The Challenge
A walk down Totnes High Street could leave one under the impression that the whole town feeds itself from locally grown, seasonal, organic produce. The town’s vibrant local food culture has long been one of its defining features. Yet, we shouldn’t be misled into thinking Totnes is genuinely using local food production to feed itself, only a fraction of what is eaten in Totnes is locally grown. As we have seen in the history section of this Plan, it was not always like this. Totnes used to be situated firmly in what one might call a ‘foodshed’, a catchment around the town that provided for its key food needs. It was a highly diversified approach, there were market gardens, back gardens, small mixed farms, orchards, abattoirs, creameries, gleaning from the surrounding countryside. Now most of that system is gone, and although we might celebrate the fact that we personally no longer have to grow anything, we find ourselves in a far, far more vulnerable place in terms of food than we were 40 years ago which doesn’t reflect the true situation. The present system is a fragile illusion.
Examples of UK food imports and exports
The way we feed ourselves is coming under increasing stress, stress that is greatly compounded by the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change. For the last 30 years we have been almost literally ‘eating oil’, such is the degree to which our food supply system is underpinned, and indeed made possible, by the uninterrupted flow of cheap oil and gas. Each calorie of food that lands on our plates has needed at least 10 calories of fossil fuel to grow, process, store and transport it to us1. We have also become increasingly dependent on just-in-time distribution systems, with the result that although we now have access to a greater variety of foods from all corners of the world than at any point in our history, we are also, at any one time, only a couple of days away from a major food crisis should the lorries that make it possible stop running, as we saw starkly in 2000 during the lorry drivers’ dispute. Clearly this is not a desirable, nor a sensible, state of affairs.
Our challenge is to rebuild the foodshed that supported the area, although what we will be putting back will be very different from what was there before. What we attempt to do in the accompanying section ‘Can Totnes Feed Itself”, has never been done before. Based on a detailed analysis of the land base of Totnes and District and how it is currently used, as well as the food needs of the population, we attempt to define what the land in the area might look like if its aim is to support the population of the area. In short, we aim to answer the question “Can Totnes Feed Itself?” It is a question no one has ever asked before and one that we should have addressed long ago.
Footnotes
- Based on Richard Heinberg’s assessment of 7.3 calories of energy required to produce I calorie of food in USA. (The UK imports more of its food than the USA) Food & Farming in Transition. Toward a Post Carbon Food System. www.postcarbon.org/food [↩]
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