02431 Design a personal food system

If you do just one thing—make one conscious choice—that can change the world, go organic. Buy organic food. Stop using chemicals and start supporting organic farmers. No other single choice you can make to improve the health of your family and the planet will have greater positive repercussions for our future. — Maria Royale, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe

This is different from 02421. That was about designing a big system involving invisible structures impacting potentially thousands of people.

This is a micro design problem that relates to your own life and household. If you live in an urban area, your personal food system explores how you will find and prepare the foods you need for sustenance for yourself and your household.

This is one of the more important iPermie design challenges. Your food choices have major impacts on the planet and on your own life and health and the lives and health of those in your household. This is an area that, because of its importance, demands careful attention to design details and the whole system orientation of permaculture.

This is about designing something that works for you and your urban lifestyle that is consistent with the ethics of permaculture.

If you live on campus, and eat at a college cafeteria, that will be a major part of your personal food system. Even so, you don’t eat all the time at the school cafeteria and what you eat away from your primary household food system is as important as anything else you do with this design. You won’t live in a college dormitory forever. How will your personal food system transition as you leave school?

Observe. If there are 30 days in the month, and three meals and two snacks in every day, that’s 90 meals and 60 snacks. Where are you eating those meals and snacks? What are you eating? “Where” as in “where is the food prepared,” as you may be doing take out and fast food for some of those meals. Where and what do you eat when you are away from campus or your home? When traveling? Do you pack portable foods to take with you?

When you eat away from home, how is the food packaged? When you buy food to prepare at home, what is the package burden? How much plastic? Foam? Paper? Save all the packaging from the food you eat for a month and see what it looks like. (Scrape off any food waste, preferably into a compost container, to avoid undesirable odors.) If you separate it into plastic and paper/cardboard, what does each weigh?

What about water? Do you buy bottled water? If so, please stop. Bottle your own and carry it with you in a permanent non-plastic water bottle. If you don’t like the taste of your local water, buy and use a water purifier.

Do you like the way you do food now? If not, or if you think your present system is “OK” but you want to do better — what do you want out of your personal food system? Can you set goals for three months, six months, a year, five years? How will you bring your personal food system into cooperation with the ethics of permaculture?

Make some lists. Goals — and the functions and systems and elements needed for them; Functions — and the systems and elements they require. Drill down into your lists to achieve greater detail and clarity about goals and functions and their necessaries.

Study and Evaluation. Where in your personal food system do you have the most control? What changes can you make there? Recalling the good -better — best strategy of decisions, if you can’t always do the best, can you do the better? And if not the better, can you do the good? You will need to decide what the good, better, and best decisions are for your personal food system. Make a list of those decisions and what each decision needs and yields.

Design. How does your personal food system interact with the rest of your life? What are the beneficial connections between the various aspects of the food system in your design? How will your life and food system evolve after you leave school?

What invisible structures do you need that will help you make good, better, and best choices for your personal food system? Do these exist? Or do you need to take a leadership role in getting them started? If not you, who do you think should or will do that organizing work?

Implementation. Once you get a plan, how do you implement it? Do you pile on and do everything at once? Or do you take a first things first, second things second strategy? (That is the general recommendation of permaculture.) If your plan costs money, do you have that money on hand? If not, where will you get it?