All residents of proposed new eco-towns should have access to land where they can grow their own food, according to new guidance drawn up by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA).

The guidance, just published in the TCPA’s latest worksheet ‘The essential role of green infrastructure’, makes a number of recommendations for developers.

• Developers should provide at least one major, well-equipped park in the eco-town, offering a variety of facilities for all age groups
• Every eco-town resident should have access to land, private or communal, to grow their own food.
• Developers should also look to forge supply links between eco-town residents, local food producers, processors and distributors to showcase the “relocalisation” of sustainable food production
• A network of “greenways” should be included to connect between larger or more expansive open spaces
• Safe-routes should be developed across a network of streets between open spaces and parks and homes and schools to encourage children to play without danger from traffic
• Open spaces should have a major role to play in contributing to sustainable transport, energy efficiency, water and drainage management, whilst ensuring a unique sense of place, heritage and local landscape character

At the launch of the eco-town worksheet on green infrastructure TCPA chief executive Gideon Amos said: “New settlements today could reinvent garden city living for a new, low-carbon century.”

Helen Phillips, chief executive of Natural England, said: “Eco-towns must have green spaces at their hearts, providing health and exercise benefits for the communities who live there, new habitats for wildlife and places for people to enjoy the natural environment.”

The green infrastructure worksheet is the fourth eco-town worksheet, following on from transport, community development and water cycle management worksheets launched in March 2008. Other topics in the pipeline include biodiversity, housing & inclusive design, towards zero-waste, energy, and the economy & ‘green collar’ jobs. Once they are all published, the worksheets will together represent a comprehensive set of policy and planning guidance on the range of subject areas to be addressed and the standards to be met when planning an eco-town.

It’s going to be interesting to see whether anyone takes any notice.

Read the TCPA press release

Download Eco-town Water Cycle Management Worksheet

Download Eco-town Community Worksheet

Download Eco-town Transport Worksheet

An article in the New York Sun last Monday reported food rationing at “big box” warehouse stores like COSTCO and Sam’s Club (‘Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World‘). A media frenzy has developed about spot shortages of staples such as rice, flour, and cooking oil. Here’s a small sample:

Reuters: ‘Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club limits rice purchases‘

Washington Times: ‘Americans hoard food as industry seeks regulations‘

FOX News: ‘Food Shortage Coming? No Rice For You‘

Wall Street Journal : ‘Load Up the Pantry’

If the WSJ is getting in on the act, you feel that things may be reaching a tipping point. Typically, the article proposes food stockpiling, not as a survival tactic, but as an investment opportunity, citing food inflation figures considerably higher than rates of return on conventional investments.

Recent shortages and jumps in food prices are global, driven by increased fuel costs, the Ug99 wheat rust threat and drought-hit harvests in Australia. The U.S. has been exporting large quantities of wheat and rice to Asia over the last 6 months to take up the slack. Inevitably, this is having a knock-on effect on consumers at home. The COSTCO and Sam’s Club warehouses where rationing has been reported are the hunting ground of commercial bakeries and restaurants as well as individual ‘cash and carry’ buyers of relatively large quantities of rice and flour. Local shortages may be due to supply problems; failure to keep up with price increases, making ‘big box’ stores cheaper than wholesale; stockpiling as a hedge against inflation.

In the short term, we can see this as a failure of ‘just in time’ supply chains to cope with a spike in demand. The U.S. government will probably move to restrict exports of wheat and rice, or ban them altogether. Once everyone who wants to boost their store cupboard has done so, and the supply chains have caught up, it’ll be back to business as usual. Probably.

That’s the short term. What happens after that is a different kettle of worms.

Culinary note: ‘Properly prepared, worms can be a tasty source of protein‘

Afterword April 23rd, Sam’s Club issued the following statement:

“We currently have plenty of rice for Sam’s Club Members. However, like our competitors, we’re just taking the precautionary step of limiting sales of the very large 20 pound bags of imported jasmine, basmati and long grain white rices, in our case, to four per member. This temporary restriction does not apply to retail-sized rice for sale in Sam’s or elsewhere at Wal-Mart stores. It also doesn’t apply in New Mexico or Idaho.

“On average, a typical Sam’s Club Business Member does not buy more than 80 pounds of rice in one visit. This temporary cap is intended to ensure there is plenty of rice for all our members. No other items are affected.”

Channel 4′s food season ‘Big Food Fight’ is about to start its second week. I’ve deliberately avoided most of the programs so far, because I know a lot of this stuff already and frankly I just get upset by yet more gory details about factory farming. Great bloke though Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall seems to be, I don’t need to sit through his faithful reconstruction of an intensive chicken farm. Although anyone who has cooked and eaten both roadkill and human placenta paté deserves our respect.

Be that as it may, last Thursday I found myself watching ‘The Truth About Your Food’, a Dispatches documentary about the £5 billion UK market in premium foods and ready meals that claim to be healthy and nutritious. Three families were given different collections of ‘foods’ from which to assemble their regular diet: premium ‘healthy’ products, e.g. Sainsbury’s ‘Be Good To Yourself’ range; bargain basement equivalents; and I can’t honestly remember what the third, quite health-conscious, family had, it may have been business as usual. That must have made them the ‘control’, although that would imply a level of scientific rigour for the program that it didn’t really deserve.

Between domestic reaction shots (“Mmmm, this is…. quite nice”) and nutritionist talking heads, we learnt a few things.

• Foods that claim to be good for you very often aren’t.
• Premium-price healthy products are often no better for you than their cheaper cousins, and sometimes worse.
• The various competing food labelling schemes are confusing and pretty much useless, since people who don’t have time to cook their own food tend not to have hours to spare to decypher the figures on the packet.
• Breakfast cereals are full of salt and sugar.
• Concentrated fruit juices are full of citric acid which is as bad for your teeth as fizzy drinks.

And so on. I know that by the end I was past caring what the ‘results’ of the ‘experiment’ were. Each family was shown piles of salt, sugar and fat equivalent to what they’d consumed while on their ‘diet’. The relative sizes don’t matter, they were all scarily large. The one thing I took away from the program was recurring nausea at the thought of yet another Tesco chicken tikka massala or Waitrose chicken filo parcel. Chicken seemed to crop up quite often as an ingredient. I wonder where it comes from. My mate Hugh could probably tell you.

A feeling gradually emerged from all this that what these people were being fed wasn’t really food at all, but what Michael Pollan would call “foodlike substances”. In his book ‘In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating’, he describes how our eating habits have been formed, manipulated and controlled by a “nutritional industrial complex”. We have moved away from traditional food cultures where what we eat and how we eat it was determined by family influence and local ingredients, to a complacent acceptance of interference in our diet by scientists, marketing and governments. While nutritional recommendations change regularly, the end result is still that “much of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the past fifty years has made us less healthy and much fatter”.

So, what to do? Pollan’s core message is that we should return to eating “real food”, and offers some recommendations on how to find it and get the most out of it. It’s a long list, here’s a few to give you a flavour:

• Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food. Going back several generations enables us to avoid the confusion of lengthy ingredient lists, most of which have dubious nutritional value and are included more for the food industry’s benefit than for ours.
• Avoid food products that make health claims on the package. Anything with a package is more likely to be a processed than a whole food. And the whole issue of packaging and its environmental impact is another kettle of worms altogether.
• Cook – and, if you can, plant a garden. Creating your own food chain, “from fork to fork” as Monty Don used to say, enables us to reclaim control from industry and science.

Pollan goes so far as to say that “cooking from scratch and growing our own food qualify as subversive acts”. This puts him firmly in the same camp as relocalisation groups such as Path To Freedom. It doesn’t matter how much or how little food you can grow yourself. If you can just grow some salad on a window-sill, that’s one less nitrogen-filled plastic bag of imported salad bought. After all, as Lao-Tzu said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Extracts from Michael Pollan’s book ‘In Defence of Food’, including his full set of rules-of-thumb, are published on the Guardian’s web site.

‘Consuming passion’

‘How to get back to real food’

The use of “bland and ineffectual promotional language” puts organic food at risk of becoming “just another commercial brand”, concludes a study by the Open University’s Centre for Research in Education and Educational technology (CREET). Their report ‘The Discourse of Organic Food Promotion: language, intentions and effects‘ says that retailers and campaigners are failing to focus on the core selling points of organic food. They tend to use “poetic, vague and emotive” language in their marketing, with an “emphasis on story-telling rather than facts”. According to Guy Cook, Professor of Language and Education at the OU:

“Buyers are not as easily manipulated as marketeers seem to believe. They reacted negatively to extravagant descriptions of ‘succulent sausages’ and animals that are ‘free to root and roam’.
“People see organic farming and its benefits for the environment and economy as promoting a sense of community. Supermarkets by their very definition are not interested in the idea of small community and so cannot sell that ideal.
“Our studies [of organic food promotion] show marketing and PR departments and their received wisdom can often be patronising and out of date…. this is a key moment for the organic movement. Does it want to remain distinctive and politically committed, or go down the road of becoming just another commercial brand?”

Now I’m no academic, so I’m probably missing the point. However, I would have thought that the massive growth in demand for organic produce was the sign of a successful organic movement. Moreover, it seems to me that placing organics at the core of shopping habits is the way to go, rather than differentiating. If organic food becomes an automatic choice, rather than one that the consumer has to mull over for every buying decision, then that must be regarded as a success.

I’d like to recommend an excellent CNN article about food and the environment. Here are some highlights:

• According to the UK’s Soil Association, 50 percent of the increase in global CO2 emissions between 1850 and 1990 has been tied to changes in land use –mainly because of farming practices.
• The Food Climate Research Network estimates that 31% of EU greenhouse emissions come from the food chain.
• More than half of that, 18% of total emissions, comes from meat production. The “average burger man…emits the equivalent of 1.5 tons more CO2 every year than the standard vegan,” reports The Guardian.
• According to Farmers Weekly, the amount of food that is air-freighted around the world has increased by 140 percent since 1990.
• The UK, for example, now imports more food than it exports, with 95% of its fruit and 50% of its vegetables coming from overseas.
• The global transportation sector contributes 14% of greenhouse gas emissions.
• A recent report from the International Maritime Organization says that, contrary to previous data, the shipping industry globally emits twice as much greenhouse gases — 1.2 billion tons — as the aviation industry, which emits between 600 and 650 million tons annually.
• By the end of this century, climate change-induced floods and droughts could cost India 30% of its total food production; and China 37% of its wheat, rice and corn crops.
• The amount of arable land per person is shrinking, says the FAO, from 0.38 hectares in 1970 to 0.23 in 2000, to 0.15 in 2050.
• The IPCC says that by 2080 3.2 billion people will suffer water shortages.
• If the EU were to replace just 10 percent of its fuel needs with biofuel, it would require 72 percent of its arable land.
• Poor African farmers are now opting to sell crops like cassava for use as alternative energy instead of food because they get paid more for it.
• China, one of the world’s leading corn exporters, withheld stocks last year for the purpose of biofuels.

All of which makes Matt’s recent question “How to feed Britain?” even more immediate and pressing.