Hi, welcome back to the course on Nexus and Sustainability. In this week we will discuss of agriculture, food and endosomatic metabolism. Endosomatic metabolism would be the production and consumption of energy material forms inside the human body, that is food. And then in this first session we would go for the problem of food accounting. So we will start going through an overview of possible labels, category of accounting that we use when we discuss of food flows. And then we try to show that in order to be able to use different quantitative assessment, different categories of accounting for different purposes, you have to use grammars that helps you in keeping coherence in your analysis. And finally, the deep implication of this is that in reality, numbers are per se, do not carry enough information unless they are contextualized in the purpose of their analysis. Why are you needing these numbers and how you generated the numbers? And this is probably the leitmotif of this course. So when we talk about food it is a very generic concept, so we can say food, nutrient food import, gross food supply, food, food, food. I mean, if we try to put numbers into this food, the numbers would be different. It would be different because all these concepts can be defined with the different narratives that map onto different scientific disciplines and of course, they would require a different way of measuring and expressing their relevant information. So let's start with beef. How much beef we need or we want to have or whatever? But if we start with a question how much. You have, first of all, to define better what beef means. In fact, let's imagine if we're talking about lean steak, if you say one kilo of matter is equal to 1300 Kilocalories of energy. Why is that? Because within the beef you can find water, protein, fat and all other things but we don't put in now just for quicker, and then the energy will be different depending on the relation between protein and fat. So when we are talking about quantities, already the relation between matter and energy depends on what type of beef are we talking about. But even more important is why we are talking about lean steak? Because we want to know how to produce it or because we want to know how much we have to eat or we can eat. Then, if you are having these two different set of questions, we will have different type of information that will be available for the discussion in the outside view, how to produce beef. We will have to have information about how to reproduce beef animals in the first place, and how to produce the feed for the animal and so on. If you are looking to the inside view, how much beef I would need to, you don't need to eat beef, but you want to know what type of input beef can provide to your diet. You have to see other things. But of course in the outside view, we have to remember that not only can we produce our own beef, but we can import and then still if we are talking about importing, it will be a completely different set of information. They need for the price, they are going to be for the safety, coming to the inside view what is relevant for the inside view is how much proteins are required per day per person, and then at that point you need to know if you are a woman, a man or a young guy, an old guy and what type of activity you do. It is a completely different set of information which is related. So if you remember, we had this at the beginning in the first week to try to explain the nexus between food, energy and water. This is the matrix in which you can see how much food, energy and water is consumed with this Mauritius island, in the household sectors and SG and BM manufacturing, you know, you remember the different categories, the different compartments. If you get a number about food here, you could see that the household sector is consuming 5.9 PJoules, that can be expressed in terms of carbohydrate, protein and fat and this would be the food nutrient supply. This information is useful because then you can check it against the diet requirements of the population. But then at the same time you can also look at the gross supply, that is how much of the different types of food items I need to produce in order and supply, and these will include the direct consumption, the underrate consumption agriculture, the losses and the import. Talking about agriculture for the domestic production, we could see the fraction of these food that is produced locally. Is mapping onto land use, water use and other inputs, primary inputs are required to produce. So you already saw this a few times, this is the grammar that is what is the final consumption, the losses, what is consumed into the agricultural sector to produce, to generate the final consumption. These are what the gross requirement and inquire not only what is consumed finally but also what is you consume by agriculture to produce it. This is the domestic consumption, this is the import. You, know these are the famous categories that we saw again and again. So the numbers here, what is consuming the finance sector are different from the numbers here. What is produced originally, and this depends on the fact that one part of the gross consumption is consumed by the agricultural sector. We remember in the case of the United States, there is an enormous consumption of grain for producing animals, for making beer and so on. So the conclusion here, the taxonomy of accounting has to be chosen. You have to choose taxonomy accounting in order to be able to handle different numbers that can be used to answer different questions. If we are talking about food and nutrition, we will have a grammar with this characteristic which is using assessment, not quantity of carbohydrates, protein and fat over the grammar. I would tell you how much can you distribute to your final population. If you are talking about agriculture whether or not and what are the limits of the possible production of food that you have, you will have a grammar that is looking at how much agriculture is consuming for its own production. In conclusion, we have different labels for food, all the food quantities. Depend on our, on the choice of the metric, we're talking about the protein, we're talking about energy, we're talking about mass. Then you could have food requirements. The food requirement is normative, it's not something you are measuring, it's something that should happen. I mean, the amount of food should be given to the population. This is not based on an actual flow of food but is on the calculation of the type of food that would require to have an active population. Then you have food intake, would be the exact amount of food that is getting into the body of the population. So this type of information is very difficult to obtain because you cannot get it from statistics. You should have specialized studies survey to have this value, but this is a very difficult to obtain because they waste enormous on the difference from what you buy from the supermarket or from the shops and what you eat actually inside your body depends on a lot of variables. Any change with lifestyle, with culture, So this is one of the most difficult piece of information to know. Then you have the net food supply, the final domestic consumption. This will be the amount of food disappearing at the level of the household, and not necessary this is what is actually eaten because we throw away a lot of food at the level of the household. Then you have a gross food consumption that is the consumption at the level of society. This include as well all the other use inside. And then we could have the gross food supply. This is how you get it from the statistics, and then this would be a local production plus import minus export, and you have to add that the changes in stocks because at times, within a country you can eat a little bit more than was imported or available, simply because you are lowering the level of food store. Other conclusion. The food and food flows is semantically open. So per se this should not be used for doing quantitative analysis. When coming to quantification, we have to have a specific action of the category accounting that can be used to understand to which we are referring to, which external referent we are referring to, and then the food cut across many scientific disciplines and then we should be aware that is used. The numbers are meaningful only within the scale that I mentioned analysis in which the category of accounting is defined. When dealing with a complex issue, This is a law requisite variety principle. You have to have as many as accounting categories as relevant aspect that you want to describe. In this session we saw that there are different categories of accounting that we have to use. So we cannot use just food available, you have to know what, when we're talking about food, what type of category are relevant, and we can only do that if we have grammars to keep relation among the different point of this. We have these general grammars. First of all a we have to make it essentially an outside view of how the primary sources are converted in carriers and the inside view how the carriers are converted in use. Then we will have to have, to define how open is the system. So whether import and export are altering the budget inside the metabolic pattern, then we have to make a distinction between quantities, they are primary sources, quantities, they are carriers, quantities that are end uses. In the case of agriculture, primary sources are either in poor or land water biodiversity. So in terms of carriers, these are different type of food item, in terms of land use, these are carbohydrate product nutrients inside the human body. For we have to assess what is the internal consumption of food for producing food, what is called a hypercycle and the losses because these make a difference to assess how much going to then use. This is the fifth point. When we're talk about how satisfying is the metabolism we have to look at how much people are eating. But we have to have as well information how much is the gross quantity of carriers. They depend on what the people are eating and what is lost into the agricultural sector. And this is the conclusion we have to have a difference between inside and outside view. We have to have an idea of import export versus domestic flows. We have to make a distinction between primary sources, carriers and use. We have to make distinction between gross requirement and net requirement and then how good is the net requirement, the net supply, what we are feeding to the population. Thank you.
