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Nine meals away from anarchy
Related to this project: Food4Health

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Every so often I see a headline that fully commands my attention and this morning I saw one from a blog that I subscribe to on design thinking run by John Thackara (who's book, In the Bubble, is outstanding : http://www.thackara.com/inthebubble/), but I digress.

The headline read: "Nine meals away from anarchy" .

http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2009/03/london_yield.php

The story looks at how Londoners (UK) are conceivably 9 meals away from the total disintegration of their society should oil run out. Why? Most of the food consumed in the city is transported from somewhere else (i.e., the city cannot sustain itself on what it is able to grown and maintain). The article does a nice job of showing us a different kind of link between food and oil. Usually we think of food miles as something that affects the environment -- and this is still true -- but food security is another way. In this case, without oil, there is no food security.

At the same time, by relying on oil, we are fueling (pun intended) climate change, which also is linked to food security. This is why a healthy energy policy is also a food policy which is also a social policy. We can no longer afford to decouple the links between what we eat, how we live, and what our future looks like.

For me, this is another example of why systems thinking approaches are so necessary to health promotion, sustainability and healthy public policy. We have to engage the entire system if we're ever going to make headway on these things and we no longer have the luxury of waxing philosophically about what to do independent of action.

April 2, 2009 | 9:39 AM Comments  0 comments

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