02081 Design Process, Principles, Strategies, and Techniques for the Permacultured Food System

Design Process

Local food systems grow from personal choices.

No action or inaction is without consequence.

If we want a more sustainable, humane, resilient, and just food production system, there must be a market for the products of more sustainable, humane, resilient, and just food production systems. Our present system is not sustainable and this needs fixing lest a disaster result.

Personal and household choices about where and how we spend our food money and time are therefore critical to the design of the permacultured kitchen.

This design process begins with observation of your situation and an inventory of what you have and do, what you need, and the challenges of getting from here to there. Once you have an understanding of what you want and where you are at the present time, you can evaluate your situation and decide on a plan of action to get yourself from where you are now to where you want to be.

Observe — Study — Evaluate — Design — Implement

OSEDI! You hear this, over and over, throughout your iPermie experience, in relation to energy, housing, transportation, and all other aspects of your lifestyle.

Because a transition like this is complex, it helps to work from a written lifestyle design plan that you prepare after going through the observation, study, and evaluation of your situation. And in any such journey, our grandfathers’ advice remains valid — Measure Twice, Cut Once.

This observation derives from the permaculture principle of working with edges. A person’s food system is an often curious intersection of sectors, zones, opportunities, and personal likes and dislikes. We are conservative in our food habits, in that we stick to them and change comes slowly. Many household activities (“sectors” in permaculture jargon) intersect in the kitchen and the family’s food systems. It is thus a productive place to start learning permaculture design and working with the concepts.

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Don’t make changes just to be busy. Don’t jump the gun and start a lot of evolution without first thinking through the whole situation and designing your response. Conservation and restraint are essential to the design process. Resist the urge to buy the latest or newest gadget just because, you know, “everyone does it.” Take the time to really understand and know “where you are at” so you can make intelligent choices about what needs to change, and what can stay. Make the least possible change, for the greatest possible effect.

Design Principles

Appropriate Scale.

You don’t need, and shouldn’t plan for, a household nuclear reactor to cook your evening meal. While this is a somewhat extreme example, let’s bring the scale down a bit and ask ourselves if we need a complicated and expensive machine — which requires maintenance, fossil fuel inputs, and regular replacement — to wash dishes? Question yourself about appropriate scale at each step of your design process.

What goes around, comes around.

Use the yields of your lifestyle and community to meet the needs of your community, as much as possible. Channel the resources being contributed to your life for optimal use and minimal waste. Yields of food include care for people (nutrition, health, happiness), and resources (compost materials, worm food, urine, humanure, mulch materials) that can meet the needs of other elements (plants, worms, soil), which in turn yield more food (caring for people) which creates more compost materials, worm food and etc. Also there are the birds, possums, raccoons, voles, and other denizens of the urban ecosystem. Love is the harmony of giving and receiving, is how my teacher Dan Hemenway describes this. When we receive, we must return and not waste.

STRATEGIES to IMPLEMENT KITCHEN PERMACULTURE DESIGN PRINCIPLES

This is not a list of all the possible strategies.

Energy Conservation. Demand destruction is the order of the day. We can shift our usage to lower power applications, and we can eliminate some uses of fossil fueled energy entirely.

Can I do this with zero fossil fuel energy? Can I do this with less fossil fuel energy?

These are design questions you must constantly ask.

Every item of stuff you own or use embodies energy in its manufacture and distribution.

Buying more new stuff = using more energy.

Buying less new stuff = using less energy.

This is not a minor point, because the industrial, manufacturing, and distribution sectors use more energy than the domestic.

Even in the city, many of us can access renewable energy by purchasing wind power electricity from your utility. Utilities often charge more for wind power energy, but the price is a more realistic price, as fossil fuel production externalizes costs and does not account for everything in the retail prices. As the price of natural gas rises (as it surely will), however, wind energy will cost less at the consumer level.

If you are a student, you can encourage your school to practice energy conservation and to invest in alternative, non-fossil fuel energy supplies.

Energy conservation works for human energy too. It can easily take an hour to drive a fossil fueled car to the store, park, hike across a 40 acre parking lot, navigate a crowded and poorly organized store, stand in line at the checkout, hike back across the acreage to the automobile, and then drive home — just to get “a few things for dinner.” Your time is valuable and finite, so make the most of it through intelligent design. How you access the needs of your life is as important a design element as anything else.

Use Biological Resources. Fueled by sun and soil, air and water, biological resources can meet our needs and the needs of other elements of our designs without the expenditure of fossil fuels. They can be of particular assistance with the problem of “embedded energy,” which is the energy involved with the production, manufacture, and distribution of commercial goods. For example, instead of using a foam kitchen sponge — manufactured with fossil fuels and a host of nasty chemicals — a better choice is to either grow natural luffa sponges or buy them from a farmer who grows them in your area. Luffa sponges are actually a higher quality choice than any foam sponge from a discount store. While growing, they make beautiful vines and showy yellow flowers.

Biological resources are important to the resolution of the thermodynamic impasse that will be increasingly critical going forward. While everything science can see, measure, and analyze tells us that there are no exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics, sometimes nature seems bent on proving the existence of exceptions in its natural biological ecosystems. Plants convert the sun’s energy with an efficiency we can’t manage. Creative use of biological resources is absolutely essential to permaculture design.

Be Temperate in Your Choices. The virtue of temperance is the practice of balance — not too much, not too little, just the right amount. The average American table is a glutton’s delight, loaded with every delicacy regardless of season. In reaction to the steady “dumbing down” of our diets by the commercial processing and distribution systems, we crave variety and novelty. The permacultured food system offers a wealth of tastes and food delights, without the environmental devastation and social injustice of the on-demand agribizness food system. Indeed, during certain seasons, at our house we may eat the same foods every day for a time. The authentic nature of the food and our kitchen experience, however, does not leave much room for boredom.

The permacultured food system avoids unsustainably harvested foods from the wild, such as most ocean fish, and products with a high degree of environmental degradation and social injustice in their production, such as non-fair trade certified coffee and chocolate and meats produced in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.

Temperance embodies the third permaculture ethic of caring for the future. Just because “we can,” is not a reason (necessarily) “to do.” When we read about “voluntary limits,” we think something along the lines of “giving up” favorite foods or activities. In the real world, as our decisions become more informed with permaculture ethics and we design a plan to move toward more sustainability, the acceptance of voluntary limits actually opens us to new freedoms, better tastes, and interesting opportunities. Temperance is not a perpetual “Lent” of gloomy deprivation, nobody ever complains about the food at my house.

We start small or we don’t start at all. Natural succession works in food systems as well as in forest gardens. We make thousands of food choices every year, and shifting a small fraction of your food choices in the “good — better — best” direction is a great place to start. Most people should not try to do everything at once; pick the low hanging fruit first, then move on to even better choices. Do one thing, and do it well, then do two! And after two comes three, four, and so on. Small, but intensive systems are productive and manageable and understandable.

Waste Not, Want Not! Recycle Resources. A permacultured food system has no waste. Someone or something — humans, animals, worms, composting micro flora and micro fauna — eats everything. Seek ways to recycle other waste, such as food packaging, and avoid stuff you can’t recycle. If it can’t go around, you don’t want it to come around. As we look at our own situations, we will find areas where we waste resources and energy. Plug the leaks! Redirect the flows. Know where everything comes from and where it goes. If something doesn't go where you want it to go, make intelligent and informed decisions to redirect it to a more beneficial use.

Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Think of your food decisions as Good — Better — Best. The best choice might be to choose a locally and organically grown product. That might not be available or you might not be able to afford the higher cost. A good or better choice might be a product made by a local or regional food processor. If you can’t avoid all paper products (like paper towels or napkins), at least buy paper products made from recycled materials and that aren’t bleached.

Don’t let your inability to make perfect choices all the time freeze you into total inaction. Nobody goes from 100% bad food choices to 100% good, better, or best choices overnight. Procrastination is equally problematic.

Learn to look at situations holistically. Wholes arise from parts. It can be hard at first to do this. So if you can’t see the total solution in the beginning, step back and pick one thing that you can understand and work on that. Then look at your situation again and see if it is now understandable as a whole system. Everyone can find something to start with and that’s where each person should begin. Slow down, simplify, make better and wiser choices.

One thing leads to another and this is how permaculture transforms from an esoteric science to a lived reality in your kitchen. Your work in the kitchen will become beautiful, and “The world will be saved by Beauty.”

Design for Economy. Economy doesn’t just happen. Most of us are well taught in the School of Substitute Money for Time. We are perennially short of time because we work long hours at a job to earn money that we use to substitute for time. Our culture’s systems design us to be consumers. As Will Rogers said, “Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like.”

Speaking of designing for economy. . . when it comes to food . . . a well-stocked home pantry is an enormous convenience in today’s busy world. It can eliminate those fossil fueled jaunts to the supermarket to get “just one thing.” Less time shopping = more time for other things. If you buy mostly non-perishables like pasta, salt, spices and pet food at a supermarket, there’s really no reason to go to the supermarket more than once a month, or even once every two or three months.

Prices in local/regional markets and in supermarkets follow cycles. When canned goods are cheap, meat is expensive. When canned goods are cheap, something else is high priced. With food storage, you can buy what you need when prices are low, and not buy when prices are high.

This won’t happen by accident, it takes conscious design to capture these energies, detect the patterns, and direct them in beneficial ways.

Design for Catastrophe. Every so often nature sends a reminder about the importance for designing for catastrophe. Besides hurricanes like Sandy and Katrina. . . there are a hundred things that could happen in a heartbeat that would disrupt the steady flow of trucks to and from warehouses and grocery stores that feed our urban areas. In an uncertain economy, people are at risk of losing their jobs and incomes. Weather can cause short or even longer-term disruptions in local food distribution.

A well-stocked home pantry is an essential aspect of family and community food security in the event of disruptions to the food distribution system or family income. Throughout nature, plants, animals, birds, and insects maintain storages of food. A good plan is to keep some of your household’s savings in the form of food. Store what you eat, and eat what you store. Are you counting the functions that can be stacked on food storage?

Eat with the season. These days, everything tastes the same everywhere all the time, 24/7/365. Real life has annual rhythms and seasons, and so does food in the real world. We have learned by sad experience that by extravagant expenditures of energy and oppression we could have summer salads in winter. What does this willingness to take food from the hungry in the third world say about our personal and social moralities?

As the seasons change, so should our food. Summer is a time for extravagant salad greens and sweet ripe tomatoes and juicy strawberries. None of those are winter foods however. Make winter salads from winter vegetables like carrots, turnips, beets, and potatoes. Long-simmered soups are not particularly desirable in the summer. In winter they hit the spot! If you want greens in the winter, grow them on a sun porch or household greenhouse or cold frame or hot bed. Don’t buy them at a supermarket which imports them from third world countries.

Summer — Fall — Winter — Spring — as the seasons change, our diet evolves. This is not something bad — this is something to look forward to and to revel in. Reveling is one of the fundamental purposes of food, never forget that little detail.

The physical layout of the kitchen may change from season to season. In the summer, we set up a summer kitchen on our porch and cook outside when it is hot. When we process summer produce, we clear extra counter space, and bring food processing tools out of storage and set them up for work. The cooking goes on outside, which keeps the processing heat and humidity out of the interior of the house.

In the winter, we pull out the crock pots and roaster ovens. Besides cooking, they contribute heat and humidity, when we need it.

So goes the annual wheel of the cycle of the seasons, foods, and menus. Every season brings something unique to look forward to and enjoy. Welcome to the real world of real food!

Use invisible structures to make it easier for you to make better food choices. If your area has something like the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, or a system of farmers’ markets, it will be easier for people in cities to buy food from farmers, and that is a win-win situation for everyone. If your state food safety regulations do not penalize small food producers, the local economy and ecology benefit. On the other hand, if your state food safety regulations treat a small producer with 50 chickens the same as Tyson with millions upon millions of chickens, the small producer will be at a serious disadvantage and this is not good for the local economy or for the local ecology. Invisible structures have serious impacts, for good or for ill, upon your local economy, your local ecology, and by extension, the planetary biosphere. Ignore this at your peril.

Don’t leave anyone behind for the wolves to devour. Good food is not only for the middle and upper classes. It is a necessity for all people. Low income households can often achieve great increases in the quality of their life and health as they leave behind the typical Standard American Diet and shift to a better way of doing food. They often lack access to sources of information and food and the infrastructure that they need. Community and religious organizations can help by providing information, classes, encouragement and infrastructure. A modest investment would buy enough food processing equipment to set up a small scale canning operations in a church or community center kitchen. Instead of buying such equipment themselves, with money they don’t have, low income people could use such community resources to do their own home food preservation. Gardening is like finding money growing in your back yard, and that can be of critical importance for low income households.

Withdraw your consent and support from invisible structures and systems that damage the earth and destroy local economies. We have the system we have because that’s what we pay for. When we shop at giant big box chain stores, we vote to destroy the local economy. When we pay for the inhumane treatment of farm animals, by buying such products in stores, we get more inhumane treatment of farm animals. When we buy non-fair trade foods from poor countries, we take food from the mouths of hungry children. If we want these things to stop, we must stop subsidizing them with our time, talents, resources, energy, and money.

There’s no other way to do it. People will continue to do what we pay them to do. If we want them to do something else, we have to pay them to do something else.

TECHNIQUES to IMPLEMENT PERMACULTURE STRATEGIES IN FOOD SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

This is not a list of all the possible techniques.

Adjust your expectations for your food system. A local food system is about distributing basic foods; it does not look like a big box store. Don’t expect all the ersatz “convenience” offered by manufactured foods. The good news is that while the process is not always easy, the change that the permacultured kitchen brings to your household is uniformly positive. The food will be more nutritious, it will taste better, you will feel better about your work in the kitchen.

Prepare Your Meals from Basic Ingredients. The permacultured kitchen offers meals prepared from basic ingredients. Not everybody has these skills in the beginning. That’s why there’s considerable information here at iPermie about how to cook plus pointers to other resources elsewhere.

People can develop better food preparation practices so that using basic ingredients fits into the busy modern lifestyle. As with any else, "practice makes perfect," or at least, you get a lot better at whatever it is you practice. This works for integrating the preparation of meals from basic ingredients.

I once complained to my grandmother that I couldn’t make a decent pie crust. She said, “Bobby Max, the problem is you haven’t made enough pies. When you have made 100 pies, then you will be able to make a great pie crust as quick as a whistle.” She was right. Although I would never claim that my pie crust was as good as hers, mine is certainly good enough to serve to company and nobody complains about it. Nor do people have problems with my peach or apple filling made from home-grown fruit.

Your menus reflect your designs. Permaculture looks at whole systems. Before we ask — “what do I have for dinner tonight” — first we must consider —

• What will I eat this season?
• How do I get my food?

People with a lot of experience might be able to get by without planning their meals. That doesn’t describe most of us, especially in the beginning. Planning menus, adapting menus to food availabilities, and the acquisition and preparation of the ingredients are necessary design opportunities and areas where most of us need to learn skills and develop good work habits..

Learn how to preserve and process foods. I like “cheese whiz.” I don’t buy it — I make it from real cheese we buy from a farmer. We like roasted peanuts, so we buy peanuts in season from farmers and roast them all year long. We grow fruit, and make jams, jellies, salsas, pickles, condiments. Those without gardens can buy extra produce during its season and preserve it for winter eating. Food processing tools and equipment can be owned by individual households. Alternatively, community and religious organizations can purchase such equipment and make it available in community kitchens. Many food preservation and processing tasks are easier when done by a group.

Buy locally produced foods. Buy some of your food from local producers. Locally produced foods may cost more than the manufactured foods of the supermarkets, so incorporate them into your meals as your permaculture kitchen process develops. When you cook meals from basic ingredients, you avoid the high cost of prepared and packaged foods. As a result of changing your food preparation practices, you will be able to spend a little more for locally produced foods. If you don’t have access to something like the Oklahoma Food Cooperative or a farmer’s market, you may have to do some detective work to find farmers selling direct to the public, or local stores that stock local products.

At the supermarket, choose organic and fair trade and be frugal. For items you buy through the commercial grocery trade, follow the good-better-best decision tree. Best would be to buy organic products, and if imported, look for fair trade certification. Good or better would be buying regular products made locally or regionally.

When you do shop at the supermarket, shop “low on the food chain.” Buy basic ingredients that you can’t source locally. Avoid the high prices of prepared supermarket foods (like frozen pizzas, frozen entrees, boxed dinners, etc.) You’re paying a high price for low quality food and the packaging and the embodied energy.

Store and generic brands are a better deal than the national and international named brands. Cooperatives owned by the independent stores make them. That is always a better choice than buying from a transnational corporation. In the Oklahoma City area, the Always Save, Best Choice, Superior Selections, and Clearly Organic brands are products of Associated Wholesale Grocers, a cooperative of independent grocery stores.

Avoid meats from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. For families that eat meat, one of the most ecologically beneficial and important things you can do is to buy meats and poultry from local producers who do not use confined/concentrated animal feeding operation practices. Here again, never let the perfect become the enemy of the good. If you cannot buy all of your meat from local producers (because of cost or availability), buy some of your meat from local producers. The best choice may be to buy all your meat from local producers. If you can’t do that, buying all or most or some of your ground meat from local producers is a good place to start.

Access to local and natural meats and poultry is often a challenge for urban residents. With a few exceptions, all meats in supermarkets originate in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, and every dollar spent for them subsidizes a food production system that creates social and environmental problems. One solution to the higher cost of locally produced meats is to “eat less meat” — set limits to your personal consumption . . . Eat less expensive cuts — more ground meat than roast or steaks. Do Meatless Mondays or Meatless Fridays every week.

With farmer-direct meats, the more you buy, the better the price. Consider this to be incentive to build community. Four households could go together and buy a whole beef from a farmer, or a whole pig. Where would you find someone willing to sell a whole beef? Start by asking at the farmers’ market, look for phone listings for “custom butchers” in rural towns (they usually keep a list of farmers willing to sell meat directly to the public). Look for meats that are 100% forage fed and free ranging.

When buying a whole or half beef from the farmer, be aware of the different ways of pricing the product. It may be sold “live weight” — which is the weight of the animal before processing. About 40% of that live weight will end up as meat in your freezer. It may be priced as “hanging weight.” About 65% of the hanging weight will end up as meat in your freezer. You can increase that useful percentage a bit by asking for the bones, which you can use to make soup and stock.

The common packaging term “Natural” or “All Natural” means nothing. It does not mean that the meat came from a free-ranging humanely managed herd. There’s lots of feedlot beef and caged chicken meat sold in stores these days cheerily labeled “All Natural.” Beware of supermarket products labeled “All Natural.” As the popularity of more ecologically produced food increases, beware of the increase in faux foods.

Food Storage. Every family should keep some of the family’s savings in the form of food as part of their design for catastrophe and for economy. Store what you eat, and eat what you store. Rotate your food storage. How much food? One month is the minimum. Two is better. Everyone should pay attention to the signs of the times, however. As things continue to devolve, increase the amount of food you store. It’s not beyond imagination to think of storing a year’s supply of food, at least of basic necessities like wheat, rice, beans, corn, condiments, spices, seasonings, and sweetenings. Few people could afford to purchase this all at once, so design a system to slowly increase your household food storage as time passes and you have the resources. Don’t plan to wait for a crisis and then attempt to stock up. The just-in-time inventory system means that stores empty quickly when demand surges.

We need community storage solutions for situations like this. Consider adding that to your list of invisible structure goals.

A second function stacked on food storage is that a well-stocked home pantry is an essential aspect of designing for economy. Buy in bulk when prices are low and you don’t have to buy when prices are high.

Grow some of your own food. We live in an urban central city, on about 1/7th of an acre with a duplex, small house, sidewalks and driveway. We grow food on our former lawns. Because of our limited space, we do not aim for total self-sufficiency from our property. Instead, we grow foods that (in our opinion) produce a lot of value for the space they need — organic fruits, herbs, hot peppers, cooking greens (mustard, chard, spinach, collards), and lots of alliums (garlic, onion and garlic chives, shallots, walking onions, multiplying onions). We don’t raise wheat or corn or animals because of space constraints (and city ordinances). However, we have easy access to these products through the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. People without land can join community gardens, and lots of people raise food on concrete using containers. We have grown potatoes in buckets on a driveway!

Start/join/adapt “invisible structures” that will grow and support an economically viable, environmentally sustainable, and socially just local food system. Start or join food cooperatives that sell local foods. Patronize farmers’ markets and local food stands. Organize to repeal government regulations that penalize local food production and restrict the rights of people to purchase food. Start new organizations and/or help existing organizations to invest in food preservation and processing infrastructure for use by the local community. Encourage organizations you participate in to choose local foods for organizational or community events.

Shop at locally owned, independent stores. For items you source at supermarkets, the best choices are locally owned, independent stores or a food cooperative. Next best would be a regional chain. Worst are national/international chains. Consolidation in the conventional food processing and distributing, at both the retail and wholesale levels, is a serious problem. That’s what we pay for when we shop at the national chains. Local and regional stores and cooperatives are more likely to reinvest in the local economy, whereas the national chains are “money sinks” that continually siphon money out of the local community.

Plant a row for the hungry. If you have land and grow some food, grow some extra produce that you can donate to local food banks that help low income households. Donate money to local food coops to buy food from farmers to give to the poor. Plant fruit and nut trees and berry bushes/canes at public housing developments, teach and organize the residents how to care for them and use their produce. Help low income people start urban and rural market gardening cooperatives to increase their income and provide more local food production. If you participate in a religious organization that has land, encourage your organization to plant a garden to feed the poor.

Patronize after-markets. When you need equipment for your food systems (and other purposes), shop at thrift stores, flea markets, garage sales, swap meets, classified ads. Buying new is the last resort after good faith efforts to meet your “stuff needs” from the after market.

Keep good records of food purchases, food storage, and menus. In permaculture design, we often speak of the importance of keeping good records and finding accurate information. A full-scale permaculture design requires at least ten years of local/regional climate data (minimums and maximums by months of temperature, precipitation, hours of sunlight, heating and cooling degree days, etc.)

Most of us are busy people, and our culture has mostly abandoned the art of memorization. We need records of our food purchases so that we know over time what happens with our local food economy. This helps us to figure budgets and to understand how we can decrease our outgoing money flows by increasing on-site production. If you keep records for as long as a year, of all your off-site grocery purchases, and arrange them by your local/regional food shed and the international food system, this will be valuable data that you can use to discern ways to reduce your dependence upon the international food system, increase your participation in local food systems, and grow your domestic production.

Menu records are important for the conservation of human time and energy. If you have a historical set of food menus, you don’t necessarily have to take the time to develop a new menu every week. You can pull something from your file and go with it.

A third set of important records are for your on-site food storage. Food storage must be cycled. Wheat can be stored for 30 years, if properly packaged for storage, and some wines and artisanal sausages and hams get better with age (to a point). That’s not true for most foods. There is a defined length of time that they can be stored. Don’t count on your ability to remember when you bought everything. It’s particularly critical to keep a list of items in your freezer. These records help you plan shopping, which stacks the additional functions of design for economy and energy conservation on the process. It’s not just “one more thing to do.”

Never buy “fast food” from a national chain and never eat at a national chain restaurant. This is an implementation of the strategy of withdrawing your support from structures that devastate the planet. “Big fast food” is a plague upon the earth. Money spent at national chains leaves the local economy quickly. College students, who are known to consume large amounts of fast foods, should strictly avoid the national brands of fast food and buy locally and regionally owned fast food.

Use portable foods and “homemade take-out” to minimize eating out. Eating out is expensive. Hamburger is effectively $8 to $10/pound when purchased as a hamburger at a national fast food chain. You can get better quality food in your own kitchen if you make your meals from basic ingredients. Many expensive restaurants serve what is essentially peasant food — artisanal breads, casseroles, and less expensive cuts of meat dressed up with flavor and presentation. Generally, restaurants source their food from the national and international food shed, and thus you never know what’s in the ground meat. The school lunch program in most areas is a food abomination. Use portable foods made in your kitchen to minimize the need to eat out. Have “homemade take-out” night, where you make favorite foods similar to those served at restaurants where your family likes to eat.