SIX FEET APART OR SIX FEET UNDER
Johnny Drain // London, England
Where does our food come from and what is it worth?
We get the English word “provision”—via Middle English and Old French—from the Latin providere, to foresee or attend to, so there's an irony to be set the task to think about provisions during a crisis that the world, mostly, did not foresee and certainly was not prepared to attend to. Against the backdrop of the crisis, I've found myself deliberating on the value of food, and coupled with a health scare at the end of last year, mortality.
With food shortages and empty shelves across the world, the crisis has brought into sharp focus expectations around where our food comes from and what it's worth. Used to outsourcing the making of, let’s say, a meal and a few drinks a day to someone else, many newly stuck at home have become aware of the true labour of cooking and washing up several times a day. (1) Preparing food is really labour intensive, and outsourcing it is a key part of many lives, whether you're a banker, a pot wash, a teacher, or an agricultural worker in the UK, or Bangladesh, or Singapore, or Turkey, or Benin. Meanwhile, restaurants, bars, and food producers at all levels have been left scrambling to find new business avenues to pursue. Many players throughout global food systems run on incredibly tight margins. How will they survive during and beyond the lockdowns? Many won't.
Furthermore, we've seen people questioning what it's okay to eat. Is eating a pangolin or a bat any weirder or less morally fraught than eating a cow or a chicken? (2) I don't think it is. But many seem to disagree with me: what we eat and why we eat it is wrapped up in many layers of culture and history, and has little to do with the nutrition, genetics, or even the taste of the thing we're considering eating.
One of the great problems of modern food systems is that much of the origins of the food we buy have been obfuscated by the companies who sell it to us. As a result, consumers have become divorced from the true value of their food and what is required to produce it. Meat—cut, whittled of bone and fat and sinew, perhaps breaded or injected with water to plump it up, and vacuum-packed—is stripped of all its formerly living and breathing animal context. Meanwhile, vegetables, fruits, and grains are branded to make growing food look like immaculate, Edenic work.
But farming is messy and dirty. Food is messy and dirty! And all of it involves muck and death and loss of some sort. But God forbid that we remind people of that. You see, that doesn't sell quite as well. Meat and fish and dairy aside, even when we grow wheat or rice we destroy habitats for the space to grow it, we kill insects and microorganisms that might otherwise feast on what we plan to feast on, and we limit the diets of the birds or fish that might feast on those insects.
Life, wherever we might find it, is in essence a bunch of organisms fighting over resources and territory, such as the sugars in an apple, or the canvas of a human body. Occasionally they strike mutually beneficial deals with each other. Often, they figure out ways to annihilate and exclude each other. Periods of time where prevailing conditions allow one set of organisms to prosper eventually yield—by happenstance or by that very prospering—to conditions that favour something else.
Humans do this, apple trees do this, and so do the “pests” that want to eat the apples before we've had the chance to. Although there is some ambiguity about whether viruses are living organisms—they are rather organisms on the edge of life with some but not all of the features of what a biologist would consider a true living organism—the coronavirus is just another example of this too: a thing competing to reproduce, using the tools that evolution has gifted it.
And alongside life is always death. Death is part of the same song as life (and mutation, reproduction, and decay are its players). Sometimes one is heard a little louder, one a little softer, but never one without the other does the song play. Death provides sustenance for life, returning resources back to its ecosystem. It is nature's great recycling trick, turning old into new, in a glorious circular economy. It frees up space, whether we like it or not, for fresh organisms to enter and flourish. Everything is food for something else. Or will be, once the teeth of time have done their chewing. (3) There is always something waiting to eat you, or something that has already started doing so: we sustain—largely in blissful harmony—many microorganisms that have made their homes on and in us.
At a human level, death has been imbued with a sense of tragedy that, by and large, is absent from nature. And yet, there are many more deaths that we are indifferent to than there are those that make us weep, or say a prayer, or light a candle. Our compassion has boundaries, and those boundaries are more limited than we might like to imagine; even at this unique time in history when the “us” of humanity is more unified than it might ever be against the “them” of a foe.
Through Human Exceptionalism (read: arrogance), we've elevated and prioritised the human above everything else in nature: we see this human-centred approach in the worst practises throughout food systems. And death is no exception. Human death, as well the remains it might produce, has been stripped of its original role in the ecosystem. The two most common approaches for disposing of human bodies, burial in coffins (often placed into sealed, lined vaults) and cremation, actually prevent the return to nature of the valuable resources that our bodies hold, the atoms that might nourish or become new life. Further, both approaches use a lot of energy, and involve the use of or release of polluting chemicals (e.g. in the embalming process, or the lining of casks and vaults, or the burning of dental fillings). So, I've been asking myself, what benefits are there to retrieving some of that connection with death as nature's great recycler, as a provision for other things to grow, as being potentially beneficial to our ecosystems and the organisms within them? And, when I go, how exactly do I want to be disposed of?
How death is commemorated varies greatly between cultures, but most societies seem not to be too celebratory about it. But there are exceptions. In Madagascar, the Malagasy people practise famadihana—“the turning of the bones”—a periodic celebration of a person’s life in which their body is removed from its crypt, unshrouded, wrapped in new fabric, and carried aloft by dancing relatives back to its tomb. In Bali, a funerary ritual known as ngaben involves a relatively joyous parade prior to a bodily cremation that, it is hoped, signals the beginning of a new, better, life rather than the absolute end of the most recent one. Jazz funerals, originating in New Orleans feature processions with a band playing solemn music that turns upbeat once the body has been buried, or "cut loose". Taking cues from such traditions, could we temper the pain we feel at the death of others by imbuing it with new meaning from a more holistic, positive perspective? (4)
Moreover, as the global population swells towards 10 billion, what if human bodies, exhausted of life, were seen as an important resource? This may sound odd, alarming, controversial perhaps, but the role that cadavers have played over the past two thousand years in furthering medical science and the understanding of human anatomy cannot be overstated, and since the 1930s they’ve been used as crash test dummies in car safety tests, helping to save many thousands of lives. (This is still done today, in fact, but carried out by universities, rather than the automotive companies themselves.) We've seen in the current crisis, with the establishing of emergency temporary morgues in large cities short on space, that the question of what to do with the deceased is a non-trivial, logistical issue. (5) Inspired by seeing coronavirus casualties being left out in streets in Guayaquil in neighbouring Ecuador, Colombian designers ABC Displays created an inexpensive cardboard hospital bed that turns into a coffin. But are there better alternatives to conventional burial or cremation?
Water cremation, also known as resomation or the trickier-to-market “alkaline hydrolysis,” uses a strongly alkaline solution of potassium hydroxide to break down the body in a few hours and consumes much less energy (90% less, some suggest) than regular cremation. (6) The resulting liquid can be used as fertilizer for plants and the “ashes” that do remain contain 20% more of the human remains than traditional cremation. So you get “more” of your loved one to treasure or scatter.
Closer to nature’s default approach to death is recomposition. Basically human composting. This involves bodies being aerated and treated with microbes in a humidity and temperature-controlled atmosphere—not dissimilar to how we make ferments in the kitchen. With this treatment, the body breaks down in about a month. The result? A bag of something like a topsoil that relatives can take away or have planted in a garden for them. (Non-organic bits, such as metal fillings or pacemakers, which can cause explosions in cremations, are filtered out for recycling, and the undecomposed remains, the bones, can be ground just as with cremation.) In the next decade it is estimated that half a billion people will die: that’s potentially a lot of nutrient-rich topsoil in a world in which, due to intensive farming methods, the quality of much of the soil used in agriculture is degrading rapidly. (7)
Such is the burgeoning interest in the topic that the University of Bath in the UK has a dedicated Centre for Death and Society who founded the Future Cemetery Project, a competition to design cemeteries for the future. The inaugural event, held in 2016, was won by a team from Columbia University whose “Sylvan Constellation” imagined burial vessels in a wooded area turning biomass into energy to power constellations of lanterns instead of gravestones. Let there be light!
Arcing back to ideas of death itself, if we gift the death of more of the organisms involved in the production of our food a privilege and status closer to that which we gift human death, how could that change, for the better, how we eat? Well, to be fair, we’ve tried. Many religions have enshrined the rights of animals and the way they are treated in death, and secular measures for reducing the suffering of animals within and outside of global food systems are many. Yet many producers of meat at an industrial scale have been shown repeatedly to ride roughshod over these edicts, even when it is claimed that they are observing them.
The true time, energy, craft, sacrifices, and loss of life involved in making our food is not well represented in its cost. This helps make margins tight for smaller players in the food system and those with more rigorous standards of ethics. In contrast, large-scale producers and purveyors appear to sell us “cheap” food, but it is heavily subsidised (7), doesn't represent good nutritional bang for buck, and doesn't account for environmental damage and the potentially existential risks involved in its production: if large-scale animal production is responsible for tens of thousands of human deaths or mass suffering then the chicken, pork, or beef it produces ain’t really good value, is it? (8) Even disregarding potential pandemics, there are a lot of deaths per unit of energy produced under our current system of food production. What number is “okay”? What number is too high?
To build a more equitable food system we need to honour the time, energy, craft, and sacrifices that go into our food; better represent its true value and costs; limit socially and environmentally damaging practises; and help people understand where their food comes from. Thinking about the cost of life is one good place to start.
Notes:
Perhaps counterintuitively, it is often the poorest and most vulnerable in societies who rely most on what is termed “food away from home” (FAFH) (either paid for or given "in kind") because they don't have access to cooking facilities and they have to pay a premium for, or even forgo, home utilities.
In the last twenty years, large-scale farming in China has taken over prime land forcing millions of smallholder farmers to move closer to areas where wild bats live and to farm “exotic” species like pangolins that once were only eaten for subsistence. It is thought that horseshoe bats, which harbour many coronaviruses, are the original SARS-CoV-2 hosts and that the virus was transferred to humans via an intermediary, perhaps a pangolin.
Indeed, when one ferments, really one is being a curator of death and decay. Your toolbox of microbial collaborators—molds, yeasts, bacteria—are the same that cause decay in something left untended. On an axis that runs from decay to deliciousness, from the tasty to the terrible (and even poisonous), the diligent fermenter must make sure that they are standing in the right place!
TalkDeath, advocates of the “death positivity” movement, encourage positive and constructive conversations around death and dying, and discuss “greener” funeral trends.
It’s not a new question: in the late eighteenth century, work on the catacombs beneath the streets of Paris started as part of the effort to eliminate the city's overflowing cemeteries.
A study for the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Research found that, based on Dutch practises, cremation has less of an environmental impact than traditional burial, but alkaline hydrolysis had less impact than both. The study found that a cremation or burial accounts for roughly a quarter of a funeral's environmental impact: the carbon emissions of mourners travelling to the funeral are far greater. So, having fewer friends might be the greenest option! Alkaline hydrolysis was first developed in the 1880s as a way to turn animal carcasses into plant food.
A study analysing government farm subsidies estimated that, globally, the public provides 1 million USD per minute. That is a LOT of money. It is focused on a small number of food products (e.g. beef, soy, corn, dairy) and is thought to actually result in a global net increase in the cost of food, affecting the ability of society’s poorest to buy food most severely.
A 2018 study of avian influenza viruses of the H5 and H7 subtypes identified that from 1959 onwards there were 39 “conversion” events—instances when the viruses changed from the designation of “low pathogenic” to “highly pathogenic"—and that 37 of those were reported at commercial poultry production systems, mostly in high-income countries. Why is that of interest? Of the sixteen strains of novel influenza viruses that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes as being “of special concern,” eleven come from viruses of the H5 or H7 subtype.
Author Bios:
Johnny is a materials science PhD who helps create delicious things for the world's best restaurants and bars. He has a particular focus on using fermentation as a tool to amplify flavours and increase sustainability. He writes and speaks about the future of food and challenges in global food systems through his work with MOLD (@thisismold), a critically acclaimed editorial platform about designing the future of food. @drjohnnydrain