Designing Ecosocial Food Systems

The Brighton & Hove Food Partnership’s Food Strategy Action Plan 2018-2023 opens with the lines, 

Our vision is a city where everyone has the opportunity to eat healthy food from sustainable sources.  It is a city where residents know where their food comes from, understand and celebrate the delicious diversity of food that changes with the seasons and feel a connection to the people and the surrounding land and sea that provide it.

- Brighton & Hove Food Partnership, 2018  

Can we design holistic food ecosystems for Brighton that integrate the city’s Food Strategy, Carbon Neutral 2030 and City Downland Estate vision?  We can begin by modelling regenerative farms that rebuild the soil carbon sponge, aiming to restore soil microbiome-gut microbiome vitality as part of a whole systems view of Health.

Returning medicine to the community

In a groundbreaking lecture on the fundamental need to protect the soil microbiome against the damaging effects of glyphosate on soil, water, air and the human gut microbiome, Dr Zach Bush MD ends with some recommendations towards Health recovery:

  • Soil management is the most important way to return medicine to your community

  • Mycelium and Bacterial management

  • Permaculture, Biodynamic Farming, Regenerative Agriculture

  • Composting

  • STOP spraying glyphosate

  • Buy local, know your farmer; CSA; farmers markets

  • Grow something in your garden, balcony or window

  • Eat crops picked ripe

  • Cook your nightshade vegetables (potatoes, peppers, aubergines, tomatoes)

  • Beware of the new “organic” hydroponic crops

  • No-till organic is key to the future of soil recovery

(Bush MD, 2018)

He cautions that current organic farming practice is now compromised by use of permitted chemicals and recommends supporting biodynamic and regenerative farming. It was Dr Bush’s experience working with cancer patients that led to breakthrough research on the direct correlation between glyphosate and cancer over time, in a highly contaminated region in America known as ‘cancer alley.’

We have destroyed the medicinal features of our food with one chemical.

– Zach Bush MD (Bush MD, 2018)

The shocking realisation of how one chemical is destroying the health of people and ecosystems worldwide compelled him to mobilise a group of scientists and doctors to travel across the USA, educating and working with farmers to transition to regenerative farming under the initiative Farmers Footprint. This emerging area of research into the soil microbiome’s influence on human health has great implications for how cities should redesign and invest in land management programmes that protect soil, ecological and human health. An important area for independent research and control studies (not funded by vested commercial interests) is to track correlations between long term provision of clean, organic food and nutrition education, and changes to the health profile of communities registering the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in Brighton.