Slack. It's not a bad word

I've been meaning for a while to write about the lack of slack in modern, highly-efficient distribution systems.  It's a foregone conclusion, really:  almost any business looking to optimise its distribution network will pare it to the bone in order to minimise capital and staff costs.  What's the point of having machinery and people sitting around, doing nothing, when you can operate at 99% capacity all the time?

The mantras of just-in-time, production-on-demand, and zero inventory make firms completely reliant on highly complex integrated distribution systems.  Usually, when the distribution systems hit a snag, it's easy to change suppliers.  But when the entire system fails, well, what then?  David Wighton, Business Editor at the Times, writes today:

One lesson we learn from Eyjafjallajökull is about the rigidity of modern integrated transport networks. Freight companies focus their operations by creating huge logistical hubs — DHL uses East Midlands and FedEx operates out of Paris Charles de Gaulle. Hugely efficient until ... a volcano erupts.

This fits with my recurring theme about resilience, slack, and systems that can bend but don't break.  Here we've got a system that broke due to an external event.  What would a system that wouldn't break in the face of a massive volcanic ash cloud and total air-traffic grounding look like?  I don't know, but I can tell you this much:  It would have a lot more slack and flexibility than what we've got now.

(One could read this as conflicting with what I wrote much earlier, on this site, about the efficiency of supermarket distribution systems.  A system in which individual farmers take care of their own distribution does have a lot more slack; it, or at least the road transit part of it, is likely, however, to be less efficient in carbon terms.  This is not to say that any resilient system will necessarily be more carbon-intensive, but that there may be trade-offs to consider.)

Superfreakonomics - and a thought on industry vs the individual

Hey, this is interesting.  The Guardian has an article on the new Superfreakonomics book, which describes

...an artful takedown of the fashionable "locavore" movement: transportation, Levitt and Dubner argue, accounts for such a small part of food's carbon footprint that buying all-local can make matters worse, because small farms use energy less efficiently than big ones. 

It's always nice to see your instincts supported.

The question about the proportion of energy used by transport vs that used by food production brings up another one:  What about the balance between industry and individuals?

Bear with me here.  The 10:10 campaign in Britain is trying to get the great unwashed masses to reduce their carbon footprints by 10% in a year.  All well and good; perhaps it's great if the people signing up are those folk who drive everywhere, fly every week, never recycle and don't care how high their energy bills are as they heat their houses by burning coal in open braziers while leaving the windows open.  But I have a feeling that many of the folks signing up to 10:10 already have lower-than-average carbon emissions; and, more important, that this does nothing to decarbonize our energy supply - nor does it do anything about industrial energy or resource use.  I'll come back to this in a future post, without doubt, but remember this:  if we run out of water, it won't be as a result of you leaving your tap on while you brush your teeth.

What to eat?

The problem with dinner is that most of us don't have much choice about what to eat - or at least that we don't value food provenance enough to do the things that we would if we could be bothered.  There's a small farmer's market close to my home in London, but only on Wednesdays in the middle of the day; how many working Joes can support it?

The bigger problem is not just that we don't choose to eat local produce (or decide whether it's better to buy our what-have-yous - apples, let's say - from farmers in far-away places where the climate is right for apple-growing at certain times of the year vs. from chaps just down the road who use much more cheap energy to grow the same things in hothouse conditions), or pay attention to seasonality or food miles to the exclusion of all other things.  It's that we don't look at the system as a whole.

Sure, local food sounds great.  But what of the logistical system - or lack thereof - which it implies?  I'll freely admit that I haven't found the numbers which would prove the point either way, but what seems better:  A host of individual farmers carrying out their own small-scale harvests, getting in their little white vans, and driving their produce around highways and byways to get the food to local markets?  Or a smaller number of highly mechanized super-farms selling to big supermarkets, which use enormous logistics systems and centralized processing centres to make distribution as efficient as possible?

And what are we trying to optimise, anyway?  Carbon emissions?  Flavour?  Employment, either local or in far-away places?

I won't be the first person to point out that eating a local diet in some places could be pretty boring most of the year.  And that it's more efficient (certainly from an energy, and therefore carbon, perspective) to produce certain things in certain places; so shouldn't we be thinking about the balance of energy calculations required to decide whether to produce X easily in Y and ship it to Z vs. producing X in hothouses in Z?

Carolyn Steel points out that the Industrial Revolution, and the taming of distance that came with it, allowed London to feed itself by rail, as it were:  Farmers no longer had to walk their cattle down the road to a market; they could put it on a train, thus opening up new possibilities and vastly increasing the amount of food available to the city, which allowed it (and countless other cities) to grow into the metropoles we know today.  We can't expect those cities to shrink back to their pre-Industrial Revolution sizes (nor would I want them to), but we do need to decide how we will continue to feed our city dwellers.  And much as some would have it that vertical farming and Utopian ideas of new centralized urban distribution/logistics systems are the silver bullets that will fix everything, I have a feeling that the reality will be much more mundane, and that - whether we like it or not - the supermarkets may, far from being the problem, hold the key to the answer.

Update on Friday, October 16, 2009 at 8:41 by Eli

Just found this article covering the issue of transport, energy, and food:  http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/07/22/the_localvores_dilemma/.  It covers the bases pretty well.  And it's great to see this kind of thinking in the general press, too.