by Paolo Marcesini
A project, an observatory, research and development projects, training. And today, the Circolar Economy for Food also becomes a portal, an information hub with the task of enhancing and sharing within the food system community best practices, the efforts of individual companies and startups, university research and supply chain projects to adopt and communicate truly and concretely regenerative production thinking.
How did the project come about and why is it essential to define the importance of the Circular Economy and its development within the food system?
The idea of creating an information hub on circular economy issues applied to food was born in 2017, in parallel with the writing of “Circular Economy for Food. Matter, Energy and Knowledge, in Circulation” (Edizioni Ambiente, 2018) book that represented globally, the first scientific popularization text on this topic. Since then, as the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo, we have been monitoring companies and research institutions, both national and international, that practice and carry out research inscribed in the Circular Economy for Food (CEFF), with the aim of understanding the potential of this new economic-cultural paradigm and participating in its theoretical-practical development. The need to contribute more strongly to the definition and evolution of the conceptual framework of the CEFF then emerged more strongly when through the monitoring action we carried out, we described the impact of some of the case studies analyzed on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Projecting the results of this analysis onto the metrics made available by the model called “The Wedding Cake” developed by Rockström (the father of planetary boundary theory) and Sukhdev of the Stockholm Resilience Center, a model that reminds us how food is the basic connecting unit of all 17 SDGs, the picture that emerges highlights how, on the whole, little attention is still paid to safeguarding the base of the “cake,” that is, the dimension of the biosphere, which contains and supports the social and economic plan. In essence, the new paradigm risks not being regenerative toward natural capital but only encouraging a manipulative approach to waste, a situation that, paradoxically, could lead to an acceleration of planned obsolescence. Such a drift, of course, as humanity and Planet, I think we cannot afford it.
What are the dangers and risks facing the world of food production today?
Rather than talking about the dangers to the world of food production, it seems to me more appropriate to talk about the risks to the World from clearly unsustainable food production.
What we put on the table determines consequences for the health of the Planet and humanity itself. For example, our plate affects the climate and is in turn affected by it, in a relationship of interconnected dualism. There are many indicators that tell us how everything in the food system is connected in a relationship of mutual evolution or involution. As Raj Patel, a prominent Indian-born economist, sociologist, and activist, puts it, “We all suffer from a systemic inflammation generated by extractive capitalism, and we need to let bigger and bigger elephants wander cautiously through the china store that is the Planet.”
In this historical period of transition from the geological era of the Anthropocene to the Ecocene era, I believe that we are at a crossroads: on the one hand, we can take a path whose foundations rest on the shoulders of the most fragile and vulnerable populations by espousing a logic of a race to hoard resources while on the other hand, we can work to mitigate our impact to be in a better position to cope with change and, in some cases, to figure out how to adapt. If we choose the first path, we will see a crescendo of phenomena such as land grabbing, water grabbing, wars for energy and rare earths, fear and instability for a good part of the population while the second path, requires adopting a collaborative, systemic, circular approach, mutualistic symbiosis, adopting a win-win logic for us and the environment. In one word, it is about co-evolutionary thinking.
In the years of the economic boom, we allowed specialization to take over from the big picture, productivity from the quality of human life and the environment, performance from well-being; in practice, we allowed a set of linear logics to impose themselves on systemic scenarios, and from this juxtaposition emerged suffering on many levels.
This is summed up well by British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who in 1972, in his book “Toward an Ecology of Mind,” wrote , “The world’s major problems are the result of the difference between how nature works (i.e., as a system) and the way people think (which is primarily linear).”
Linear economics is clearly the child of linear thinking.
An economic model that is based on the modus operandi “produce, consume, dispose” is a model of economics that, once primary needs have been saturated, creates secondary needs to ensure the continuity of production, credit mechanisms to sustain consumption, public debt to stimulate demand, not simply stopping to consider that there can be no infinite growth on a finite Planet. The linear economy is rightly being pitted against a circular economy for years now, which should lead us to adopt a systems approach to solving increasingly complex and interconnected problems, but the Circularity Gap Report of 2022 tells us that currently only 8.6 percent of the world economy is circular, so there is still much to be done and we have little time. Recent data from the European Compost Network tell us that 40 percent of the total waste at the European level is organic waste, and that of this waste only about 33 percent is valorized at the end of its life, so we have 66 percent of possible secondary raw material that we still need to think about so that it is not wasted by becoming waste. We need the economies, taxonomies, innovations, but most of all the will and mindset to challenge some of those established habits that are the real obstacle to the transition to sustainable development.
What are the areas most impacted by food systems?
In my opinion, we are witnessing a real “crisis of reason” that becomes apparent in its senselessness when we address the issue of food waste understood as Food Loss and Waste. Globally, we throw away 1,300,000,000 tons of food (about 8600 cruise ships) with a total value of about $1.7 trillion, and at the same time, we know that it would take about $267 billion a year to eliminate world hunger by 2030, an investment corresponding to 0.3 percent of world GDP. To this figure we can add that it has been scientifically quantified (thanks to Life Cycle Assessment calculations) how, along with wasted food, we are literally throwing away about 250 billion liters of water annually (equal to the consumption of New York City for the next 120 years) and 1.4 billion hectares of land (30 percent of the world’s usable agricultural area).
But as I told you, the circular economy applied to food cannot be limited to being just a consideration of how to avoid the generation of waste.
Starting with food to develop a circular economic-cultural paradigm shift means bringing attention back to biodiversity, communities, the quality of relationships, and the substance of behavior.
This is because, for example, going beyond the focus on waste, we know that mainly due to food production, species are disappearing at the rate of about 27,000 per year, which is 100 to 1,000 times faster than the physiological extinction rate associated with natural evolution. Out of about 30,000 naturally occurring edible species, 3/4 of the world’s food depends on just 12 plant and 4 animal species. Think of it, food crops that alone meet 95 percent of the world’s energy needs number just 30. Of these, wheat, rice and corn provide more than 60 percent of the calories we consume. And if, naturally and culturally, we are rapidly converging toward promoting an economy that is homogenizing and therefore less resilient, it becomes even more apparent that we are working to feed the economy that is functional for its own sake, rather than to meet real basic human needs. A good indicator that confirms our voracity is Earth Overshoot Day, the calculation of the day on which the world’s population consumed all available terrestrial resources for the year and began to overexploit the planet by not allowing ecosystems time to regenerate, a day that in 2022 fell on July 28. Exaggerated lifestyles obviously severely affect the amount of resources humanity will have in the years to come. The extraction of primary materials tripled from 1970 to 2010: from 22 billion tons of materials annually to 70 billion, from a global average of 6 tons per capita to 10, all obviously not equally distributed among states. It is estimated that in 2050, keeping production and consumption rates stable, it will serve to put into the global system, about 180 billion tons of natural resources, or 20 tons per person per year. Of these, however, about 29 billion tons will be missing if action is not taken in preserving and regenerating them.
Moreover, when the world population exceeds 10 billion in 2050, the problem will not be limited to raw materials alone, but will also involve a 30 percent increasing demand for energy to support the 70 percent increase in agricultural production. This is a situation that needs to be responded to with solutions capable of reducing emissions harmful to the ecosystem. CO2 concentrations have increased by 145% over pre-industrial levels (before 1750). Due to the production until the sale of food, more than 3.3 billion tons of CO2 are generated, or about 34 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Food waste, after China and the United States, is the third largest contributor to the planet’s climate-changing emissions.
Finally, a scenario where the situation is already dramatic is that of water, where agricultural production accounts for 69 percent of withdrawals, and, as if that were not enough, by using abundant amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus in the fields to increase crop yields, global biogeochemical cycles are being altered by contaminating aquifers. Again through water (and beyond), plastic is making its way into the human food chain. Scientific data already tell us that about 83 percent of the world’s drinking water is contaminated with microplastics. In practice, we are accumulating waste inside our bodies, just as we do in our landfills, substances that are not natural and difficult for the body to metabolize. These are materials and substances that change our physiological balances, and it’s not just microplastics. The European Food Safety Authority, has published numerous articles on the contamination of our bodies due to substances that are used on farms or in intensive agriculture. For example, it is estimated that an average Italian each year, along with “normal” food, sends down 12 kilograms of chemicals (fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, etc.) and 9 grams of antibiotics (equal to 4 treatments). So it is not surprising that the World Health Organization, reports us how the risk of mortality from diseases related to poor nutrition has exceeded that related to diseases determined by insufficient caloric intake.
In light of this data, I think it is clear that the Circular Economy for Food needs to address all of these issues, not by compartmentalizing them, but by taking a systemic approach to analyze problems and identify solutions. A mode of operation that, as the National Institute of Health says, is of “One Health,” meaning it recognizes that human and ecosystem health are inextricably linked.
Research and development, innovation and tradition, community and territory, enterprises and supply chains. Can the Circular Economy be the hinge to stitch together a new Economy of Relationships capable of restoring balance and a sustainable future to the whole system?
If I had to summarize in one sentence what I have been able to understand by working on numerous researches and experiencing their applicability with enterprises, I would say “we are all one system,” we are an organic whole. Our world is characterized by nested networks within networks where it is not so much the actors in the system that are decisive, but what they exchange through relationships. It is a dynamic system composed of matter, energy, information and characterized by stock, flow and feedback loops. A system in which the balance between the parts is worth more than the sum of the individual elements.
Thinking for systems (Systems Thinking) can help us to see the interconnections, to protect the health of vital ones (avoiding, for example, the outbreak of zoonoses that often arise from the disruption of relationships between ecological units and can lead to pandemic dynamics such as the one we are still experiencing), to sharpen our ability to understand the needs of all parties involved in the system, and to be courageous in designing new relationships that make the system more resilient.
We are our relationships, and the circular economy can be the tool to help us strengthen them by avoiding compromising our relationships with the best raw material supplier known to mankind, namely Nature.
Can you give us an example?
In Nature, there is no concept of waste, everything is metabolized by the 5 natural kingdoms (bacteria, algae, animals, plants, fungi), each element is valued 100% and becomes life. With the same goal in mind, there are now many industrial entities adopting a symbiotic approach by exchanging secondary raw materials, production waste, residual forms of energy, services, skills and technologies. As geographers Charles White and George Renner wrote in “Geography An Introduction to Human Ecology” in 1936, it is all those industries that “seemingly separate and distinct, actually depend on each other.”
In recent years, many new Circular Business Models have emerged that come to fruition through by-product valorization, technology sharing, product remanufacturing, dematerialization and process optimization, and so on, but, I would like to remind you, beware of wanting to close the loop at all costs! One of the main risks of the circular economy is related to the dichotomy between eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness. If attention is not paid to the indirect consequences produced, a circular action (eco-efficient) can potentially remain far from the paradigms of sustainability (eco-effectiveness), and this is especially the case when there are conceptual phases of a project that are not considered (blind spot), and thus when a systemic approach is not taken in the design phases of the circular action. To give you a few examples, a circular action is not, in my opinion, worthy of being called such when it does not take into account the impacts on the environmental context by introducing invasive alien species into local agroecosystems, or when it does not take into consideration the length of the supply chain by generating more climate-changing emissions, and again when it does not clarify the economic dynamics that contradict the relationships with workers. Unfortunately, we see situations like this. It almost seems that for some companies, circularity is more an exercise in style than a concrete transformative effort.
That is why it is important for large enterprises to make the ecological transition a significant one, while policy has an obligation to provide practical support to small and medium-sized enterprises that are most struggling to change their production methods. We need reference points to migrate to a new paradigm, and as the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo we are constantly seeking a dialogue with all those companies that take a systems approach to be vectors of change.
Underlying the Circular Economy for Food are 3 Cs, that of Capital, that of Cyclicality and that of Coevolution. A kind of vocabulary capable of defining sustainable food quality.
I like to call it a “cultural framework” that defines an operating scenario in accordance with shared value systems in a given society. The 3 Cs are based on the European environmental and social taxonomy, which has been promoted since June 2020 and developed by the European Commission to achieve the goals of the Green Deal. It is a ranking system that sets priorities, but more importantly it serves to establish a common language, a clear definition of what is “sustainable.” This helps shift investments to where they are most needed and creates greater security for investors by protecting them from greenwashing. The European Taxonomy Regulation establishes 6 environmental goals (climate change mitigation; climate change adaptation; sustainable use and protection of water and marine resources; transition to a circular economy; pollution prevention and control; and protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems) and 3 social goals (securing decent work for all, ensuring adequate living standards and well-being, and promoting inclusive communities and societies), the 3 Cs further simplify these goals without trivializing them and aspire to enhance their interconnected and inseparable nature.
If I had to give you a concise definition of what Circular Economy for Food should be today, in my opinion, I would tell you that it is that systemic way of thinking and acting that starts from placing at the center of all decision-making the protection and regeneration of natural capital to which human, cultural and economic capital is associated, respecting planetary limits and at the same time providing an equitable space for civil society.
Capital, Cyclicality and Coevolution are the operational boundaries of a guided anarchy, in the words of Carlin Petrini, President of my University.
The C of Natural, Human, Cultural and Economic Capital reminds us that humanity should not be a destabilizing, invasive subject, but should seek balance with Nature. In other words, as is the case with natural ecosystems, our economic model should also aspire to reach its climax, that is, those environmental and social conditions that remain stable and capable of self-perpetuating over time. C of Cyclicality, on the other hand, in its various modes of execution, represents the working method that, from a circular perspective, encompasses within it three fundamental concepts such as the extension of product durability (EcoDesign) and producer/consumer responsibility, the metabolization of any surplus through new cycles of valorization, and the necessary adoption of renewable energy and matter. Finally, Coevolution C indicates the set of priorities and conditions that a design must have in order to be considered circular, that is, adherence to a collaborative and systemic paradigm that generates a win-win solution, including the environment (thus returning in a circular logic to capital).
Can Italy with its agrifood supply chains and the quality of its offerings also be a leader in circular food production?
We know that food will be a crucial issue in the 21st century and that Italy can rise to the occasion if it acts as a “Country System.” The extended food supply chain (agricultural sector, food industry, distribution and horeca) is the leading economic sector for Italy, with a turnover of more than 500 billion euros and almost 4 million people employed. I personally believe that there is a need to reorient some of the agricultural priorities from quantity production to quality production, but what is certain is that each of us, as end consumers, can and must do our part by teaching new generations to live within planetary and social limits. Whether we can also be leaders in circular food production? I believe that the opportunity to set a good example always exists. It depends on whether, as George Bernard Shaw–Irish writer, screenwriter, playwright, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1925–said in the near future we will be reasonable men who adapt to the world or unreasonable as we insist on trying to adapt the world to us.
Can we talk about circular economy even downstream of production? As an extension of the consumer’s social responsibility, environmental awareness, and pursuit of well-being?
“Circularity” is an evolutionary dynamic that has always been present in Nature and also in humanity. Food is the medium through which the circular process of metabolizing matter in the human body and its consequent transformation into energy for life begins. A consideration that prompted German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach to state in the second half of the 1800s that “We are what we eat.” So our nutrition is fundamental, and just as we do not allow ourselves to ingest substances that cannot be metabolized by our bodies, because otherwise we would be sick, so we should not produce and put on the market products that are not “digestible” by the metabolism that characterizes the recycling collection. So, the first thought I would like to share is that, as conscious consumers, we should not only judge the quality of a product by its content, but also by its container. Good food must be sustainable as much in its raw materials as in its packaging, which must be eco-designed to put the consumer in a position to properly sort it once it becomes no longer useful. On this issue, I believe that the circular economy must insist on the meeting of extended producer and end-consumer responsibility.
Secondly, I believe that two other factors are key to the realization of the ecological transition: waste reduction and the protein transition, two issues on which the consumer is at the forefront. A diet that is healthy for humanity and the Planet has an optimal caloric intake and consists largely of foods of plant origin, reduced amounts of foods of animal origin, includes unsaturated rather than saturated fats and limited amounts of refined grains, ultra-processed foods and added sugars. According to current figures presented by the EAT-Lancet Commission, a leading scientific committee on Planetary Health Diet issues, the amount of fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes consumed globally is expected to double, while that of foods such as red meat and sugar is expected to decline by more than 50 percent.
On the waste reduction front, on the other hand, planning weekly meals, not being ashamed to ask to take home leftovers in case we go out to eat, sharing small appliances and buying durable ones, valuing waste that is no longer edible to generate agricultural soil improver, and adopting circularity in the kitchen are all shrewdnesses that we can decide to make our own.
Especially I believe that the “Circular Kitchen” still has great potential to be expressed. With the Pollenzo Food Lab, we have been working for months on clarifying the operational modalities of circularity in the kitchen, which we have defined as “a creative recombinatorial culinary process that arises from the use of the whole ingredient and from cycles (short, long, cascading and pure) of enhancement of each by-product.”
History teaches us that adopting this mentality gave rise to dishes that still mark the history of the gastronomy of the territories. Such as Ravioli del Plin, which originated in the 20th century in the Langhe, Monferrato and Roero (Piedmont) area as a fresh egg pasta dish filled with meat and stewed vegetables leftover from the day before, or the more international Meatballs (in Italian, Polpette), a dish that originated in Roman times, between 25 B.C. and 35 B.C., using boiled meat leftover from various cuts of different animals. But to say that logics of home economics are practiced only as a matter of valuing surpluses is perhaps reductive, as it does not give credit to the cultural component attached to them. Underlying this ongoing research-action, there must be respect for the fruit of one’s labor and an awareness of what it took to generate it. An emotional connection to a product that has a strong impact for the purposes of its treatment during and at the end of its life cycle.
How can the circulareconomyforfood.it dissemination platform help individual enterprises engaged in the process of transition to a new production model?
A sustainable economy can only exist if it is supported by a knowledge economy. The science popularization platform circulareconomyforfood.it I hope can first of all be a useful tool for “communicating,” in the true sense of the word, which, having the same root as “common,” means “to pool, to make accessible, to share a piece of information.”
In a relatively short space of time, the sensibility of doing sustainable innovation must grow. To achieve this, we need to find the right language to give substance to an intergenerational pact: a “glocal” agreement to rethink food production in a systemic/circular way and make the economic model associated with its entire life cycle more resilient.
The platform has a duty to offer an authoritative point of view, since it is derived from scientific research, but at the same time to tell it in a simple, communicative way, without trivializing it, because never before have we needed science and storytelling to meet, with the aim of putting the new economic-cultural paradigm into circulation and promoting innovations, reforms and funding useful to achieve it.
