Food, glorious food

...but isn't there a little too much of it? Now that's a wicked problem!

As we reported last week the Enginuity Future Skills Hub, a project we’ve been busy with over the past few months, is now launched and available on Enginuity’s website. As we move into the next phase, including a string of interviews for further episodes of the Future Skills Hub Podcast, we’re also turning our attention to another venture we were invited to collaborate in early in 2024. This is the First Hand project, being led by Forth CIC.

First Hand is described as a Learning Venture and is part of a project portfolio being run by Trinity College Dublin and funded by the European Union, christened LEVERS (Learning Ventures for Climate Justice). There are nine projects in the portfolio across the EU (it’s good to see the UK baby hasn’t been thrown out with the Brexit bathwater for things like this), including ones on urban beekeeping from Serbia, community energy from Ireland (see also our recent guest post on the subject), and the future of food from Slovenia. The whole LEVERS portfolio can be seen here.

First Hand is focused on urban food systems and describes its context thus:

Food is a huge force in our lives, as individuals, in society and in culture. Where it comes from, how we get it, what we do with it and how we consume it can signify so much about our means, our identity, our values. These choices we make as individuals and collectively then have impact on our environment. In London the complexity of the food system is vast. Changes, already happening whether directly because of climate change or through regulation or other forces, require the system to work differently, fast. Our challenge has been to identify how our Learning Venture can make a worthwhile contribution to accelerating this change.

Source: LEVERS/First Hand

The deliverables of First Hand are still in formation, but the plan is to develop and roll them out later this year as a range of engagements – workshops and the like – with actors in the food supply chain, all aimed at upskilling and reskilling their workforces in line with UN Sustainable Development Goal for Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12). We’ll keep you posted on progress.

Anyway, as is our wont we’ve been doing a bit of dot-joining, to nut out how we may be able to add value to both First Hand and the Future Skills Hub, by figuring out some connections where a bit of leveraging might be done. Oops, we’re starting to sound like consultants here – got to be careful with that.

First Hand is a good place for our train of thought to start. This is all about responsible food consumption and production in an urban context, and one of the project protagonists, The Felix Project, is a great example, rescuing and redistributing surplus food to Londoners in need from the likes of M&S, Waitrose and even Fortnum & Mason to the tune of (it tells us) 32 million meals last year.

Across the UK food supply chain we waste 4.8mn tonnes of food per year – the equivalent of feeding everyone in the UK for 39 days. Image: balloon.

Is all this food surplus purely due to overproduction on the part of the food companies? Or is overconsumption – or an expectation of it – part of the problem? We’ll get back to that later; for now we’ll continue with our joining of the dots. When we think about our Enginuity project, we’re talking about production – and the people who do it – in its wider sense: production of designs, production of ways to make things (as well as production of the things themselves), production of ways to keep things working, and so on. And minimising overproduction, with its knock-on goal of minimising the consumption of resources in the process, is exactly what the well-established engineering principles of lean manufacturing, Just-In-Time, kanban, kaizen and the like are all about.

To achieve all this, we would argue that a key competence for the engineering profession is creativity. And in our experience and humble opinion, engineers are creative people. Perhaps not all of them naturally, like 3D printed organ designers or improvisers that can get Apollo 13 astronauts back to earth. But in almost every engineering or manufacturing role, some degree of creativity is needed and, in many cases – again, in our experience and opinion – can be learned¹. How to design the tooling for that particularly fiddly component? How to get a vibration probe on that bearing up there and round the corner? How to modify that valve so that it doesn’t go ‘whoosh’ and spoil the trainee pilots’ in-flight simulator experience (in a previous engineering life, we got a patent against our name for solving that particular problem).

All of which dovetails nicely with one of First Hand’s key themes, which is to build knowledge, understanding and skills in three vital areas, one of which is, indeed, creativity. (Incidentally the other two areas are collaboration and complexity, and many engineering jobs are involved closely with managing of the latter at the very least).

So, we can find links between ‘our’ two projects. Both are concerned with responsible use of resources: First Hand explicitly within consumption and production of food; the Future Skills Hub within the general production of all things engineering and incorporating responsible consumption in the process. And both with a good dollop of creativity thrown in.

But, in following this train of thought we find a deeper consideration, and this goes back to the question we raised a paragraph or two ago about all those Fortnum & Mason (and others’) comestibles being redistributed around London. When we read about responsible consumption and production, there seems to be a kind of underlying assumption that this is mainly about consumption, or at least the demand for it. After all, the classic supply chain principle is that supply should follow demand, right? And if there’s too much food in the supply chain, surely it’s because the Great British eating public wants it – now! – and perhaps needs to be educated not to want it so much.

But, while that might be largely true, there are many reasons – in the food supply chain at least – why production might outstrip even the inflated demand of a growth-mantra-fed consumer population like Britain. Favourable weather conditions leading to higher primary ingredient yields, market fluctuations, production quotas and incentives for farmers or food producers, for example. Inefficiencies getting fixed in international supply chains through the implementation of some of SDG 12’s goals, leading to higher landed product yields, for another. We won’t go too much into that – it’s complicated – but it gets us into lots of interesting areas, like Extended Producer Responsibility and how far that takes us in real terms.

Image: Zero Waste Scotland

Going a stage further, though, can supply also be used to shape demand? Looking outside the food sector for a moment, the repair economy seems to be a good example. If engineering creativity is used to build (back) longer lives into engineered products, together with the product-as-a-service models that are starting to emerge, then we might hope to reduce the volume of linear-use tat we find as a matter of course, made in certain Eastern realms and sold through the types of online marketplaces that make profits that allow its owners to mess around in space for a few minutes at a time on their own rocket ships.

This may be true to a more limited extent in the food sector, through tactics like portion control – although beware the backlash when reducing the size of things like chocolate easter eggs is perceived (perhaps correctly) as merely a way to increase margins (beware: this Instagram post is liberally smattered with the type of language you would not normally expect to hear on The Green Edge). Portion control certainly seems to be something to look at for reducing waste in the Hospitality and Food Service industries, though, according to this 2022/23 WRAP study.

So, while the Felix Project is a great case study for how to reduce food waste through redistribution, it seems to us that this presupposes the food is already being pushed in at the left-hand end of the supply chain, perhaps out of synch with true demand. Or perhaps even assuming there’s going to be loads of waste, but that’s OK because there are plenty of good folks like the Felix Project to take the surplus. Are we being too cynical here?

The reality, of course, is that the food supply chain is a wicked problem. Complex, interconnected, uncertain, ambiguous and constantly-evolving, with diverse communities of stakeholders with conflicting goals and trade-offs. At best, we suppose, a range of problems within might be framed and even solved - like how to redistribute food in a city like London - but whether and how that might create or exacerbate problems elsewhere requires a more holistic approach. Easily said, more tricky to do.

The logical landing point in our ramblings here – for this post at least – is the Circular Food Economy. We can find lots of good stuff from The Ellen MacArthur Foundation about this and we particularly like this piece on Opportunities for Cities. The projections, though, are scary: 68% of the world’s people are forecast to be city-dwellers by 2050, at which point those 68% will be eating four-fifths of the world’s food. Why? Waste is one thing – this case study on the B Corp Toast Ale tells us that more than two out of five bread loaves are thrown out – although as sourdough bakers ourselves, we could argue that two out five loaves (at least) of industrial, sugar-laden white bread should be thrown out (or, better, given the ancient Egyptian treatment).

But another, more sinister, factor is overconsumption and obesity linked to city living. And that’s the point at which we stop our dot-joining (for now at least), roll up our sleeves and start thinking about what we can do to help the First Hand project along.

(Social media image of spaghetti by Stefan from Pixabay)

1. Is creativity a natural ability or a learned skill? Sources like O*NET give mixed messages, but many argue that creativity is educated out of most people by our current Education systems. See the famous TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson on the subject – made in 2006 but with relevance still today.