This is the third part of a series of essays that explore the impact of food systems through four key territories: oceans, forests, countryside, and city, reflecting on the research behind Schmidt Hammer Lassen’s 6-part publication The Hacktivist Guide to Food Security first published during the UIA World Congress of Architecture in 2023.
Countryside
The incremental industrialisation of our food has transformed the rural patchwork into a network of planar factories and logistics hubs. An ironically branded Green Revolution, made possible with exhumed sea-creatures1 and synthetic lightning2, introduced plants to a world decoupled from the logic of ecology. Agriculture, no longer constrained by the necessity of biological nutrients to stimulate growth, has moved from traditional, biologically-based practices into industrialisation and the adoption of synthetic fertilisers and chemical inputs — its produce, offered to global traders, and its waste-streams, to local water-bodies. Just as zoning regulations removed the threat of factories from intruding on the backyard vistas of the middle class, food production with the myth of the wholesome family farm still intact, has been swept from view. ‘Go big or go home’, a euphemistic adage used by farmers to describe the pressure of mechanised expansion to make ends meet, masks its corollary: that humans are an expense that agriculture can no longer afford.
Food as commodity
A catalyst for this territorial metamorphosis is revealed when we treat food as a commodity —‘a basic good that is interchangeable and essentially uniform across producers’— and it hinges on two fundamental principles in trade: homogeneity and waste. If everything produced was consumed, the market would collapse since profitability relies on the potential to source the same items at a lower cost elsewhere.
The human microbiome, a complex world of creatures expecting threats from the biosphere, starts to rebel when underchallenged by nature and outgunned by chemicals.
Commodity-economics has a habit of exploitation, honouring the lowest bid irrespective of the casualties. Farmers enter the debt spiral, caught in a pincer move3 between agrochemical companies and a retail-door policy that excludes the ugly and the unusual4. Children adorn the doorsteps of rural villages with pesticide-induced deformities. Penicillin-resistant bacteria find new hosts in humans in the confines of Danish piggeries. Locked into the ‘free’ market, infamous for its crashes, our food system fails to account for systematic risks, and people are part of the collateral damage.
As farmers conform to these retail trade standards, the nutritional content, taste, smell, and texture—the signs of life—slink away from land and plate as they elude cursory comparisons in trading warehouses. Instead the metrics of colour, size, shape and weight, supplant nutrition and sensory stimulation, replaced with empty calories and a spritz of glyphosate5. In the alignment problem6 between the food industry’s ‘quality standards’ and our health, poison is presented as sustenance.
Growers exploit the technologies, the land, and themselves to compete with the global labour baseline. In a monopolised paradigm of supply and demand, food retail is no longer the marketplace but the market itself. The consumer remains, simply to consume. With the loss of biodiversity in our diet, our bodies turn on us. The human microbiome, a complex world of creatures expecting threats from the biosphere, starts to rebel when underchallenged by nature and outgunned by chemicals.
Farewell to the Holocene
If we consider the precarity of our current food systems, it becomes clear that a multitude of approaches are required to establish food resilience and security. What is less apparent are the opportunities to enhance our daily lives. The Hacktivist Guide to Food Security is conceived as a tool to stimulate new conversations and insights of how food systems might be recomposed to transform cities, landscapes and oceans for mutual benefit.
Enlai Hooi is the head of innovation at Schmidt Hammer Lassen. Since 2021, he has led the firm’s research into the impact of architecture and urban systems on the ecology.
1 In prehistoric oceans, marine organisms absorb phosphorus from seawater for their metabolic processes. When they die, their remains sink to the ocean floor and create phosphate rock (apatite).
2 The energy intensive Haber-Bosch process, which mimics the activity of a lightning strike, is an artificial nitrogen fixation process that converts atmospheric nitrogen (N2) and hydrogen (H2) into ammonia (NH3). It requires high temperatures (approximately 400-500°C) and high pressures (approximately 200-300 atm), and supplies most of the worlds agricultural nitrates.
3A pincer move is a military maneuver in which forces simultaneously attack both flanks (sides) of an enemy.
4 Rigid retail standards of appearance and form applied to food products mean that any item that does not meet specifications is devalued or discarded.
5 Glyphosate, marketed by Monsanto under the name Roundup is a broad-spectrum herbicide extensively used to kill weeds without killing crops that have been genetically modified to resist it. It holds 50% of the world's herbicide market share and has been implicated in liver disease, as an endocrine disruptor and carcinogen.
6The term "alignment problem" originates from the field of artificial intelligence (AI). It refers to the challenge of ensuring that an AI system's objectives align with human values and intentions, preventing the system from taking harmful, unintended actions to achieve its programmed goals.
