support; and Food Preparation. On the right side of the circle are the following items listed from top to bottom: Technology and Infrastructure; Crop and Livestock Breeding and Biodiversity and Communication and Education.

In addition to this more linear or "conveyer belt" portrayal of food systems delivering nutrition from natural resources, we may also be interested in thinking about the dramatic impacts humans have made on earth systems during the Anthropocene, discussed in module 1.1. In that light, we know that these natural systems may either be sustained or degraded by management, an important response that either maintains or undermines the entire food system. For this purpose, we may be interested in a food system diagram that makes the interactions among human and natural systems very explicit. Below in figure 1.2.6 is a version of a Coupled Human-Natural Systems diagram -- again, a concept map of sorts -- developed by an interdisciplinary group of social and environmental scientists (Liu et al. 2007) to represent the human-environment interactions in food systems.

Figure 1.2.6. A food system as a Coupled Human-Natural System, a way of considering food systems that will be explored throughout the course. This more detailed presentation compared to that in module 1.1 shows that both human systems (communities, regions, food supply chains) and natural systems (agroecosystems, landscapes, water bodies) have internal interactions. Human systems also organize and modify natural systems to produce food, and natural systems respond via feedbacks (food provision, aggradation or degradation depending on the human modification and management of the natural systems.

Credit: Steven Vanek and Karl Zimmerer; modified from the National Science Foundation.

Click for a text description of the Human Natural Coupling image.

A coupled human-natural system. Heading at the top says, Human to natural coupling: Human systems reorganize natural systems to produce food: e.g. gardens, farms, fisheries, managed forests. Below this heading are two boxes, side by side. On the left is a box with the heading, Human System. Outside of the box is a descriptor that says, human system internal interactions. There are two lists inside the box on the left. The first list is Farms, farming households; food policies; food distribution companies, consumers. The second list is management knowledge for farming, herding, hunting, fishing, etc.; local and national governments; agriculture input companies. Inside this box are arrows indicating a continuous relationship among the listed items. On the right side is a box with the heading, Natural System. Outside the box is a descriptor that says, natural system internal interactions. There are two lists inside the box. The first list is plants and animals (crops, livestock, pests, wild species); soils. The second list is the climate system and water. Below the two boxes is the heading Natural to Human Coupling: Altered ecosystems respond with food production, degradation, sustained production. There are arrows around the entire diagram indicating the continuous relationship among all items.

This diagram highlights internal interactions within both the natural and human components of the food system. The natural components of food systems shown here are those we will tackle first in the first part of the course, while the latter half of the course will address the human system aspects of food systems and human-environment interactions shown as the large arrows connecting these two major components. As we saw in comparing home garden production, smallholder production landscapes and global food production chains above, food systems and their components are highly varied. However many similarities apply across the different components, actors, and environments of the food system:

• Food systems modify the natural environment and capture the productivity of the earth’s natural systems to supply food to human populations. Globally they create huge changes in the earth’s surface and its natural populations and processes.
• As portrayed in Figure 1.2.6, despite their complexity, food systems often involve coupling between human management and the response of natural systems. As pointed out by author Colin Sage in Module 1.1, the response of natural systems to human management can create sustainability challenges in food systems.
• Food systems involve the production, transportation, distribution, and consumption of food (Figure 1.2.5). The scale of these three processes can differ among food systems, which can be local, regional, and global.
• Food systems are examples of complex systems: they involve many interacting human and natural components, as well as important variability, for example, droughts, soil erosion, population changes, and migration, and changing policies. All of these affect the natural and human systems and can disrupt simple cause and effect relationships, in spite of the large-scale drivers and feedbacks shown in figure 1.2.6.

Knowledge Check

Module 1 Summative Assessment Overview

Summative Assessment: Concept Mapping and Assessment of Food Systems

First, download the worksheet [16] to understand and complete the assessment. This assignment will require you to draw on your reading of this online text from module one, as well as several options for case studies where we have provided brief descriptions and audiovisual resources (radio clips, videos, photos) that describe these systems. You will accomplish two parts of an assignment that will not only evaluate the learning objectives for module one but will also give you practice in skills you will need to complete your capstone project. These two parts are:

1. Draw a concept map of the system that distinguishes between human and natural components or sections of the system (an example is given below)
2. Fill in a table that identifies some key components, relationships, and sustainability concerns for this system.

You will complete this assignment for your choice of two food system examples, as described in the detailed instructions below. You will first read, then draw a concept map, and then fill in a table with short responses.

Instructions

1. Choose ONE national to global food system example and ONE local to regional food system example from the options that follow this assignment page in the text (see links in outline view at right, or the link to the next page at the bottom of this page). National to global food system examples are Pennsylvania Dairy, Colorado Beef Production, and Peruvian Asparagus, while local to regional examples are the Peruvian smallholder production and New York City greenmarkets examples. Read the descriptions of the system, which may include photos, videos, audio clips, or visiting other websites. Completely read through the description of the two systems you have chosen (one national/global and one local/regional), including these external links before continuing on to the following steps (though you may certainly return to the descriptions as needed). You are welcome to consult other resources online regarding the system you have chosen since that is a skill that will be helpful when embarking on data gathering for your capstone project.
2. Using a sheet of paper, or composing in PowerPoint, develop a concept map of only ONE of the systems you chose, subject to the following guidelines:
   1. Title your concept map with the name of the system you are describing (among the five described on the following pages) and put your name on the diagram.
   2. Before you begin your concept map, draw a vertical line in your diagram to distinguish between Human and Natural components of the system to right and left, drawing on Fig. 1.2.6, 1.2.7 below, and 1.1.3 (the last one is the concept map example from the guided introductory reading by Colin Sage). However, you do not need to make your diagram look like the highly schematic diagrams in the text of the previous pages (see rather Fig. 1.2.7 below) -- you should include components that are discussed in the examples on the following pages, and connect them in the way that makes sense to you.
   3. Your concept map should be legible, but it does not need to be extremely neat since it reflects a first attempt to characterize a system. Additional components and relationships will occur to you as you draw, and you may need to squeeze them in. Therefore, leave space as you begin your diagram. If you feel your map becoming too hard to understand, please do compose a second "clean" copy.
   4. Remember that systems are defined as components and the relationships between them. If you are having trouble thinking of what to draw, think what the components are in the system (these can be boxes or ovals), and then how they are related (these may be labeled arrows)
   5. Below in Fig. 1.2.7 is an example of a concept map drawn from a food production system producing field crops (wheat, oats, barley, soybeans) and hogs for pork in Western France. Material for this concept map is drawn from Billen et al., 2012, "Localising the nitrogen footprint of the Paris food supply"¹
      

      Fig 1.2.7. Example concept map of a food production system, divided into human and natural components.

      Credit: Sketch by Steven Vanek
3. Fill in the table on the worksheet [16] with short answer responses regarding the two food systems you have chosen. The worksheet asks for responses in the following areas:
   1. Identify two natural components of the food system.
   2. Identify three human components of the food system.
   3. Tell how products from the system are transported to markets or to households for consumption.
   4. Name one sustainability challenge for the system, and state whether it represents a challenge in the area of environmental, social, or economic sustainability.

Once complete, use the worksheet as a guide to complete the Summative Assessment quiz. 

Early Hunter-Gatherer Modifications of Environment for Food

Hunting and gathering activities were the primary way for humans to feed themselves from their natural environments for over 90% of human history. Gathering plant products, such as seeds, nuts, and leaves, is considered to have been the primary activity in these early human-natural food systems, with hunting mostly secondary. The mix of hunting-gathering activities and the tools used varied according to the environment. Among many hunter-gatherer groups worldwide fire was one of the most important tools and was used widely. Fire was used by these human social systems to transform natural systems in habitats ranging from grasslands and open forests, such as those of Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, to those of denser forests that included the Amazon rain forest of South America. One importance of fire was that it helped enable hunter-gatherers to “domesticate the landscape” so that it yielded more of the desired plants through gathering and the sought-after animals through hunting.

Fire also was and is crucial in enabling humans to cook food. Cooking rendered animals and many plants into forms that humans were significantly more able to digest. The capacity to cook foods through the use of fire----which was obtained through gathering and hunting---may have arisen as long ago as 1.8 – 1.9 million years ago at about the same general time as the emergence of our ancestral species Homo erectus on the continent of Africa. (Homo erectus subsequently evolved to Homo sapiens, our own species, about 200,000 years ago). These early humans were able to extract significantly more energy from food as a result of cooking. In short, cooking enabled through the use of fire, produced chemical compounds in food that were more digestible and energy-dense. While the changes and challenges of human diets and nutrition continued to evolve---they are a focus of Module 3 —this early shift to cooking through the use of fire was one of the most influential in our history.

Hunter-gatherer peoples are assumed to have used thousands of different types of plant species and, at the least, hundreds of different animal species. In many cases, the impact on the environment or natural systems was only slight or moderate, since population densities were low and their use of the environment was dispersed. Populations were relatively small and technology was fairly rudimentary. In a few cases, environmental impacts were significant, such as the use of fire as discussed above. Hunting pressure also could have led to significant environmental impacts. It is hypothesized that hunting by groups in North America contributed to the extinction of approximately two-thirds of large mammal species at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000-12,000 years ago. The human role in this extinction episode, referred to as the Pleistocene Overkill Hypothesis, was combined with the effects of other changes. Climate and vegetation changes in particular also impacted the populations of these large mammals and made them more vulnerable to hunting pressure.

We know less about the societies and social structure (human systems) of these groups. However, work with recent and present-day hunter-gatherers suggests they had high levels of egalitarianism since livelihood responsibilities are widely shared and not easily controlled by single individuals or small groups within these groups. One thing we do now know is that hunter-gatherers have been related to agricultural peoples in a number of ways. A first and obvious way is that in the history of human groups and food systems, "we" were all hunter-gatherers once, and across a wide range of environments agriculturalists emerged from hunting and gathering in their origin. Another is that hunter-gatherers sometimes coexist with agriculturalists and may even have conducted rudimentary trade. Last, there are even cases of hunting and gathering emerging from agricultural groups. In Africa and South America, for example, the Bantu or Bushmen (in southern Africa) and the Gi (in present-day Brazil) are thought to have been agriculturalists prior to assuming hunter-gatherer lifestyles. These changes presumably owed to lessening population densities and the opportunity for more feasible livelihoods through hunting and gathering given the circumstances these peoples faced. This re-emergence of hunting and gathering is an excellent example of the sort of human natural-coupling we consider in this module and apply to the history of food systems: the social factor of lessening population densities, and perhaps something the re-emergence of more wild ecosystems in natural landscapes, allowed these agriculturalists to re-adopt hunting and gathering, with consequent changes in the natural systems.

The Nature and Timing of Agricultural Domestication: Global Patterns

The origins of agriculture as the predominant mode of food production were dependent on the domestication of plants and animals. Domestication refers to the evolution of plants and animals into types that humans cultivate or raise; conversely domesticated types can no longer exist in the wild. Domestication and the social and environmental transformation that accompanied them are closely related to the Anthropocene and represent one of the most pivotal experiences ever, both of earth’s environments and in our history and evolution as a species. Domestication has been and is widely studied by interdisciplinary environmental and agricultural fields as well as various disciplines such as archaeology, biology, geography, genetics, and agronomy.

A couple of common definitions of domestication will help to underscore the importance of this concept. In a 1995 book on The Emergence of Agriculture, the archaeologist Bruce Smith defines domestication as “the human creation of a new form of plant or animal---one that is definitely different from its wild relatives and extant wild relatives”. In 2002 in the scientific journal Nature the geographer, Jared Diamond writes that an animal or plant domesticate is “bred in captivity [or in a field] and thereby modified from its wild ancestors in ways making it more valuable to humans its reproduction and food supply [nutrients in the case of plant domesticates]” (page 700). In other words, plant and animal domesticates have lost most or all the capacity to reproduce long-term populations in the wild---thus making domesticated populations of plants or animals different than ones that have been simply tamed or brought into cultivation on a one-time basis as single organisms. Expanding beyond these definitions, you can read more about domestication at National Geographic: domestication [27].

Figure 2.1.1. Grains and ears of the wild ancestor of maize, teosinte, domesticated in the area of present-day Mexico about 6000 years ago (left), a comparison of the plant and seedstalk of teosinte and modern maize (center), and size comparison of teosinte and maize ears (right). Note the relatively large seeds of teosinte that may have called attention to early plant domesticators as a useful species for a staple food, and the true size comparison of the two ears at far right that shows the dramatic increase in size accomplished through domestication and breeding.

Credit: Teosinte photo (left), Matt Lavin; Teosinte/Maize comparison diagram (center), Biosciences for farming in Africa (B4FA) [30]; size comparison photo (right), Hugh Iltis.

A great deal is now known about the nature of domestication and its timing, in addition to the place of origin of many domesticated crops and animals (covered on the next page). Illustrating the multiple disciplines needed to understand the history of food systems, this information owes to evidence and analysis in archaeology; biology, ecology, and agronomy; geography; anthropology; and genetics. For one, the domesticates in general, and our most important domesticated crops and animals in particular---such as wheat, rice, corn (maize), barley, potatoes, sorghum, cattle, pigs, and sheep, are recognized to have evolved from wild plants and animals that were selected, gathered, and brought back to camp by hunter-gatherers. Second, while a broad spectrum of wild plant and animal foods were being gathered and hunted prior to domestication the origins of agriculture represented a bottleneck. The effect of this bottleneck was that the number of major domesticates that became available to humans numbered in the several dozens, but not the thousands. Third, well-established demonstration of the actual dates of domestication varied from 8,000 - 10,000 years ago in the Near East (the Fertile Crescent of present-day Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria) and China to the broad window of 4,000-8,000 years ago in several of the other world regions discussed next.

Domestication of plants and animals has been framed by many experts in terms of a " domestication syndrome" which refers to a set of traits or "syndrome" that are common to domesticates. Syndrome traits are ones that should be easy to remember because these traits confer usefulness to humans. In plants, for example, wild relatives may have shattering seed pods, where a seed is dropped on the ground as it ripens, while domesticates generally keep their seed on the plant to give humans greater convenience in harvesting. There are also dramatic increases in seed and inflorescence size in many plant domesticates in relation to wild relatives (e.g.. Fig. 2.1.1), as well as decreases in bitter or toxic substances that make food crops generally more appealing and nutritious to humans (and sometimes to wild herbivores as well, which then become pests!). Plant domesticates are generally less sensitive to day length as a requirement for flowering and reproduction, which means they complete their life cycles and produce grain and other products in a more predictable way for humans, and tend to have greater vigor as seedlings than wild relatives, which also follows from their larger seeds. In animals, the greater docility of animal pets and livestock, and traits such as floppy ears and general juvenile-type behavior of domesticated dogs are oft-cited examples of domestication syndrome. See if you can identify examples of these traits in the website presentation of domestication cited in the text above.

Geographical Sites and Ecological Components of Agricultural Domestication

Just as for the dates and historical processes that led to domestication, the sites of plant and animal domestication are known from a similar interdisciplinary mix of perspectives, from archaeology to genetics. The map in Figure 2.1.2 and Table 1 show current knowledge of seven important areas of early agriculture where the world’s major crops and animals were domesticated. The question of crop and livestock origins and movements presented in this module is still an active and interesting area of research and more remains to be discovered. Most important of these areas was the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris-Euphrates river system and surrounding uplands in Southwest Asia---present-day Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. This region was responsible for the domestication of several major crops (wheat, barley, oats) and almost all the major domesticated animals (cattle, sheep, goats, pigs) that are incorporated today into major food systems worldwide (for the definition of food system see module 1.2). Like other areas it also included domesticated plants in particular that were significant components of local food systems and diets---such as bitter vetch and chickpeas—that did not become major global staples. China, which we identify as a single geographic area, was responsible for the domestication of rice, soybeans, millet, and several other domesticates that included tree crops such as the peach. Pigs were domesticated independently in China, meaning the pig population there that evolved to domesticated forms was separate from that of the Fertile Crescent. It is likely that China contained two separate areas of major importance in our global overview: the Yangtze River basin and the Wei (Yellow) River valley.

Four other major world regions were also vitally important as sites of early agriculture and in the domestication of major crops and animals. Southeast Asia including New Guinea and the Pacific Islands is an expansive geographic area where staples such as various species of yam, citrus, bananas, and sugar cane were domesticated (see Table 1). A significant size region of sub-Saharan Africa was also quite important, contributing crops such as sorghum, coffee, and species of millet other than the ones domesticated in East Asia (see Table 1). Geographically this area of sub-Saharan Africa includes the savanna areas of West Africa as well as the highlands of Ethiopia and Kenya. Locally within this region, such domesticates as teff and fonio, a pair of grain crops, became highly regarded foodstuffs.

Figure 2.1.2. Map of the crop centers of origin as described by botanist and breeder Nikolai Vavilov: (1) Mexico-Guatemala, (2) Peru-Ecuador-Bolivia, (2A) Southern Chile, (2B) Southern Brazil, (3) Mediterranean, (4) Middle East, (5) Ethiopia, (6) Central Asia, (7) Indo-Burma, (7A) Siam-Malaya-Java, (8) China and Korea.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons: Vavilov-center (Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 [31])

In South America, the combination of the Andes mountains and the Amazon basin was an important area of early agriculture and domestication that included potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and manioc (or cassava). The Andes and Amazon also included many locally important domesticates such as quinoa and acai (the fruit of the acai palm) that recently have gained popularity as elements of global food systems. The area of Mexico (extending to the U.S. Southwest and southern Arizona in particular) and Central America is also important. This area’s contributions included corn (also known as maize) and domesticated species of bean, chili pepper, and squash in addition to the turkey. Eastern North America was also an important area of early agriculture though most domesticates there did not become familiar items in major contemporary food systems. Sunflower did though become relatively important and some of the domesticated plants of the northern parts of North America, such as cranberry and so-called Indian rice, did become moderately important foods.

At this juncture, it’s important to note some important points for understanding the environment-food interactions that arise from our discussion thus far of hunting-gathering, domestication, and early agriculture. This geographic and historical context highlights the importance of the independent establishment of early agriculture through domestication in multiple geographic areas across diverse world regions. Our description of current knowledge emphasizes the importance of seven world geographic areas, but other variants of this accounting are possible. Crop origin areas could potentially be more numerous, for example, if we counted additional distinct sub-areas of China, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South America. It is interesting that the major modern population centers, the Eastern United States and Northern Europe, seem to have been less important than other world regions in the domestication of the major staple grains and vegetables. As noted above, the question of crop origins and the relations of humans to crops via domestication, breeding, and knowledge of how to cultivate crops remains an active and fascinating area of research.

Our description also highlights the domestication of a handful of specific species of major crops (approximately 100 species) and major animal domesticates (14 species). These domesticated species are the same ones we still recognize today as the most valuable cornerstones of our current food systems as well as being central elements in their environmental impacts. When local crops and livestock are added the numbers of these domesticates is significantly higher (upwards of 500 species). Still, the number of species in this new agricultural biota paled in comparison to the thousands of species that have been the basis of human livelihoods in hunter-gatherer systems. In other words, early agriculture meant that humans narrowed their focus on a select group of species in the biotic world, namely the ones that were most productive and could be most feasibly and effectively produced and consumed. In doing so, humans intensified the level of interaction, knowledge, and cultural importance of these crop species as a fundamental human-natural relationship at the base of food systems from prehistory to the present day.

In a variety of subsequent units of this course, we will be considering the diversity of crops and animals in agriculture as we explore the agroecology and geosystems of food production (Section II) and the role of human-environment interactions amid such challenges as climate change, food security, human health, and environmental sustainability (Section III). In this module, we keep our focus on early agriculture and domestication. Our present focus will also require that we use the model of Coupled Natural-Human Systems (CNHS) through the remainder of Module 2.1 followed by continuation and expansion of this focus in the next module (Module 2.2) where we discuss a few of the major historical transformations leading to the world’s current situation with regard to the environment and food (Module 2.2).

Explaining Domestication using Coupled Human-Natural Systems (CHNS)

The Coupled Natural-Human Systems, which we introduced in Module one, can be used as a framework to explain domestication events and early agriculture in the history of food systems. This framework is sometimes used to think about the "why" question of domestication, for example, "why did human and natural systems come together at a particular time in different parts of the world, including the middle east, so that plants were domesticated and agriculture started?; Why not earlier, and why not later?". The framework can also be used to explore the history of food systems after domestication, which is the subject of module 2.2.

Review and Definitions: Drivers, Feedbacks, and Coevolution

You probably recall from module 1.2 that systems are assemblages of components and the relations between them. Two basic relations that can occur within systems, and that you likely included in your concept map of a food system example (summative evaluation 1.2) were those of a driver and a feedback relation. As you may already suspect, drivers are those processes or changes that can be said to impel or cause changes in other parts of a system, somewhat like a volume knob that causes the volume of music to increase in a room. In the example of the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis from module 2.1, for example, human hunting is thought of (hypothesized) as a dominant human system driver that eliminates the possibility of hunter-gatherers to easily find food, so that they may have been forced to develop early forms of agriculture. Excessive hunting is the driver, and collapsing prey animal populations, and eventually, domestication are responses. Meanwhile, feedback processes are those that can be said to be self-strengthening or self-damping (see module 1.2), and in the case of domestication, also may involve multi-driver processes where a response to a driver is another process that serves to strengthen both processes (positive feedback) or diminish the change (negative feedback). For example, as you will see in the next module, a common dynamic around the emergence of agriculture could be the coming together of excessive hunting, changing climate with worsening conditions for both wild game and crops, and the expansion of human settlements that may have also degraded the land. This combination of human and natural drivers could all tend to drive increased areas under cultivation to deal with the lack of food from hunting, and later the lack of food from soil degradation. A positive feedback emerges when the expansion of agriculture itself begins to change the climate, further eliminate prey, or reduce food availability from soil degradation. These processes would be thus said to interact as a positive feedback on domestication and the emergence and continuing expansion of agriculture. The diagram below (fig. 2.1.3) shows these potential drivers and feedback processes. the basic-level illustration shows the coupling of these two systems.

Figure 2.1.3 General Diagram of Coupled Natural-Human Systems (CNHS) illustrating potential drivers and feedback processes from human to natural systems and from natural to human systems (blue ovals show examples of these processes). It is understood from module 1 that the human and natural systems themselves consist of multiple social and environmental components, but are represented as solid blocks here for simplicity.

Credit: adapted by Karl Zimmerer and Steven Vanek from a diagram designed by the National Science Foundation Coupled Natural-Human Systems Program

Click for a text description of the Human Natural System image.

Diagram of coupled natural-human systems. At the top of the diagram is the heading "Human to natural drivers and feedbacks: Human system causes changes in the natural system and strengthens existing changes". At the bottom of the diagram is the heading "Natural to Human drivers and feedbacks: Natural system causes change in the human system and strengthens existing changes". From Human System, the arrow flows to an oval with the following items inside: Hunting, Domestication, Fire, Expansion of land under tillage and food crops, City building. There is another arrow from Natural System to an oval with the following items inside: Long-term drought or rainfall increases, Climate warming or cooling, Collapse of wildfire or plant populations. The arrows represent a continuous relationship.

In Figure 2.1.3, then, the human factors that can change the environment we will refer to as “Human Drivers” or “Human Responses” of the CNHS model. The environmental factors that influence humans are referred to as “Environmental Drivers” or “Environmental Feedbacks.” As illustrated below with examples, the CNHS model describes the combined, interlocked changes of human behaviors and societies, on the one hand, and environmental systems including the plants and animals under domestication, on the other hand. This model is also referred to as a coevolutionary model since the drivers and feedbacks, including intentional and unintentional changes, influence subsequent states and the resulting development of the human-environment food system.

An initial, specific example: Why did agriculture emerge at the end of the ice age?

Before using these diagrams in Module 2.2 to explain the history of food systems (including the summative assessment which asks you to diagram some of these relationships yourselves), we'll illustrate the concept of drivers, feedbacks, and the coevolutionary emergence of food systems using a very specific diagram about the emergence of agriculture in Fig. 2.

Figure 2.1.4 Specific example of a coupled human-natural system in a transition from hunting and gathering to domestication and early agriculture, showing what are thought to be a dominant driver (climate change) and a human response that created positive feedbacks in strengthening the transition to agriculture (densification and social organization of human settlements near water sources)

Credit: National Science Foundation Coupled Natural-Human Systems Program

Click for a text description of the Human Natural System image.

Specific examples of coupled natural-human systems. At the top of the diagram is the heading "Human to natural drivers and feedbacks: Human system causes changes in the natural system and strengthens existing changes". At the bottom of the diagram is the heading "Natural to Human drivers and feedbacks: Natural system causes change in the human system and strengthens existing changes". An arrow from Natural System to an oval with the following: 1. Change to warmer climates and more seasonal precipitation, including vegetation changes (late Pleistocene and early Holocene, i.e. end of ice ages). From Human System, the arrow flows to an oval with the following: 2. Increase in the size and density of human population near water and increased social complexity and demand for agricultural products. The arrows represent a continuous relationship.

The "story" of this diagram is as follows: First, climate change is one of the main environmental drivers that influenced early agriculture and domestication. At the end of the Pleistocene, the geologic epoch that ended with the last Ice Age, there was a worldwide shift toward warmer, drier, and less predictable climates relative to the preceding glacial period (Fig. 2.1.4, oval (1)). This climate shift that began in the Late Pleistocene resulted from entirely natural factors. Hunter-gatherer populations are documented to have been significantly influenced by this climate change. For example, many hunter-gatherer populations responded to this climate change by increasing the size and density of human populations near water sources such as river channels and oases (Figure 2.1.4, oval (2)). This climate change also led to the evolution of larger seed size within plants themselves (especially those plants known as annuals that grow each year from seed), which are summarized as part of the vegetation changes noted in Fig. 2.1.4. It may have also selected for annual plants being more apparent parts of natural environments in dry climates these humans inhabited, since surviving only one season as an annual plant, and setting seed that survives a dry period is one evolutionary response in plants to dry climates (see module 6 for the concept of annual and perennial life cycles). The driving factor of climate change thus led to responses in plants and human societies that are hypothesized to have acted as drivers for domestication and early agriculture. The driver of climate change is also thought to have concentrated the populations of the ancestors of domesticated animals. Their concentrated populations would have better-enabled humans to take the first steps toward animal domestication. Recognizing the importance of climate change we single it out as the main driver in Figure 2.1.4, though doubtless there were other interacting drivers.

Influential Human Drivers included such factors as population (demographic) pressure and socioeconomic demands for food and organization of food distribution were also highly important in contributing to the domestication of plants and animals and the rise of early agriculture (Figure 2.1.4, oval (2)). This pair of factors is also referred to as human to natural drivers, as shown in the diagram. The influence of human demographic pressure was felt through the fact that settlements were becoming more permanently established and densely populated toward the end of the Pleistocene. People in these settlements would have been inclined to bring wild plants with good harvest and eating qualities into closer proximity, and thus take the first steps toward agriculture.

Socioeconomic factors are also considered important as Human Drivers in early agriculture and domestication. As hunter-gatherer groups became more permanently settled in the Late Pleistocene they evolved into more socially and economically complex groups. Socioeconomic complexity is generally associated with the demands for more agricultural production in order to support a non-agricultural segment of the population as well as for the use of the ruling groups within these societies. The emergence of this social organization, and higher population density, combined with the ability to feed larger populations with newly domesticated grains, are plausible as a powerful positive feedback that served to continue and strengthen the course of domestication and agriculture. Continued climate change associated with the expansion of farmed areas, and potentially soil degradation from farming that necessitated even larger land areas and/or more productive domesticated crops (see module 5), would have been additional feedback forces that strengthened the emergence of agriculture. Therefore, drivers and feedbacks are one way to answer the "when and why" questions around the start of agriculture, as a coevolution of human society with changing climate and vegetation. The concepts of drivers, feedbacks and coevolution will be further explored in module 2.2, to explain other stages and transitions in the history of food systems.

From the Origins of Agriculture to Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of Food 

Introduction

The development of agriculture as part of food systems in the Anthropocene began with domestication and has continued across millennia among diverse peoples inhabiting a wide variety of the earth’s environments (e.g. the Mediterranean region, the Indus River Valley; southern South America; the Congo River basin; the Island now called Sumatra, and many other highly varied landscapes). The history of agriculture also includes the present: domesticated plants and animals, as well as agricultural management, continues to change. In module 2.2 we will divide an overview of this complex history into four general periods:

1. Domestication/Early farming (10,000 BP-4,000 BP);
2. Independent States, Small Groups, World Trade, and Global Colonial Empires (4,000 BP – 1800/1900 CE);
3. Modern Industrial Agriculture (1800/1900 CE – Present);
4. Recent Quasi-Parallel Agricultural Types and Possible Next Phase (2000 – Present): Agroecological Modernization (e.g., Organic) and Local Environment-Food Systems.

Each of these categories lumps together a lot of variation with regard to the specifics of agriculture and coupled human-natural food systems, and if you have the chance to read in more detail about these phases of the Anthropocene, you'll find a significant and interesting amount of variation among different places and time periods (see the additional readings at the end of the unit).

To continue describing the environment-food systems of each of these four periods, we recall that in module 2.1 we described the long period of hunter-gatherer activities and environment-food systems, which comprised well over 90% of the history of humans as a cultural species. We also looked at plausible drivers and feedbacks in the origins of agriculture and domestication. Here in Module 2.2. We’ll pick up the thread of the environmental and social transformations represented by agricultural origins and domestication. We note that early agriculture, and perhaps a later stage of agricultural development marked the transition to the Anthropocene epoch in which humans became a dominant force in transforming earth's surface and natural systems (see module 1 regarding the Anthropocene).

Key terms and concepts for the history and development of food systems

After its first origins, agriculture spread worldwide through a process known as spatial diffusion. The spatial diffusion of agriculture involved individuals and groups of people gaining access to the ideas, information, and materials of agriculture and other innovations through physical relocation and social interactions. Spatial diffusion can occur through local individual-level human observation and the exchanges of goods and information as well as long-distance trade and organized activities (e.g. group-level decisions to adopt a new planting technology). A brief description and examples of spatial diffusion in early agriculture are given in Table 2.2.1. While agriculture was developed independently in each of the different world geographic areas roughly corresponding to centers of crop domestication (Module 2.1, Figure 2.NN), agriculture then spread widely out of these early centers in a way that was highly influential. Agriculture's diffusion from the Near East to Europe, for example, transformed a wide range of environments and societies. As discussed more below, the spread of crops themselves was often transformative for the environment-food systems to which these domesticates arrived. For example, all the major cuisines we know today rely on food ingredients that were made available as the result of spatial diffusion For example, foods originally from Mexico, such as tomatoes, chili peppers, and maize transformed environment-food systems globally beginning in the 1500s, spreading as far as Africa, India, and China.

The geographic spread of agriculture created both similarities and differences across space and time. On the one hand, sharing the same food crops and sometimes agricultural techniques created commonalities among environment-food systems. The current environment-food system of the country of Peru, for example, is rooted to a large degree in the connections that were forged through spatial diffusion during the Inca Empire that ruled between roughly 1400 and 1532 of the Common Era (CE). On the other hand, differences in environment-food systems also evolved over time as crops and food were subject to the human and natural system influences in each new site to which agriculture spread. One of the main reasons for these differences was the role of people in adapting agriculture to different environments and sociocultural systems.

A few concepts in addition to spatial diffusion are central to understanding the spread of agriculture and its importance, and we introduce them here. These concepts -- adaptation, agrodiversity, and niche construction -- are briefly described with examples in Table 2.2.1, and the term Anthropocene is also reviewed from the standpoint of its relation to early agriculture. The first of these, adaptation, refers broadly to the way in which humans use technical and social skills and strategies to respond to the newness or changes of environmental and/or human systems (e.g. droughts, hillier topography or increased rainfall as crops moved to new areas, climate change). Adaptation and adaptive capacity of human society are a major focus of Module 11.

The use of agrodiversity was also vital to the spread of early agriculture. Agrodiversity is described by the geographer Harold Brookfield and the anthropologist Christine Padoch as human management of the diversity of environments in agriculture and food-growing. Brookfield and Padoch use agrodiversity to describe indigenous farming practices among native peoples, but all knowledgeable farmers actively make use of agrodiversity, even if the technologies may differ greatly. Managing diverse agricultural environments was essential since early farmers produced domesticated plants and animals under new and different conditions. The third concept is that of niche construction, meaning that agriculturalists (and hunter-gatherers) shaped food-growing environments (“niches”) through constructing fields and all kinds of other activities. As a result, adaptation occurring across the wide geographic and historical evolution of environment-food systems involves responses to a range of factors that include both natural ones and those resulting from human activities.

The development of agriculture through the four periods mentioned above has resulted and continues to incur, a wide range of both environmental and social impacts that will be mentioned in the following pages of this module. Environmentally these impacts have altered the biogeophysical systems of our planet, including the land, water, atmosphere, and biodiversity of the earth. As mentioned the idea of the Anthropocene epoch---a distinct geologic epoch defined by drastic human modifications of the earth’s environmental systems---is often tied to agricultural activities. Global environmental sustainability, whether the earth’s systems are operating within limits that will enable long-term functioning, is fundamentally influenced through agriculture, as you’ll see in this module and all the ones to follow.

Period 1: Domestication, Early Farming, and Widespread Impacts (10,000 BP - 4,000 BP) 

We will start our historical summary of environment-food systems by describing domestication and early farming (10,000 BP – 4,000 BP). Widespread environmental and social impacts occurred during this period. New agricultural ecosystems were created and spread along with the use of domesticated plants and animals. These agroecosystems contained distinctive species and populations of plants and animals including domesticates, as well as characteristic insects, mammals, soil biota, and uncultivated plants (such as weeds). In many places, agroecosystems were increasingly established in areas that previously had supported tree cover. During this period in the Near East, China, and Europe, for example, clearing for agriculture led to increased deforestation.

As part of this survey, we ask you to read the short and provocative article by Jared Diamond on the impacts of the diffusion of early agriculture. This should prompt a lot of thinking on your part about the way that the emergence of agriculture affected human societies that we describe further below.

Impacts of domestication and early agriculture were notable not just for natural systems but also on human systems. Both a population explosion and a technology explosion occurred in conjunction with early agriculture. The early farming societies grew in the size of their populations and the use of diverse tools and technologies, including ones that no longer needed to be transported as part of highly mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The growth of population was made possible by the increased productivity of food per unit of land area. Impacts on human health and disease were also notable in this period, though they were not entirely positive. As Jared Diamond points out in the required reading above, there were negative impacts on human health traced to larger settlements and denser human populations (e.g. highly infectious “crowd diseases” such as measles and bubonic plague) and also infectious disease involving transmission from domesticated animals (measles, tuberculosis, influenza). Nutritional stress also ironically increased, with life expectancy actually decreased following domestication and the early development of agriculture.

These negative impacts on humans have led Diamond to refer to agriculture provocatively as “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”. This title is purposefully provocative, and by way of understanding this "mistake", we should realize that early farmers’ switching to agriculture may have become the most viable option in many places. Agriculture becoming the principal livelihood option would have occurred as local hunted-gathered food sources were overexploited and/or required by population pressure. By the end of this period, the evolution of more complex societies also meant the development of deep class divisions. There the social phenomena of deepened class divisions must also be seen as a product, in part, of the evolution of agriculture. In addition, changing social arrangements from agriculture would tend to create a positive feedback (see the end of module 2.1), along with other factors, in maintaining and deepening the pathway of society towards a greater embrace of an agriculture-based food system.

The model of Coupled Natural-Human Systems (CNHS) can be used to reflect on the above impacts through the integrated perspective of human-environment interactions. Here we can highlight a couple of these interactions. First, widespread deforestation occurred as a result of early agriculture. In addition to changing land cover and ecosystems, it has been postulated that the extent of this deforestation at this time was significant enough to release considerable carbon dioxide (CO₂) and thus to define the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch. As mentioned below other scientists argue the Anthropocene was created more recently. This scientific debate about the Anthropocene epoch has been productive in our understanding of human dynamics and impacts with respect to the environment.

Humans are presumed to have responded to deforestation by increasing their reliance on agriculture, since the removal of forest cover would have reduced the productivity of hunting-gathering activities, creating a second positive feedback that would have deepened the transition to agriculture. The second form of human-environment interaction involved the selection of a relatively small fraction of utilizable plants and animals that become the cornerstones of early agriculture. Since these plant and animal domesticates produced well relative to others, they became relied upon by early farmers, also acting as positive feedback towards the adoption of an agricultural lifestyle. The legacy of this initial selection of certain types of plants and animals demonstrates the important role of contingency and positive feedbacks, whereby initial decisions were amplified and exerted a lasting influence on the Coupled Natural-Human Systems of agriculture. The concepts of feedback are considered further in the subsequent pages and in this Module’s Summative Assessment.

Period 2: Independent States, World Trade, and Global Colonial Empires (3,000 BP – 1800/1900 CE)

The second period of our rapid historical survey encompasses independent states, societies based on small groups, world trade, and global colonial empires and covers roughly 5,000 years between 3,000 BP and 1800/1900 CE. Both positive and negative environmental and social impacts were associated with this period. We can use the coupled system model to illustrate two examples of this period’s characteristic forms of environment-society interactions. The Inca Empire in the Andes Mountains of western South America (from present-day Colombia to Argentina) offers a good example of an independent state with pronounced environmental and social impacts of its agriculture. Ruling from approximately 1400-1532 the Inca state oversaw the building and maintenance of extensive agricultural field terraces and irrigation canals (Figure 2.2.1). These terraces and canals produced sustainable landscapes in the tropical mountain environments of the Andes.

Figure 2.2.1. Terraces and related irrigation works built by the Inca and other early, large-scale agricultural societies are a dramatic example of the transformation of the earth's surface for sustained food production.

Credit: Phil Romans, Flickr [32] (Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 [24])

From the perspective of coupled natural-human systems (CNHS), the terraces and canals of the Inca produced sought-after foods and symbolized Inca imperial power, thus contributing further to Inca capacity to extend these sustainability-enhancing earthworks. The Inca state eventually established terraces and other large-scale agricultural and food transportation works (storage facilities, improved riverbank fields, roads, and bridges) that extended over much of the area of their empire. Environmental impacts of these terraces and other earthworks were beneficial since they stabilized mountain agricultural environments and enabled higher levels of food-growing per unit land area without major damage. Still, we need to remind ourselves that early independent states, such as the Inca, also created environmental problems and often were marked by large social inequalities between rulers and commoners. In other words, just as today, the environment-food systems of non-European peoples could and did attain high levels of sophistication while, at the same time, they were often wracked by significant issues with both environmental and social sustainability (see module 1 for definitions from the "three-legged stool" of sustainability. Similarly important for us to note is that some Inca terraces and canals continue to exist and are still used today as they are in Peru so that they still create a sustainable contribution to food systems at a local scale.

A second example of environmental and social impacts resulting from this period of agricultural diffusion and trade in world history comes from the world trade system established by global colonial empires involving major European powers between 1400 and 1800 (such as the Spanish, British, and French colonial empires). A well-known example of social and environmental impacts from this time period is the exporting of crops and livestock, along with related elements of European environment-food systems, on many areas of the world by these empires. Examples included wheat, sugar cane, alfalfa, cattle, and sheep. These crops and livestock had not originated in Europe but had already diffused there during earlier history, and were common in Europe at the time these empires were expanding. These components of new European colonial environment-food systems were mutually reinforcing, since for example the forage crop alfalfa and introduced European grasses were highly conducive to expanding the raising of cattle and sheep and making new sources of animal food products available to human populations. There were thus reinforcing (positive) feedbacks between the way that these crop species such as alfalfa and grasses were able to "remake" environments and make them more hospitable for European livestock. Sugar cane is another crop that is notorious for remaking the landscapes and social relations in the Caribbean, South America, and the United States, through plantation agriculture and slavery. The case of pasture species and livestock is considered further in this module's summative assessment.

Period 3: Modern Industrial Agriculture (1800/1900 CE – Present)

The third major period in our broad historical summary is modern industrial agriculture, which is the predominant environment-food system today, though it coexists with a significant sector of smallholder agriculture that has incorporated modern industrial techniques to a greater and lesser extent.

Modern agriculture arose in the 1800s and 1900s through a variety of developments in agriculture and in the processing and business of foods. “Industrial” in this description refers to the major role of factory-type processes that are principally large-scale and involve the defining role of technological inputs such as large amounts of freshwater use, chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and “improved” seed that delivers high-yield responses to the other inputs. Industrial is also an appropriate term since this environment-food system has narrowed concentration on a few species of crops and livestock. “Modern” is important in this description since distinct foodways and consumption practices---many based on foods that are highly processed, relatively inexpensive, easy-to-prepare convenience items---that are integral to this environment-food system. Modern is also an important term since it’s estimated this predominant system is based on more changes in the past 100 years than occurred over several hundred and maybe even thousands of years previously.

In much of the world, the advent of the modern environment-food system was provided through the Green Revolution beginning in the 1940s and 1950s. The Green Revolution used science and technology to develop modern crops and agricultural production systems for the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While it has evolved considerably, the approach of the Green Revolution continues to be used today. The worldwide influence of the Green Revolution suggests one additional term to describe this type of environment-food system, which is “global.” The development of this system, as well as its inputs and impacts, is global in scope. The global characteristics of today’s predominant environment-food system will be evident throughout this module and the others in this course as we place emphasis on the global scale of environmental and social impacts, which relates to the concept of the Anthropocene. In fact, if we consider the bar graphs of the relative areas of wild versus managed land (crops and livestock) globally presented in module 1 (Figure 1.1.4) we can see why some experts prefer to think of modern industrial agriculture, and the related expansion of human populations, as the defining period of the Anthropocene.

Figure 2.2.2. Modern industrial agriculture is a culmination of social and technological processes beginning in the 1800s that sought to increase yields of agriculture for growing human populations by applying fossil fuel energy, mechanization, and advanced crop breeding methods. This photo of a modern grain variety being harvested encapsulates this transformation towards modern agriculture in many ways: the large area of a single grain variety, likely bred and sold by a modern corporation; the extreme mechanical efficiency and speed of grain flowing off the field into a wagon for storage and sales; the need for diesel fuel and associated carbon dioxide emissions to drive the powerful machinery, whose power and efficiency reduces the workforce needed for agriculture.

Credit: Alan Harrison, used with permission from Flickr under a creative commons license

A wide range and mix of environmental and social impacts are associated with modern industrial agriculture. Agricultural mechanization has coincided with a major reduction in the agricultural workforce. In the United States, for example, less than 2% of the population is estimated to be directly employed in agriculture. In the 1870s and 1880s, by contrast, this estimate was 60-80% of the U.S. population. Environmental impacts and human-environment interactions have also been strongly influenced by the widespread use of fossil fuels in modern industrial agriculture.

Fossil fuel use is the foundation for many modern agricultural technologies ranging from tractors and farm machinery (Fig. 2.2.2) to fertilizers and pesticides as well as the energy costs of processing and the large number of “food miles” typically involved in transportation. As the result, energy issues along with greenhouse gas emissions have become a major concern with modern industrial agriculture----as discussed in subsequent modules.

One example of human-environment interaction will suffice in this section since modern industrial agriculture will be examined in detail in many of the modules that follow. (Modules 6, 7, and 8, which focus on agroecology, feature excellent and far more extensive examples.) The widespread use of pesticides and the creation of pesticide-dependent crops and cropping systems are a defining characteristic of this agriculture worldwide. The development of these synthetic products for protecting crops, and potentially the increase in yields associated with solving, if temporarily, a pest problem. Meanwhile, the populations of agricultural pests continue to evolve resistance in response to these applications, an example considered further in module 8. As a result, it is essential that these modern industrial crops and cropping systems (including the use of pesticides) be constantly developed in order to gain a new advantage against the most recently evolved pests.This innovation process in agricultural technology for crops is another example of a positive feedback driving the further industrialization of agriculture.

Period 4: Sustainability Movements Towards the Future of Food: Quasi-Parallel Ecological Modernization and Alternative Food Networks (2000 – Present)

In recent history (since 2000) significant new directions have entered the spectrum of existing environment-food systems. The future of food will depend on these newer systems, in addition to modern industrial agriculture that was introduced on the previous page. The new directions---which we refer to here as “ecological modernization” and “alternative community-based food systems”---are a response to concerns over environmental sustainability, human health, and food safety in addition to the attempt to reinvigorate rural society and address social justice issues, a concept we introduced in module 1 as "social sustainability". Each of these new directions also has its own environmental and social impacts. These impacts are introduced here and then taken up again in module 10.1 when we consider them as "global" and "local community" variants of new, alternative food system types. In both these new directions, a major role is taken by ecological methods and techniques replacing to a significant degree the use of synthetic chemicals. Substantial success can be seen in some cases: for example, organically certified lettuce and carrots with reduced use of synthetic pesticides now account for more than 10% of the land producing these crops in the United States.

Social changes---remember we use this term broadly to refer to economic impacts as well---vary widely in the environment-food systems associated with ecological modernization. Large corporations as well as a substantial number of large family-managed farms, for example, predominate in the large-scale sector of organic agriculture and organic food production and distribution, where these companies and large farms occupy a "quasi-parallel" role to their role in supporting modern industrial food production (previous page). We and other authors describe their style of adoption of organic production techniques as ecological modernization because they seek environmentally sustainable methods as relatively interchangeable replacements for synthetic chemical inputs in modern agriculture (previous page). Ecological modernization also retains modern forms of organization, for example, large scale and efficiency of cropping and shipping of food, corporate management, and sales through mass outlets such as supermarkets. Food distribution companies in this system can offer organic foods at lower prices in the case of fresh vegetables and fruits. This advantage is significant since affordability is a major issue among potential consumers of organic food, and such "corporate organic" foods may be more accessible at the present for a larger proportion of the population. Others argue that issues of cost and accessibility resulting from transitions towards organic and other more ecologically-based ways of managing agriculture merely reflect the artificially low financial, environmental, and social costs of comparable products from the modern industrial food system, for example, the carbon dioxide emitted in the manufacture of fertilizers and pesticides (see module 10). In any case, the rules, regulations, and preferences of human systems designed to foster organic agriculture (such as organic certification and labeling) may be effective in improving the natural system, though the feedbacks to human systems may be ones mostly supporting large agribusiness through positive feedback effects introduced in Module 2.1.

Take for example the case of organic produce such as lettuce and carrots where natural conditions in climatically optimum growing areas (e.g., organic vegetable-growing areas in California) favor the capacity of large corporations and family farms able to access the high-quality land, resource systems (such as water), and deal with the regulatory tasks associated with large-scale national markets. The large scale of these corporate actors becomes a positive feedback driver which strengthens the transition towards this "ecological modernization" mode of a new food production system. This case is considered further in this Module’s Summative Assessment.

“Alternative community-based food networks” is a term that is applied to various smaller though increasingly important types of environment-food systems. We use this term to focus on local environment-food systems. Proponents and activists supporting these types of environment-food systems center much of their attention on the process known as re-localization. This process brings food producers into closer contact with consumers. Local farmers' markets, where farmers sell food directly to consumers, are an example of re-localization. Local environment-food systems are seen as an alternative to the concentrated corporate control of environment-food systems. A major goal of re-localization is supporting small- and medium-scale farmers, including the majority of family-owned farms, as a means of reinvigorating rural life among a range of small businesses---not just a larger number of farms but also the corresponding number of small business that support and benefit rural areas. This interest in “alternative food systems” is committed to increasing the percentage of the “food dollar” that goes directly to farmers. This percentage is estimated currently at 8-10% in modern industrial environment-food systems where a large share of the food dollar goes to food processors and farm input suppliers. For this reason, the local food emphasis in alternative food movements is also sometimes referred to as an emphasis on short food supply chains exemplified by farmers' markets or regional sourcing of food in supermarkets and restaurants. These alternative food systems are presented further in Module 10.

Summative Assessment: Drivers and Feedbacks in the Development of Food Systems

Instructions

Download the worksheet [33] to understand and complete the assessment. You will submit the answers from the worksheet to the Module 2 Summative Assessment in Canvas.

The first part of the worksheet presents a more detailed version of the interaction of human and natural systems at the onset of agriculture at the end of the last ice age, presented at the end of Module 2.1. This is to provide you an example in the use of these diagrams to think about changes in food systems over human history, and it is shown below here as well.

Fig. 2.2.3. Example of human and natural system drivers around domestication in human food systems, to guide responses in the two other examples in the assessment.

Credit: Steven Vanek, adapted from the National Science Foundation

Click for a text description of the Human Natural System image

Heading at the top says, Human to natural drivers and feedbacks: Human system causes changes in the natural system and strengthens existing changes. At the bottom is the heading Natural to Human drivers and feedbacks: Natural system causes changes in the human system and strengthens existing changes. From Human System on the left, an arrow leads to the following items: Humans settle near to water sources in higher population densities, Increase in social complexity, Humans notice and make use of large-seeded wild plants and animals near water for domestication, Increased need for food, Deforestation, and disturbed soils. From Natural system, an arrow flows to the following items: Warmer/drier climates with more seasonal precipitation, Larger seed size in wild plants, Potential domesticated animals drawn to water sources near to humans, Good niches for crops around human settlements. The arrows represent a continuous flow between Human and Natural systems.

Further instructions for the assignment are given in the worksheet. You will need to fill in four questions on the worksheet, some of which have multiple parts.

Completing Your Assignment

Please use this completed worksheet as a guide for taking the Summative Assessment quiz. You do not need to submit your worksheet. 

Energy Sources in Foods: Carbohydrates, Fat, and Protein

Energy: Requirements and Function

Carbohydrates (starches and sugars), fat, and protein within food can all function as sources of energy when they are metabolized to carbon dioxide and water in respiration processes in all of our body’s cells. This energy fuels everything from the production of neurotransmitters in our brains to the muscle contractions required to shoot a basketball or weave a basket. The energy content of food is expressed as “calories” (“calories” are in reality kcal or kilocalories as defined in chemistry; 1 kcal will heat one liter of water one degree C). Energy-dense foods with high caloric content are generally those with high carbohydrate, protein, or fat content - for example, pasta, bread, oatmeal, grits, and other cooked whole grains and porridges consumed around the world as staples; plant oils or animal lard present in cooked foods, or meat and cheese. It is interesting to note that gram for gram, fats contain over twice the energy density of carbohydrates or protein: about 9 kcal per gram for fats versus only about 4 kcal per gram for carbohydrates and protein. We’ll address the further role of high-quality fats as a nutrient, rather than just an energy source on a page further on.

Energy Sources: Diet and Food System Aspects

Current U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other major nutritional guidelines promote the idea of accessing calories via a predominance of whole grains (e.g.. whole wheat and oats and flours made from these, brown rice) as these whole grains contain a mixture of carbohydrates, proteins, and indigestible fiber, as well as vitamins. These non-caloric contributions to nutrition are also important as discussed in the pages below, and combine well with the caloric content of food to produce better health outcomes. Calories are a fundamental consideration within nutrition because a negative calorie balance (calories consumed minus those expended in human sedentary activities and exercise) along with shortages of other associated food components described below leads to weight loss and faltering growth in children, including childhood stunting and permanent harm to a person’s developmental potential. By contrast, large excesses in a calorie balance over time lead to weight gain that is linked at a population level to increased rates of heart disease and diabetes. These diet-related diseases increasingly afflict populations in industrialized economies and urban populations worldwide with access to abundant, though often less healthy, food choices. Diet-related diseases as part of food systems will be taken up again in module 3.2.

Protein and Amino Acids: Building Blocks

Protein: Requirements and Function

The second main component conceptualized by nutritionists as a key ingredient of a healthy diet is protein, which is used in many different ways to build up and repair human tissues. Proteins are basically chains of component parts called amino acids, and it is these amino acids that are the basic “currency” of protein nutrition. Twenty amino acids are common in foods, and of these nine[1] are essential because humans cannot synthesize them from other nutrient molecules. Meat, fish, and eggs are animal-based and protein-dense foods that contain the complete profile of amino acids, basically because we are eating products that are very similar in composition to our own body tissues. In addition, some grains such as quinoa and buckwheat contain complete protein, while most legumes (peas, beans, soybeans, bean sprouts, products made from these) are high in proteins in a way that complements grains in the diet.

Protein Sources: Diet and Food System Aspects

For people who do not eat meat (a vegetarian diet) or who avoid all animal-based foods (vegan diets), the full complement of amino acids are accessed by eating milk and egg products or by eating a diversity of plant-based foods with proteins such as whole grains, nuts, and legumes. Legumes are particularly protein-dense and important in addressing the lack of amino acids in other plant-based foods. The combination of rice and beans is an oft-cited example of the complementarity of amino acids for a complete amino acid profile. Eating a wide range of plant-based foods is an excellent strategy to access the full complement of essential amino acids, as well as the diversity of mineral, vitamin, and fiber needs discussed on the next pages. Many of the most problematic diets are those that are highly monotonous due to poverty and/or inadequate knowledge about diet, with an excess or a sole dependence on a single starch source without legumes or animal products, or overconsumption of processed foods in comparison to fresh plant and whole-grain foods. Where only a single grain is eaten, deficiencies of certain amino acids can result.

[1] These are phenylalanine, tryptophan, methionine, lysine, leucine, isoleucine, valine, and threonine, which you can find in many introductory nutrition texts or resources online, if further interested. A ninth amino acid, histidine, is important in child growth and may also be vital to tissue repair, while another, arginine is essential for some growth stages and can usually be synthesized by healthy adults.

Vitamins and Minerals:  Growth, Illness Prevention, and Proper Function

In addition to the daily requirements for energy and protein, vitamins and minerals are required in relatively small amounts as part of a proper diet to ensure proper functioning and health and are especially important for childhood development. Vitamins and minerals deficiencies can lead to “hidden hunger”, where energy and protein needs are being met but the lack of vitamins and minerals prevents adequate development and health of child rent and saps the productive capacity of adults, for example via iron-deficiency anemia (see below). There are a large number of essential vitamin and mineral components in foods. In this module, we focus on a few that frequently pose major challenges within food systems. If you are interested, full details on the roles of many nutrients can be found in the excellent online text from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Human Nutrition in the Developing World [40]. This module's formative assessment may also point to other vitamins and minerals that can become deficient in diets.

Calcium

Although it is important for other functions, calcium is emblematic in its role in proper bone growth and maintenance. It is especially important for women to consume adequate calcium throughout life, and higher intakes of calcium from childhood on are associated with lower rates of osteoporosis and stronger bones later in life. Vitamin D is also essential for the proper absorption of calcium so that a vitamin D deficiency can lead to calcium deficiency. Dairy products and small fish that are consumed whole (so that fine bones are eaten) are highly calcium-dense foods around the world. Grains are low in calcium but are consumed in such volumes that they often contribute substantial calcium to diets. As is true for many other nutrients, women who are breastfeeding a child have an especially high calcium need because they export calcium in their breast milk to help grow the bones of a developing infant.

Iron

Iron is most important as an ingredient in hemoglobin that causes the red color of blood, and the role of red blood cells in carrying oxygen. Iron deficiency thus leads to anemia from a lack of red blood cells, including shortness of breath and overall weakness. Women require more iron than men because of blood loss in menstruation, and pregnant and lactating women require especially high amounts of iron as they expand their blood supply and provide for a growing fetus. During lactation or breastfeeding, mothers pass substantial amounts of iron to their growing infants, so that iron need for women is also high during the period when mothers are nursing their children. When shortage arises during pregnancy or lactation, a woman’s iron stores tend to be sacrificed to the benefit of the child, which can leave a mother who lacks adequate food due to poverty with acute iron deficiency and anemia that greatly complicates other daily activities such as economically important work. The best sources of iron in foods are meat, fish, eggs, green leafy vegetables, and whole grains. Cooking food cast iron utensils is also an easy way to supplement iron in food.

Zinc

Zinc is an essential mineral that is important in a large number of human cellular enzyme processes. It is important for proper tissue growth, cell division, wound healing, and the functioning of the immune system, among other functions. As such it is very important for children’s health, growth, and development. Zinc is an example of a nutrient that is often used to fortify processed foods and is also naturally present in a wide variety of foods such as red meat, poultry, beans, nuts, and whole grains. One goal of plant breeders recently has been to breed or identify traditional varieties of whole grains and potatoes that are high in zinc and iron. This way of enhancing diets by way of the properties of crop plants is called a biofortification strategy. Because these staple foods are usually present even in the most rudimentary diets associated with extreme poverty, biofortification can be an effective strategy to ease access to these important mineral nutrients in the most vulnerable populations.

Vitamin A

Vitamin A or retinol (linked to the word ‘retina’ or part of the eye) is famous for the popularized connection between eating carrots and good eyesight. Vitamin A deficiency is the cause of reduced vision in dim light, called night blindness, as well as a broad correlation to increased infant mortality in children from a variety of causes. True vitamin A is not in fact directly present in carrots and other dark green or pigmented vegetables (collards, squash, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and even yellow maize) but is readily synthesized in the body from the orange pigment (beta-carotene) that these plant sources contain. True retinol is found in eggs as well as meat and fish products. Like zinc, vitamin A is another crucial nutrient for growth and development that can become deficient in the diets of children and other vulnerable groups (Figure 3.1.2), and has been targeted as a priority for resource-poor populations around the world through the promotion of orange-fleshed sweet potato, other orange vegetables, and yellow maize within smallholder diets and "golden rice" as a genetically engineered innovation in maize varieties that was developed to address vitamin A deficiency. While not all biofortification approaches utilize genetic engineering, golden rice is a further example of a biofortification strategy.

Figure 3.1.2. Prevalence of Vitamin A deficiency around the world, with colors indicating the percentage of children affected. Many of the areas with "no data" are in fact areas where per-capita incomes are high enough that consumers are assumed to be eating enough animal products and vitamin-A-containing vegetables to avoid deficiency. The map shows that prevalence rates in Mexico, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific are highest, reaching up to 80 percent. The rates of deficiency in China, Central America, and South America reach up to 20 percent.

Credit: Steven Vanek, based on data from Bassett & Winter-Nelson, 2010, Atlas of Human Nutrition

Vitamin C

Vitamin C is not a major deficiency challenge worldwide, though in the 1700s vitamin C deficiency was linked to the disorder scurvy in sailors due to highly monotonous diets. Rather it is presented here because of its iconic association with fresh fruits and vegetables, especially citrus fruit but also potatoes, bananas, spinach, collards, cabbage, and many of the weeds that are consumed around the world as leafy vegetables. True deficiency is thus uncommon in most diets around the world, though vitamin C’s role as an antioxidant and health-promoting vitamin that “cleans up” harmful free radicals in the body has been promoted. Also, vitamin C is an excellent example of a positive interaction between nutrients. Vitamin C promotes iron absorption. Since most plant sources of iron are much less available than so-called heme iron in animal iron sources, fruits and vegetables with vitamin C in the same meal with plant-based sources of iron are an excellent way for people that eat meat-free diets (or just individual meals without meat) to absorb sufficient iron.

A number of other vitamins and minerals are essential, and in general, the way that a food system can work to provide these to human populations is to make a wide variety of plant-based foods as well as a few meat options, available to consumers. As we will see soon, this is in contrast to what certain sectors of the food system often make available to consumers. Some of these important vitamins and minerals are Vitamin C, Vitamin D, the B-complex vitamins, potassium, and magnesium, and you may see these arise as concerns in the formative assessment below.

A complete description of vitamins, minerals, and other diet components in an accessible format can be found in the online book from the FAO, Human Nutrition in the Developing World [40].

High-Quality Fats and Shifting Paradigms Around Fat in Diets

You may be familiar with the idea that fats are perhaps "delicious yet harmful" for most humans, and to be consumed in moderation (see the balanced plate in figure 3.1.1). Recently there has been increased attention focused on the role that “good fats” play in health and development, in addition to the awareness that most diets in more affluent areas of the world contain excessive fat, especially saturated fats of animal origin. Unsaturated fatty acids of plant origin are generally considered essential healthy nutrients, and there is evidence that fatty acids derived from plant sources and fish are important in promoting better neural development and nerve function. For consumers that tend to face food-insecure conditions, also, fats are a highly concentrated energy (calorie) source and therefore a valuable addition to a diet. Where calories are already in excess such as in many urban diets around the world and particularly in the industrialized first world, the calorie content is not a benefit of high-fat diets. Recently it has been found that excessively processed or hydrogenated fats often included in processed foods (trans-fats) are harmful to health, and so labeling now specifies the trans-fat content of foods. For example, you can find the trans-fat content of diets in the diet tool used with this module's formative assessment.

Fat in foods as a case study of shifting paradigms in nutrition

(this section is adapted from a contribution by Human Geographer Mark Blumler at Binghamton University)

Most of us have probably absorbed the current overall thinking that fat in diets needs to be treated with caution, that it is synonymous with "divine" or "sinful" food in a joking way, or perhaps that there is something suspect about fat. Because of evolving in limited nutrition environments, most humans are primed to take in fats and other high-calorie foods as a nutritional bonanza and store it away in an evolutionarily "thrifty" way to confront future calorie shortage. However, western nutrition scientists’ beliefs regarding different types of fat in diets have undergone drastic fluctuations over the past century (Table 3.1) that may potentially shake our confidence in exactly what is known about "good" and "bad" in nutritional terms. The advice coming out of the nutritional science community, as filtered through government proclamations such as the food pyramid, have also caused enormous changes in the American diet, which have benefited some such as the vegetable oil processing industry, while hurting others such as cattle ranchers and the beef lobby.

To recap this sometimes bewildering history: around the 1960s, scientists discovered a relationship between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease and noticed that saturated fats have more cholesterol than other oils. Consequently, there was a big push to replace butter with margarine and to cut back on the consumption of red meats, lard, and other animal fats. Initially, it was believed that polyunsaturated fats such as safflower oil are most heart-healthy and so there was a major promotion of such oils. Later, interest developed in the “Mediterranean diet” because of the presence of many very old people in Mediterranean Europe, and nutritionists came to believe that monounsaturated fats such as in olive oil were best for us. Polyunsaturated oils, on the other hand, were increasingly shown to be not beneficial. Meanwhile, further research showed that cholesterol in the blood does not correlate with cholesterol in the diet, undermining the assumption that saturated fats are unhealthy. Trans fats, high in margarine and other processed fatty foods, were shown to be very inimical to heart health. Also, fish oils were recognized as being high in omega 3 fatty acids, which are deficient in the typical American diet today. Recently, butter has been officially accepted as “good” fat, reversing a half-century of denigration of its nutritional value. While other saturated fats are not yet accepted, there is nothing to distinguish butter from the others that would explain how it could be “good” and the others “bad”.

It is interesting to compare these shifting attitudes against traditional diets: The Japanese have the longest life span of any nation. Within Japan, the longest-lived are Okinawans. On Okinawa the only fat used for cooking is lard (of course, being on an island Okinawans also consume considerable fish oil although they do not cook with it). So, what is going on here? Why can science and scientists not "make up their minds" about fat in diets? Are findings on diet overly influenced by lobbying groups of major food industries, as some have charged for the case of margarine or dairy fats?

The story of fat recommendations illustrates the nature of science, that it proceeds piece by piece, and also seems to have a penchant for identifying single causes that are later shown in the context of a complex system to be overly simplistic. Each research finding, such as that cholesterol is associated with cardiovascular disease, may have been correct. But that gave rise to recommendations that were wrong, because other facts, such as that dietary cholesterol does not correlate with blood cholesterol, were not yet known. Given that many of us would like to eat healthy diets and may also believe that science should guide better nutritional policy, there is a need for principles that emerge from current science to inform dietary recommendations, rather than the confusion that is perhaps caused by this tangled story about the history fats in nutrition. In the summary below, we try to provide some ballpark recommendations regarding fats, other dietary constituents, and lifestyle choices. They summarize many of the same principles from the "balanced plate" at the beginning of this module or the "healthy plate" from the USDA and other nutritional recommendations of government organizations.

Summary: Fat consumption within a healthy diet and lifestyle

• Diets very high in fat in the absence of fiber and sufficient fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are probably not very healthy within the range of choices of modern consumers.
• Eliminating fats in favor of simple (i.e. non-whole grain) carbohydrates to promote "low-fat dieting approaches" was probably a bad idea.
• Plant-based fats and fish oils, on the whole, seem to contain more health-promoting properties than exclusive reliance on animal-based fat. However, some recent large studies have shown little significant correlation between saturated fat consumption (like those found in meats) and chronic diseases like heart disease, although these diseases are definitely thought of as diet-linked.
• Whole grains of many different types are good, as is a preponderance of fruits and vegetables in the diet.
• Much of this seems to be leading us back towards the principles of more traditional unprocessed food diets without a preponderance of meat (which has benefits for the water use related to a diet as well, as you will see next in module 4 regarding water and food).
• Lifestyles should encompass diet and exercise, but this exercise does not need to be high-intensity for it to have a really positive effect on well-being and health.
• Pay attention to upcoming research and advice from research communities regarding diet, but resist taking them to extremes unless there is robust evidence over the long term, and place them in the context of more traditional knowledge and the other principles we've addressed in this module.

Dietary Fiber and Microbes in the Human Gut

The Importance of Fiber Overall and for the Gut Microbiome

In addition to these nutrients that contribute to particular functions within the human body, fiber is the mostly undigestible component of food that moves through the human digestive tract but also provides remarkable benefits. Undigestible cell wall components of plant foods (fruit membranes, bean and grain seed hulls, most of the plant cell wall, etc.) are examples of dietary fiber. In addition to its famous role in avoiding constipation by moving masses of foodstuffs through the digestive tract as a bulking agent, fiber helps to feed beneficial gut bacteria that produce beneficial substances. Over the last few decades fiber consumption associated with the benefits of avoiding certain cancers, heart disease, and diabetes. Emerging knowledge regarding fiber highlights the role played by the gut microbiome --many billions of non-human cells that inhabit our digestive tract in promoting human health and avoiding disease. These cells are more in number than the human cells in our body, due to the small size of bacteria compared to human cells. Much like the other areas of nutrition described here, the importance of fiber links directly to the importance of eating a varied diet with whole grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables. It is interesting to view fiber and these microbes not as a direct nutrient for human life processes, but as a "helper nutrient" or "catalyst" for human nutrition. Dietary fiber is relatively inert as a source of protein, minerals, or vitamins, but helps our digestive system do its job.

Formative Assessment: Using a Diet Assessment Tool

Instructions

In this assessment, you will use an online diet assessment tool to test how different foods contribute to the total nutrients in a daily diet. You will follow along in the instruction sheet, and log the nutrient content (e.g. calories, total fat, vitamin C) for each diet option in an excel spreadsheet, to be able to compare the diets.

Download both the instructions and worksheet [42] (word doc) and the excel spreadsheet [43] for logging the results. The spreadsheet has color-coding of cells to transform the data you log into a color that indicates deficiency or sufficiency, which will help you to interpret the result.

We will use the tool My Food Record [44] for this assessment. Important: you should use the "one-day analysis" under the "analyze" tab so that you do not have to create an account and can just log in as a guest. You should open this online nutrition assessment tool in an adjoining window or a different browser so you can see the instructions for the assessment and the online tool at the same time.

Submitting Your Assignment

Please submit your assignment in Module 3 Formative Assessment in Canvas.

Malnutrition (Undernutrition) Among Poor and Vulnerable Populations

Food insecurity, or the inability to access sufficient, culturally appropriate food for adequate nutrition, is a major problem for the poorest segments of the world’s population, the 1 billion or so people who live on less than two dollars per day (Food Security and Insecurity are more fully addressed in module 11). These poorest members of society often face chronic malnutrition, which some call undernutrition to distinguish it from nutrition diseases of overconsumption or poor food choices, which are considered malnutrition of a different type. Undernutrition is sometimes coupled with nutrition-related illnesses and long work hours in paid employment or smallholder agriculture on small and/or degraded land bases that often accompany poorer farms in rural areas. Undernutrition represents a failure of human societies and food systems to create access to a minimum standard of diet quality that can allow all human beings to live to their potential. In addition, the difficulty posed by undernutrition may fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable members of society: women, children, and the disabled and elderly. A particular burden is faced by caregivers of children (women, and increasingly grandparents) to both provide adequate care and feeding and take on the role of earning money to farm or buy food.

Organizations who work with these populations have worked to identify barriers to better care and feeding practices because it has been recognized that if the allocation of food within households is not equitable, simply increasing farm production or access to food can sometimes fail to increase consumption of healthy foods by vulnerable groups in households. Increasing the direct involvement and knowledge of parents and other caregivers in nutrition practices, and focusing attention on children under five years of age can help to improve nutrition outcomes and child growth in many poor households. These aspects of care, feeding, nutrition, and harmonization with local culture are important parts of food security referred to as the utilization component (this will be further addressed in module 11.2). As an example of the sort of trade-off that can occur between agricultural and nutrition goals in improving livelihoods, agricultural methods that are introduced to improve soil quality or increase agricultural income can be labor-intensive and must take care not to place undue additional time burdens on caregivers, who may then neglect the care and nutrition needs of children.

The challenges of chronic malnutrition are often linked in rural food-producing households to small land bases and/or degraded soils, which is of concern to us because it is a highly problematic case that links human system factors in the form of poverty, and natural system factors in the form of the degradation of earth's ecosystems. As will be described further in module 10.2, the coupling of malnutrition and soil degradation can form a ‘poverty trap’ for rural households, where unproductive soils demand large amounts of labor for small yields, with limited alternative options for food production or employment because of inequality -- or lack of social sustainability -- in the local and global human system. In this way, degraded soils have particular bearing on malnutrition because of the additional work and expenditure of calories required to coax yields from degraded land, which both deepens issues of food deficit and malnutrition, and can translate to expansion of the land area under degrading practices, or contribute to continued production at the lowest level that soil will allow. These factors can trap households in poverty. Such a situation can also translate into the migration of a smallholder household in search of more lucrative activities, which often means a dramatic change in diet towards more urban and processed foods, even if it changes the overall income possibilities of a family and can be considered as an adaptive response to food shortage and vulnerability.

“Diseases of Affluence”: Not Just for the Affluent

A second major issue facing modern food systems is chronic diet-related disease that results from calorie overconsumption, often linked to increasing rates of obesity in societies around the world. The major chronic conditions related to calorie overconsumption are heart disease and type II or “old-age” (later onset) diabetes (see Fig. 3.2.1 for a global map of diabetes incidence). These have been called “diseases of affluence” because they tend to increase in prevalence as countries increase in material wealth, with a combined increase in meat and calorie availability along with more sedentary jobs and lifestyles.

Figure 3.2.1. Percent of the population affected by diabetes by country, including Type II or old-age onset diabetes. Note that diabetes is more common in middle and high-income countries. It is, however, increasing in developing countries as diets change with increasing incomes and urbanization. The map shows that North America, most of South America, Europe, Northern, and Western Asia, and Australia, have incidences of diabetes of at least 5% and up to more than 10%. Whereas, most of Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific have incidences of 2.5% or less.

Credit: Steven Vanek, based on data in Millstone and Lang 2013, The Atlas of Food.

The dominant role of the globalized, corporate food system in these societies (see module 10.1 for the typology of food systems) means that processed foods (e.g. mass-produced “non-food” snacks and sweetened beverages, prepared frozen meals, fast food, pasta) occupy a larger and large part of the diet of typical consumers in these societies. To save cost and maintain demand, processed fats, sugar, and salt, are used as low-cost ingredients in these foods (e.g. corn syrup, oil by-product from the cattle and cotton industries) As has been described by food writers such as Michael Pollan, the prevalence of these diet choices means that consumers eat a large proportion of “empty calories” without fiber, high-quality fats, sufficient vitamins, and minerals, or in some cases adequate protein. Although high-calorie and fatty restaurant foods have been common for generations, at a whole food system level the prevalence of these foods, and the way they have been normalized in such concepts as “the American diet” (which upwardly mobile consumers in many other countries aspire to) are of great concern because they provide a dominant range of food choices that are not consistent with human health. This is especially so as consumers become more urban and many (though not all) expend fewer calories in manual labor related to farming. The increased prevalence of calorie excess has produced increasing rates of obesity in North America and Europe. (Fig. 3.2.2 below)

Figure 3.2.2. The prevalence of obesity in the United States at the county level. The map shows that the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. is highest in Alaska and the southern and southeastern states. It is the lowest in the western states.

Credit: Max Masnick based on U.S. Centers for Disease Control data, 2008. Used with permission as a public-domain image.

The “double burden”: chronic diseases in poor economies: Moreover, the term “diseases of affluence” is misleading because it is, in fact, poor people in industrialized countries as well as the developing world that face the greatest impact of these diseases. Empty calories are often very cheap calories for poorer sectors around the world, so the consumption of processed or dominantly carbohydrate diets with insufficient whole grains, fruits, and vegetables is more common among the poor. In addition, poorer households often are less able to pay for the expensive consequences of these diseases in the middle-aged and elderly (e.g. insulin provision for diabetics, the consequences of heart attack and stroke in the elderly). Ironically the same poorer sectors in poorer parts of the world and even within the United States can simultaneously face the issues of “traditional malnutrition” (i.e undernutrition, insufficient consumption of vitamins, iron, zinc, calories), especially among children and women, as well as diseases of overconsumption of empty calories. This ironic pairing of food system dysfunction has been called the “double burden” on developing countries by food policy experts. It also acts, at a national level, to reduce the overall income of a country by impairing the productivity of its human population (Figure 3.2.3, below).

Figure 3.2.3. The economic impact of chronic diseases around the world estimated as the total income sacrificed by different countries between 2005 and 2015 to impaired productivity and costs to populations and government from chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and conditions resulting from stroke.

Credit: Steven Vanek, adapted from data in World Health Organization (WHO), 2005, Rethinking "Diseases of Affluence": the Economic Impact of Chronic Disease

Click for a text description of the economic impact of chronic diseases image

This bar graph shows the foregone total national income in billions of dollars as follows: China 550, Russian Federation 300, India 225, Brazil 50, United Kingdom 30, Pakistan 25, Nigeria 10, Canada 5, Tanzania 3

Food deserts: Within industrialized countries, food system analysts have noted that the marketing model of the globalized food system has focused on suburban supermarkets that are able to capture profits from middle and high-income consumers. This model is profitable for food distribution companies but has the effect of not adequately serving either inner-city poor populations and the rural poor, who face difficulties in physically getting to distant supermarkets. Fast food and high-priced, smaller food markets with a preponderance of processed and unhealthy foods are the only food options in many poorer parts of the United States and other industrialized countries. These areas of low food access for healthy, reasonably priced foods are called food deserts. You will explore these more with a mapping tool in the summative assessment for this module.

Human System Factors in Nutrition: Challenges in the Globalized Food System

Although the modern globalized food system is highly dynamic and able to move enormous quantities of food and generate economic activity at a huge scale in response to global demand, the issues of poor diets, malnutrition and constrained food access we have described here are sobering issues that human societies need to confront. From the earliest days of civilization, food has been at once (1) a fundamental human requirement and human right; (2)a source of livelihood and a business as well as (3) the common property of cultures and ethnicities. The rise of a globalized food system, however, has brought new patterns into play because food has become an increasingly fiscalized commodity and experience.“Fiscalized” means that the provision of a fast food item, a food service delivery to a restaurant, or a supermarket buying experience (vs. a traditional regional open-air market, for example) are increasingly not only interactions among farmers, truckers, shopkeepers, and consuming households. Instead, the activities of production, distribution, and consumption within food systems become more and more integrated into the trade and investment patterns of the global economy. Food production, trade, and sales have been absorbed into the purview of profit-driven corporations that seek maximum value for stockholders. These stockholders are in turn citizens, organizations, and even governments that also participate by profiting from the functioning of the global system, demonstrating the involvement of common citizens in this system as well. Food activists, policymakers, and advocates of concepts like “agriculture of the middle” (see module 10.1) have argued that this new corporate character of the food system increasingly creates a food system that has an incentive to ignore important values like food access equity, just treatment of producers and workers, healthy diets, and environmental sustainability as the elements of the three "legs" of sustainability (see Module 1). However, reform movements within the globalized food system also demonstrate that it is able to pay attention to human nutrition goals and environmental sustainability.

In fact, the food system is not a completely unfettered capitalist enterprise.& Examining any food packaging shows the degree to which food is subject to regulation and oversight by the government. Food safety scares and health inspections of restaurants show the close attention paid to the acute impact (if not always the chronic impact over time) of unhealthy food. Education efforts promoting healthy choices in diet and exercise are regularly heard from both government organizations and private advocacy organizations: for example, state cooperative extension agencies, universities, and public service announcements. The efforts to label calories on restaurant menus and the movement of food service companies and local restaurants towards healthy options in menus show the growing awareness and movement of food demand towards healthy options. And many supermarket chains are making substantial efforts to include more local and regionally produced foods and promote healthy diets and nutrition as part of the communication to consumers.

In part, these changes show the changing awareness of the problems in the modern “American diet” among the public, brought on by food activists and authors about the food system. And on-the-ground marketing initiatives for values-based value chains such as those promoted by local and regional food system advocates include improving access to healthier foods like whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. For middle- and higher-income consumers with access to the abundance of foods in typical supermarkets and farmer’s markets around the world, this can incentivize better choices about well-rounded diets. In many cases, these healthier diets also include less reliance on meat because of its water footprint and adverse impacts on health when eaten in excess. One essential question, however, is how these efforts to improve food choices and access can expand their reach to poorer consumers and those who live in food deserts, either by improving geographic access, low-cost alternatives, or income opportunities to these consumers. You’ll explore this question of food equity more in the summative assessment for this module, regarding food deserts and examples of organizations in your capstone regions that are promoting healthy food choices and production.

Local and Alternative/ Organic Foods and Food System Challenges

At the end of module 2, you read about alternative food systems and the relocalization of food production and distribution as one of the emerging future proposals in the history of food. These efforts, which will be revisited in a typology of current food systems in module 10, are an important source of ideas and initiatives to increase sustainable food production methods and equitable relations between consumers and producers. Local and regional food systems and initiatives have been promoted as ways to retain economic benefits and jobs within regional contexts. Organic and sustainable production methods often form a part of these movements and seek to reduce the environmental impacts of food production. Organic food is, in fact, a documented way to reduce exposure to pesticide residues in foods, which is of concern to many consumers. Food such as fruits and vegetables, which is fresher when it is consumed, which can be the case for locally produced food, is also likely to have a greater content of vitamins and other health-promoting components. However, others have pointed out that at a global level, the optimal freshness of produce, or a complete absence of pesticides, can be of smaller benefit to health in the overall food supply than would be, say, orienting diets away from processed fats or towards greater vegetable consumption or plant-based oils. This more incremental approach suggests that it is important to target low-hanging fruit like availability of lower-cost vegetables and higher-fiber diets to more of the worlds' population, rather than just playing up potential benefits from foods that are local or produced with fewer or no pesticides. It is also important to point out that there can be much confusion among consumers on whether all organic food is locally produced (it's not) or whether local food is always organically produced (also not true).

In summary, given the much smaller size of these local and alternative food initiatives in comparison to the global food system, and also the scale of the problems of malnutrition and unhealthy diets, it may be important to put potential benefits of local and/or organically produced foods in the context of the overall challenges of the food system. For example, in the case of an urban food desert where only low dietary quality processed foods are available, increasing the availability of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains consumed using a number of strategies may be a more viable food system strategy to pursue than promoting locally or organically produced foods as a sole strategy. These multiple strategies could, in fact, rely on greater supermarket access and food streams from the globalized food system along with seasonal access to farmers' markets for local produce. Home and community gardens can also complement and reinforce strategies for healthy eating. In addition, organizations of farmers using organic and other more sustainable methods have often acted as important allies in local food system settings for promoting healthier diets. As we will see throughout this course, the nutrition and sustainability outcomes emerging from the interacting parts of the food system are complex, and we can't always go with a single alternative to provide the best outcomes.

Required Video: Putting local alternative food systems in context

Please view this short video from the "Feeding the nine billion" project of Professor Evan Fraser at the University of Guelph. He argues for the importance of local, alternative food systems but also acknowledges the issues of scale that make global food systems an important aspect of diet and nutrition for the foreseeable future. This is not just about nutrition -- he is also reviewing many of the themes of food and sustainability we will be covering in the course and the relationships between human and natural systems as part of feeding humanity.

Video: Feeding Nine Billion Video 5: Local Food Systems by Dr. Evan Fraser (5:19)

The “Happy Medium” in Nutrition and Diets

By now you may be forming the correct impression that a better diet and nutrition around the world is a matter of finding a “happy medium” for consumers between food shortage on the one hand, and excessive consumption of unhealthy foods on the other hand. That is, consumers in poorer sectors and societies eat too little fruits, vegetables, high-quality fats and proteins and in the worst case even insufficient calories. Meanwhile, wealthier consumers and even some of the urban poor eat excessive quantities of low-quality calories and fats in relation to relatively sedentary lifestyles. The results are serious chronic malnutrition (undernutrition and nutrient deficiencies, specifically) at one end of the diet spectrum and chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes at the overconsumption end of the same spectrum. In addition, a high-meat diet and millions of acres in crops to feed beef cattle and pigs creates a water-consuming and polluting food sector of the economy to support these diets, as seen in previous modules. Therefore, increasingly there has been a movement to unite concerns about the environmental impacts of food with the problematic diet and nutrition outcomes from modern high meat and processed food diets. The reading below from food columnist Michael Pollan addresses these principles for a happy medium in diets.

One example of a "happy medium": the demitarian diet concept

In order to address the need for this "happy medium", a number of scientists and activists globally have enunciated the interesting principle of the demitarian diet [50]¹, in which consumers commit to reducing their consumption of meat products, short of adopting vegan and vegetarian diets. The prefix demi- comes from French for “half” and reflects the principle that consumers in high-income societies and sectors need to at least halve their consumption of meats, to produce better health and environmental impacts, especially the impacts on nitrogen pollution and greenhouse gases from fossil fuels in agriculture (more on this in the following modules). The demitarian diet and its proponents are primarily focused on the environmental sustainability of first-world diets. Nevertheless, we can extend this concept to the third world to say that populations eating diets of poverty will receive benefit from increasing their intake of legumes, fish, meat, vegetables, and other high-quality nutrient sources. Populations at risk from undernutrition may see dramatic positive effects from even slight increases in consumption of these high-quality foods that are often lacking in circumstances of poverty. This is because even small quantities of meat, eggs, and other animal products along with legumes, fruits, and nuts, can be very high-density sources of protein, Iron, Zinc, Vitamin A, and high-quality fats. Because of this nutrient-density, animal protein (e.g. poultry, fish, eggs) as well as legume crops (e.g. bean, pigeon pea), vegetables (e.g. sweet potato, collards, carrots), and fruits (e.g. papaya, mango, avocado) therefore feature prominently in nutrition interventions of government and other organizations.