The concept of food footprints

Clearly, one cannot look at Totnes and District in isolation. While this paper suggests a rebuilding of food resilience, and of a local food economy primarily built around meeting local needs and thereby living more within its energy budget, it is not suggesting an isolationist approach, or of somehow intentionally choosing to deny ourselves a certain amount of imports while they are available. Rather, it is about building resilience, the ability of the area to withstand shocks from the outside. A recent paper by DEMOS, ‘Resilient Nation’, defined resilience as “the capacity of an individual, community or system to adapt in order to sustain an acceptable level of function, structure, and identity” (DEMOS 2009: 18).

What is explored in this paper is the hypothesis that living within the food footprints set out below, were it to prove possible, need not mean a marked impoverishment of our current quality of life, a hairshirt lifestyle set in an apocalyptic worst-case scenario. Rather, what is presented here explores the potential for a new food culture, one that becomes more rooted in healthy, fresh food, with a wide variety of local livelihoods offering meaningful and productive work, with rich soils, abundant wildlife, a resurgence of skills and craft, and a renewed interest in healthy eating¹. It would result in a more populated countryside being home to a range of businesses and a greater range of land use types, and an urban landscape fully integrating food production and intensive market gardening. It is not about “going back” to some dimly imagined rural idyll, rather it is about going forward into the future in such a way as to be able to thrive and flourish in uncertain and volatile times, and to live within realistic energy constraints.

One of the most fascinating places to start this exploration of the degree to which Totnes and District could build a more self-reliant food economy is to look at its geographical context, and how the food footprints of neighbouring larger settlements overlap with that of the area. The term ‘food footprint’ refers to the amount of land in total that it would take to meet the basic food needs of a given settlement. The food footprint of Totnes town itself (that is, the amount of land required to feed its population if it were to be entirely self sufficient) covers an area of 19.4 square kilometres². This might lead one to think that given that it sits in a mostly rural landscape, building a relatively self-reliant food system is easily achievable. Figure 1 soon dispels this idea by showing composite food footprints for all settlements in the South West with estimated populations of over 800 people³. It is based on the assumptions that all back garden space is utilised for food production and that the diet is Fairlie’s Livestock Permaculture model (see Figure 7).

When one looks at the food footprint of Torquay and Paignton to the east of Totnes and District, it passes beyond Totnes heading west, passing into the footprint of Plymouth, which extends nearly as far as Totnes from the opposite direction. The area we are looking at in this paper is intersected and overlapped by these two other much larger population centres. The most sobering footprint is that of Greater London (not shown in Figure 1), which extends almost as far west as Bristol, and as far north as Birmingham. Feeding the UK’s cities will be a huge challenge, and raises many questions, including what degree of re-ruralisation will be required.

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