"A lot of the global food system is powered by fossil fuels"

Interview with the host of Fuel to Fork

When I woke up this morning, I have to admit writing this newsletter was the furthest thing from my mind. I just wanted to crawl under a rock and not come out until January 2029. 

In the grand scheme of things, I know that me and my little community will mostly be ok, including those living in America.

But I know many more who will not be, from my contacts in Latin America to my husband’s colleagues in Kyiv, from fellow journalists in Palestine to my countrymen attacked with Russian weapons, from women of child-bearing age to parents of LGBTQI+ children. 

They will be affected, whether from tightened migration policies, cuts in aid, appeasement of Russian and Israeli governments, abandonment of much-needed action on climate change and biodiversity loss, and/or cruel attempts to control women’s bodies. 

What hurts the most, in my personal case, is seeing Burmese migrants who made it to America complaining about open borders and expressing their admiration for a strongman.

But like I often say, giving up means letting the bad guys win (yes, I’m openly using the bad/good, black/white language now). We need to keep fighting, even if we are on the “long road to defeat”, whether it’s to transform food systems, rein in runaway climate change, or push back on inhumane policies and governments. 

So, join me? 

Photo by me.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new podcast in town and it’s called Fuel to Fork. As the name suggests, it looks at the role of fossil fuels in our current food systems, and is brought to you by the fine folks at TABLE, IPES-Food and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.  

So far, four out of seven episodes are out and it’s a fascinating deep dive into where the fossil fuels are and how we got here. If you haven’t really thought about how interlinked these two are, the short clip below from the show will give you an idea. 

With COP29 just a few days away, being hosted in a third petrostate in three consecutive years, I thought it would be timely to speak to Matthew Kessler, Host and producer of Fuel to Fork, facilitator of food systems debates at TABLE, project coordinator at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and former farmer. 

Thin: Let's start right from the beginning. Tell me about your journey into food systems.

Matthew: I never ate anything green growing up. I grew up outside of New York in the suburbs and I just had a very different relationship with food then than I do now. It was just calories. But after I went to study English and Philosophy and then dropped out - because I couldn't think of how that would lead to a job exactly - I ended up working on farms, and I found purpose working on farms. So my first touch with the food system was on food production. 

Over the last almost two decades, I ended up working on different parts of the food system. I worked on farms, grocers, retailers. I've worked a lot in kitchens. I've studied soil science, food policy and agroecology. And since I started working at TABLE, we’re exploring the global food system debates and it's been interesting to bring these different parts of my life. 

Thin: Tell me about your farm experience. Did you just fall into it? 

Matthew: No, I wanted to know how it works. Like I said, I felt like I was lacking a purpose so I was like, “Okay, let me just get to the core of something”. And (farming) is the most tangible way to do that. I worked on farms in Hawaii to start with and ended up working on farms in five different countries and across the United States. I've worked on small scale, agroecological types of farms. I've also worked on larger farms, just to understand these processes behind the food at our grocery store. 

Thin: I find that fascinating because I come from a completely different direction: I've not worked on a farm. Obviously I’ve visited many and I grew up in an agrarian country, so I'm familiar with how it works, but I come in as somebody who’s obsessed about food but also from a country with a lot of hunger and malnutrition. Has your experience as a farmer changed the way you see food systems? 

Matthew: Yes. I try to think more about the practicality of solutions, because I hear a lot of discussions about what sounds really good and nice but when you look at the reality on the ground, they're just really hard to implement for a variety of reasons. So I'm very sympathetic, I guess, to some of the lock-ins that farmers find themselves in. They have really good hearts and want to change towards more sustainable practices and are doing that, but that's incredibly difficult to do that at scale. 

The other thing is I’m just very wary of the romanticised narratives of farming. I mean, every culture is different but nowhere is farming this glorious profession that everyone is aspiring to do and wants to do. It's deeply hard work. Really fulfilling, but also, I could see how I might have health problems down the road for the kind of extensive labour that I did for even a short period of time. And (I did that) by choice. A lot of people aren't in this profession by choice.

Thin: I definitely want to come back on this but let's talk about the podcast. Tell me how Fuel to Fork came about. 

Matthew: So the Global Alliance for the Future of Food produced the Power Shift report in 2023, a fantastic analysis that put numbers to something that a lot of people either weren't thinking about or didn't have an inkling of. They came up with this number of how 15% of global fossil fuel use goes to power the food system. IPES-Food approached us at TABLE about doing a podcast series on it, because they like the critical and expansive look we give to the topics. 

Thin: So this is a seven-episode series. How do you select your topics? 

Matthew: We wanted to map out fossil fuels inputs across the whole supply chain. So the first two episodes are basically a history of how we got here and why you should care about this topic. The next two episodes are on fossil fuels on our farm: the first on farm inputs, like nitrogen fertiliser and synthetic pesticides, and the next is on where fossil fuels are throughout the farm. We look at machinery and also the fossil fuel imprint of data and precision agriculture technologies. 

The next two are on processing and packaging, which has the largest fossil fuel footprint in the food system, which is fascinating to me. I didn't know that. The last one is on fossil fuels in our kitchens, so cooking and consumption. 

And every one of these is so tricky, because it has such implications for the ways we live our lives today, and we break up the solutions into these buckets. Like, can we make efficiency gains? How far does that get us? What sort of alternative technologies are available to substitute from a fossil fuel source to a “greener” source of electricity? What does a completely different way of eating and farming look like? A whole systems change. And what are the risks of that approach?

Thin: I was going to ask this later, but I think it makes sense to ask now. Will there be more episodes or a second series? 

Matthew: My cheeky response is if anyone is keen to fund another season, there's a lot more to explore. We spend this first season really mapping out where fossil fuels are in our food, and that leaves you with a lot of frustration, because there's so much opportunity to dig into people's lives and understand the dynamics happening on a community and a national level. 

Thin: I think you're right. I was just re-reading that FAO-led paper that found a third of total manmade emissions come from food systems. The researchers broke it down into different sectors and said distribution accounts for 29% but it's growing and expected to continue growing. They also said 40% of these emissions comes from input production. I’d forgotten that! 

Matthew: Can I say something off the back of that? Most of the focus of global conversations around food systems is on emissions. Our diets and how we produce food cause climate warming emissions, and they're impacted greatly by (the emissions). It's a very clear and measurable story and we're really good at analysing this. We can raise awareness around the social and environmental impacts of emissions, and we can act on those findings in meaningful ways. 

But looking at fossil fuels is a different story. Looking only at emissions, in one way, sort of pre determines what solutions are available to address, because you need to reduce emissions. But if you look at the upstream inputs and you find that a lot of the global food system is powered by fossil fuels, the same fossil fuels that cause climate change, the same ones that tie the price of food to the price of oil, and whose extraction causes enormous social and ecological harm to communities across the world, you get maybe a different set of solutions or a different analysis. 

Because it forces you to look at a political economic analysis or put more simply, where is power in the food system? It also gives me the excuse to talk to the brilliant Jennifer Clapp about these topics, because she takes it to another level. I'm gonna do a bonus episode with her. 

You have to talk about structures and ways that our food system is locked into particular types of food production and diets, because those all rely on fossil fuel inputs. And this series gave us the opportunity to explore all that.

Thin: That's such a great point. A lot of the time, when you talk about sustainability, it's very much based around either reducing agricultural emissions, or linking farmers to markets, but there’s little about the wider power imbalances. 

Matthew: We're supposed to, in governance, to have long-term thinking, but the incentives around actions are really short-term and (revolve around) election cycles. But these are long-term existential crises and and some of these processes are quite hidden from us. And fossil fuels are a lot more invisible than, say, emissions which we're talking about and measuring a lot more. 

I've heard people in the series talk about how corporations are intentionally hiding the fossil fuels behind their brands, and changing the conversation to personal responsibility, like the carbon footprint. But our modern lives are powered by this. And I used this analogy in the podcast: It's the water we're swimming in.   

Thin: Do you think people are aware at all about how reliant our food systems on fossil fuels? 

Matthew: I think it's barely on people's minds. I mean, it was barely on my mind, honestly, and I've been thinking about this for a long time and working in this field, but this explicit connection wasn't as obvious for me. We did vox pops where we talked to people on the street and one person made some kind of statements around the moral importance of focusing on fossil fuels in our food, but everyone else was just shopping for food. 

They're thinking about the cost, the taste, the freshness. And how far did the food travel, which is an aspect that matters, but there are a lot of other factors too, like convenience, how does this fit into my hectic day? 

And like I mentioned before, the nature of (fossil fuels’ involvement) is quite invisible, compared to flying on an air plane or driving in a car. The only direct way we interface with fossil fuels as an everyday consumer is probably the type of fuel that we're cooking with, right? Whether we're using gas stove or an electric stove, or going to the grocery store and seeing your food wrapped in plastic. 

Thin: What would you say are some of the most surprising things that you've discovered over the course of this podcast?

Matthew: On the big picture, my answer is quite depressing, which is just how implicated fossil fuels are all over the food system and also that its (involvement) is really expected to grow, specifically around the growth of nitrogen fertiliser, increasing ultra-processed food consumption and the use of plastics throughout the supply chain.

These are the markets with opportunity for growth for oil companies and petrochemical products while we're phasing out or decarbonising other sectors. It is the food system. That’s the reason we won’t be reaching climate goals.

The other part is that we know some solutions at hand that will help, and we also know how difficult some of these are to implement. For example - and this statistic blew my mind - we have a 46% nitrogen use efficiency rate globally, which means that over half of the nitrogen fertiliser that we're applying isn't being taken up by crops. 

There's a lot of different reasons for that. There's education and training, the fact that this is highly subsidised and farmers are hedging their bets - it's better to apply more than to apply less - and they don't have the safety net, although there are policies and countries are working on that. 

Nitrogen fertiliser use is growing across the board but Denmark, for example, has decreased its use in half from the 80s and the 90s and that's largely due to regulation and policies that punished overuse and required nitrogen management on every farm. They also made incentives and supports to switch to organic farming, where there'll be certainly much less use of some of these inputs.

Thin: One thing you said earlier that struck me was how precision farming and the data that underpins it are linked to fossil fuels. Can you talk more about that because I think whenever we talk about precision agriculture, we look at it from (1) how that's going to help mostly the big, intensive, monoculture farms, or (2) who owns the data. We don't actually think about the fossil fuels associated with it. And I think that's a really important point.

Matthew: Yeah, so there are competing arguments at play here and I'm going to do my best to paraphrase them and also credit Jennifer Clapp who laid out all these arguments really succinctly on the podcast. She has a book coming out next year where she talks about all these lock-ins. 

Let me make the positive argument first, which is that having better data and a better understanding of our ecologies where excess fertiliser is running off, means we can more precisely input the exact amount of nutrients that are needed for the crop. In theory, if you do that as perfectly as possible, you will reduce fossil fuel inputs onto farms, and you'll cause a lot less environmental damage. This is also going to save costs for the farmers, because you're using less inputs. 

The question on who owns (the data) is kind of the interesting one here when you bring in the political economy of food, because it's the same companies that are selling these fertilisers and pesticides that are also selling the data. Jennifer said data is the new input in farming, and it has a fossil fuel footprint. 

I mean, the numbers here are completely obscure and it's really difficult to find any information about exactly how big this footprint is, but we know that these data centres now account for 1% to 2% of global electricity. Precision agriculture is a fraction of it but it is growing. 

I also talked to Darrin Qualman of the National Farmers Union in Canada and he was saying how after some of these technologies are implemented, they haven't seen any reductions in fuel use or input use. So this is where the theory and the practice don't always match up, and I'm quite keen to find more case studies that are successful. 

Thin: Having done the research and spoken to all these people, have you changed your mind about any topic or any issues?  

Matthew: It changed the way I go about the world a little bit. I opened this series with me going to the store to grab a bag of potato chips. Such a frictionless consumer experience, right? I have a craving, and then, minutes later, I have that bag of potato chips in my hand.

The complications of how that bag of potato chips got to the store… not only do I think about the farming processes now, but also the energy intensity that goes into each of those. That wasn't something I was thinking about when I think of ultra-processed foods.  

Given how big a portion of the fossil fuel footprint on food is on processing packaging, it makes me think, “Yes, we need to change consumption patterns but if we can also green these processes, we're actually getting pretty far.” 

Thin’s Pickings 

I’m sharing a single story this week because it seems very apt for the times we’re in. Besides, it cites one of my favourite books and is linked to the topic of “hope” I covered last week. 

It’s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate & Get Heroic - Noema 

This is a long read and Pamela Swanigan is scathing of purveyors of hope, many of whom I admire and respect, but her writing, which posits American bureaucrat John Collier’s “the long hope” with J. R. R. Tolkien’s “the long defeat”, hits you in the chest. Some excerpts: 

“Tolkien saw us as called upon to fight a valorous but never-ending and ultimately futile battle against the world-destroyers.” 

“He termed this ongoing battle “the long defeat” and set the immortal elves of Middle Earth to fighting it through all “ages of the world,” bent on forestalling what they could not prevent: the day when the forces of power-lust would indeed be utterly regnant and the original genius of the living world snuffed out.” 

What does she think we should do now that we’re facing a similar existential crisis, turbocharged by Western capitalism? 

“Evoking heroism rather than hope, and courage rather than comfort, are central to this response. So too is involving people in a story instead of hectoring them with information. And, most importantly, we must take inspiration from a colder truth: We may not be able to prevent the end, but if we are willing to fight the long defeat, perhaps we can make a better one.” 

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