What is the food system and how can we make it sustainable?

This is the first part of our educational series on sustainability in food. If you want to get all the updates, sign up here.

For all of human history, we’ve had to eat. But how we get food onto our tables now looks more different than it ever has before, and that’s not really a good thing.

In this post, we’re going to lay out all the ways that our food system is broken, but don’t worry! As we dive deeper in this series, we will talk about solutions and explore the ways a sustainable food system is already emerging, so be sure to follow along.

You can watch videos of each topic on Nude Food’s YouTube, catch snippets on Instagram or Tiktok, or get bite-sized newsletters sent straight to your inbox. 

What is a food system?

This is a term that covers everything from growing food, to packaging and distributing it, to eating it. A food system can be global or local, depending on the scale you’re looking at.

Our food system currently is globalized and incredibly complex. We source food from all around the world, and several industries are involved to get food from where it’s grown to your plate. On one hand, this is delicious. It’s nice to have mangos in cold climates, or fresh produce year round. But on the other hand, this system creates a loooot of problems.

 

Via Franki Chamaki on Unsplash

How did we get here?

Before the development of agriculture, humans spent about 20 hours per week hunting and foraging for food. After agriculture and farming became the main food source, humans spent 30+ hours per week tending to fields. In the past few hundred years, as societies diversified their skillsets, most humans spent a lot of their income on food. Even our parents and grandparents in 1950-1960 were spending more on food as a proportion of their income compared to the early 2000s.

(Would that hold up today, in 2025? Maybe not – but that is likely because of corporate greed in pricing food, not that it is more expensive to produce.)

The truth is that the real cost of food is hidden. Many things contribute to this, including: agricultural subsidies, labor exploitation of agricultural workers, a lack of economic penalty for environmental harm, industrialization, swapping out natural ingredients for artificial ones… the list could go on.

How does our current food system compare to the past?

The Earth is cyclical. We have seasons, carbon cycles, water cycles, birth and death cycles, and for most of human history we aligned food production to these natural rhythms.

In the past, we grew regionally specific foods that were cultivated to thrive in those regions. What wasn’t eaten was fed to livestock or composted, their manure would add nutrients back into the soil, after the growing seasons the dying plants would break down and feed the earth, and we relied on these cycles of nature to help us grow food.

We also ate seasonally. Humans ate a plant-forward diet during the warm months, and used storage crops like potatoes, squash, and grains as well as meats throughout the colder months.

But now we’ve lost touch with all of that. We can get any food at any time – which means it’s not very fresh and likely has traveled halfway across the world to get to your plate. Our food production systems are linear and extractive.

Via Amelia Bates on Unsplash

Rather than working with the cycles of the Earth, we’ve completely ignored most of them.

Nature could provide all the nutrients the soil needs, but we’ve upended the cycle of organic matter decomposition that would add nutrients back. We rip plants out of the ground after harvest and leave soil bare, and opt for chemicals rather than compost.

Nitrogen and phosphorus are essential for plants to grow. We’ve found ways to create them synthetically, and we spray them as fertilizers on our crops. But studies have shown that nearly 80% of the fertilizers we apply are lost due to runoff, soil erosion, and more. When excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus make it to our waterways, they cause algae blooms that suck up all the oxygen in the water and create dead zones. These are becoming more common all across the world.

Couple that with the massive amounts of pesticides we use that are directly leading to the loss of our pollinator and insect populations, including honey bees and butterflies, and you start to realize that what we’re using to grow food is also really good at killing things – including us.

Herbicides and pesticides used in agriculture are known to cause horrible health effects in humans. Glyphosate, a chemical found in the herbicide RoundUp, is a carcinogen and a recent study found that it can increase risk of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma by 41%. Pesticide exposure can cause many negative health outcomes, including short-term symptoms, cancer, chronic illnesses, and negative reproductive and nervous system effects.

It might make you wonder, why are we putting that on our food?? 

Via Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network

Agriculture, the Food System, and Climate Change

The environmental harm our food system does hasn’t had a price tag attached. But maybe it should. In the US, agriculture contributes 11% of our greenhouse gas emissions, including tons of methane from cattle production which is has a vastly higher warming effect than carbon. When we put food scraps in the landfill, they also create methane as they slowly break down without oxygen.

Conventional agriculture is carbon-intensive. It requires heavy gas-powered machinery, and food is transported all over the country and/or the world before making it to your plate.

Additionally, soil is a carbon sink – plants take in carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. But most farms till, which rips up the soil and releases all that stored carbon back into the atmosphere. And it degrades the quality of soils, which leads to the need for chemical fertilizers. Weeds also love degraded soils, leading to the use of herbicides.

As you can see, when we work outside of the Earth’s natural cycles it causes problems and our man-made solutions often lead to more problems.

The food system and our health

What we eat has a massive effect on our health and communities – we see this all over the U.S. People who primarily eat processed, chemical-laden foods have worse health outcomes than those who have access to and eat healthy, fresh, nutrient-dense foods.

Food access is a structural issue that is also built into our food system. Developing cities or towns so that they lack grocery stores, or lack stores that sell organic healthy food, is a choice.

Because so many people don’t have easy access to food that is nourishing for them, our healthcare costs are enormous. It’s no secret that Americans spend more on healthcare than any other developed country. We foot the bill for our broken food system at the doctors office, rather than the grocery store. 

And unfortunately, because we’ve depleted our soil of nutrients, much of the produce on grocery store shelves today is considerably less nutrient-dense than what our grandparents were eating. Unless you’re buying produce from a local farm that prioritizes soil health, you’re probably not getting the level of nutrients from produce that our bodies need.

From field to grocery store

Now let’s take a look at American grocery stores. Nearly every product in it comes packaged in plastic which isn’t good for our health. The plastic waste from our groceries stays in our environment forever, slowly breaking down into microplastics that build up in soil and water. And most grocery products have a global footprint. 

Via Nico Smit on Unsplash

For example, if you buy a snack pack of pears it might say “grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand” and you’re holding it in a U.S. grocery aisle.

Or a product like chicken might be farmed in the U.S., but sent to China to be processed and packaged, and then sent back here to be sold.

Most of our produce comes from California, Mexico, or South America, and is flown or shipped to grocery stores so that by the time it gets to you, it really shouldn’t be considered “fresh”. 

We’ve grown used to convenience, but at what cost? Much of the food that travels the world before it gets to your plate could be grown, for a significant part of the year, in our own regions. Humans survived for eons on the food grown in their areas.

To acommodate the industrialization of food, we’ve seen the rise of megafarms. In the past 100 years, we’ve gone from 6.8 million farms in the US, to now just 1.8 million. This is due to many things, but farm consolidation and agribusiness taking over the majority of the land in production is a huge factor. 

This is a huge issue, because it means that any shock to the system can be catastrophic. 

A centralized, globalized food system is less resilient

The vast majority of our country’s eggs come from a few centralized factory farms rather than tons of small local ones. So in January when the bird flu hit, people were seeing empty egg sections in grocery stores from coast to coast.

Industrial agriculture is a key player in this crisis too. When animals, like chickens, are packed so tightly in confined spaces like they are in factory farms, disease spreads rapidly. Local farms with plenty of pasture for their chickens didn’t see outbreaks of the bird flu. 

When we concentrate most of our food production in the hands of a few massive agribusinesses, we also set ourselves up for crisis as climate disasters become more common. Tornadoes and flooding across the corn or grain belt could decimate our supply of those products and send huge ripple effects through the food supply chain. We’ve already started to see this.

How can we fix this broken food system?

As an individual, you can only do so much until we have larger scale solutions. At Nude Foods, we’re actively building a new system. We research and vet every product for health and sustainability, carry almost entirely organic products, prioritize local sourcing, and seek out regenerative products. Eating should be easy, so we exist to make sure it is easy AND good for you and the planet.

But if you don’t have a Nude Foods near you, there are still many actions you can take to help create a better food system. 

• Buy locally from sustainable farms whenever you can
• Buy organic products as much as possible
• Skip as much plastic as possible – take your fruits and veg “naked”, opt for groceries in cardboard, metal, or glass when you have a choice, or take it a step further and shop at bulk foods stores with your own containers
• Support brands championing regenerative agriculture, like Patagonia Provisions snacks and Alexandre Family Farms dairy products
• Eat less beef, and when you do, buy local and/or regenerative beef

Our goal is to transform the food system.

It’s completely possible to feed the planet AND grow food in a way that regenerates the earth. It takes changes – from industry, which is what we’re focused on shifting, all the way to individual choices of where we shop and what we buy. But we think a better system is fully possible, and necessary. 

Stick around for more! Over the coming weeks we will be deep diving into other areas of the food system and exploring all the solutions that exist. 

You can watch videos of each topic on Nude Food’s YouTube, catch snippets on Instagram or Tiktok, or get bite-sized newsletters sent straight to your inbox.