Watch what you eat: tipping points hastened by food system

What did you eat yesterday? 4.1 litres of diesel, 29 kg of soil and 2.2 tonnes of water? According to science writer Julian Cribb, this is what the average consumer ‘eats’ each day or, in other words, what it takes to produce the food that one person eats in one day.

“That’s what it takes to feed the typical human being - and when you multiply it by 7 billion people, our food system is costing a huge amount of resources that are increasingly hard to replace,” Cribb told the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra on 27 November.

Forget the SUV you drive to work each day, your overseas flights or your electricity use - what we eat has the most significant impact on the planet, Cribb says, but few of us know just how significant.

Cribb warned of a series of ‘tipping points’ in his paper to the Second Australian Earth System Outlook conference. These tipping points are points of no return that the global food system will reach in the next 50 years unless there is a radical change to farming systems, cities and the world diet.

Scarcities of water, land, oil, nutrients, technology, fish and finance are now acting in synergy and are being amplified by climate shocks, said Cribb, author of The Coming Famine: the global food crisis and how we can avoid it.

“Because these scarcities are operating in sync, we are likely to reach tipping points in the food system much more quickly and unpredictably than many people realise.

“There is still time to act - but the action must be fast and it must be universal, as globalisation means everybody is now affected by food prices, supply and the conflicts and migratory floods that arise when the food chain fails.”

Cribb’s message wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. He said the current situation presents us with opportunities for major new developments in food production, including a 300% growth in world aquaculture; a massive new industry in algae farming to produce food, feed, fuel and plastics; a rise in urban agriculture; and new ways to produce low-cost food sustainably with bio-cultures.

We should explore the culinary potential of the earth, Cribb said. In Australia, for instance, we have 6100 edible plants - of which we only eat five or six. The earth is home to 25,000 edible plants, 99% of which are unfamiliar to most people.

“My message is that the risks to the global food production and a safe human future are very great - but if we recognise them and act soon enough, then the opportunities, including diversification into alternative crops, are very great,” Cribb said.

“In Australia, for example, we have opportunity for new food and farming industries worth $30 billion and employing around 50,000 people - provided we get our science, our investment and our act together.”