Doing More With Less: A harvest around every corner
by: Siria Contreras
A big theme for me personally in 2019 has been shifting my thinking to “doing more with less”.
As a consumer, I have cut back considerably. No more daily Amazon deliveries that make every day feel like Christmas, considerably less fast-fashion, a big reduction in one-off errands as I try to think about where and why I’m driving somewhere in an effort to consolidate trips and accomplish more in one carbon-emitting trip than if I were to go out each time I needed something.
Not all of my efforts have been to save money which is often-time what motivates us to make changes, but that’s been a nice side-effect.
Most of this shift was to intentionally hold myself accountable for my own actions and the impact that they have on our planet, communities, and people. This carries over to my approaches and what I do via Consciously Studio and The Nourish Foundation. As are most everyone else including my Nourish Foundation colleagues, I’m a work in progress as I continue to work on making smarter eco-friendly decisions.
While the “doing more with less” is something that I’m sure I’ll continue to integrate into my lifestyle for likely the rest of my life, one of my larger overarching and constant life themes that I was born with is more driven by my analytical mind (likely responsible for my curiosity), which is “what’s the big picture”?
While my creative side is more at times more laureled, it is my analytical side which is as much a part of me as the creative side, that at times drives as much of my creativity as unexpected sensory inspiration does. It is when both my analytical and creative sides combine that I have been most effective in my career and personal endeavors. Creative Ideas and solutions to problems are now a dime a dozen. What actually gives them greater value is their sustainability and scalability. For this you must look at the big picture and really take that god’s eye view approach to truly understand if a new idea or a proposed solution is the right one for the big picture. If we know the “big picture”, then we can contribute ideas, solutions, and recommendations that are more proactive vs. reactive as well as more apt to scale and be sustainable.
I know all too well that the big picture is sometimes the hardest thing to focus on when you’re in crisis mode and locked in the smaller segment of the big picture that is what is causing the issue. Sometimes looking at the big picture can feel overwhelming, but if you start with the full view and zoom in on the smaller issues then you start to see what the right solution can be not only for that moment, but for long-term so that the same vicious cycles aren’t repeated. This protects resources (both natural and man-made), revenue (putting a band-aid on a leak doesn’t fix the leak and you’ll have to keep buying those band-aids until you’ve fixed the leak), and at times even morale and mental health.
I recently came across EatingWell’s “Future of Food” article series and it mentioned a lot of what I’ve been either learning about or involved in over the past two years since Olivia and I launched The Nourish Foundation. We’ve mentioned some of those things in past posts.
However, something that I’d had a conversation with an ex-colleague about in late summer --the subject of community gardens found itself into one of these articles in a different way beyond the green spaces within the community by way of Mike Lee’s “future of food’s” trend prediction.
Mike Lee is the co-founder of Alpha Food Labs and the Future Market in NYC, two futurist food and concept labs that focus on both the macro and micro trends in food innovation and evolution of our natural resources. If you take a look at some of their concept products, which include a , you realize their deep research around the areas of sustainability and food waste and strong focus on biodiversity. .
Lee’s prediction was that “Grocery stores would begin to grow their own food” adding to the grocery store experience as his example of China’s fast-growing Alibaba concept store Hema has mastered. Gotham Greens is already pioneering this via their rooftop garden above Brooklyn’s Whole Foods Market.
In this article, Lee goes on to say that, “Supermarkets are going to be tapping into advancements that will allow them to become places where food is actually grown and made. Indoor farming is already happening, and it's possible to improve and miniaturize that model and put it on top of a grocery store. So now your supermarket is also a farm. The same could happen with cellular agriculture, where beef is produced in the back of a Whole Foods without a cow. If the promises that these technologies have put forth come to fruition, it's conceivable that the grocery store might not need any goods from the outside world in order to produce food for its shoppers.”
I was curious enough about Lee’s companies and found one of his keynote remarks from a past United States Chamber of Commerce “Food Forward” summit, where he’d broken down the concepts of monoculture and polyculture. Emphasizing the importance of polyculture farming citing that “75% of our food sources come from 12 plant and five animal species”. When you think of the 7.5 billion+ humans in our world currently, the math doesn’t add up when it comes to sustainability.
All of this data, predictions, and the beauty of the Hema concept store and Gotham Greens vision as well as all of Lee’s efforts tie in both of those themes that I’d mentioned, and this is just one example in just one area of focus in issues that plague our world so it does beg us to continuously ask ourselves the question, “how will you do more with less?”
We’ll continue to explore that question via the Nourish Foundation over the next few weeks in at least two more posts, but also in our own strategy as we also think about what can be done in addition not just in our efforts and mission, but also physically at our Austin home at the Ana Lark Center in partnership with owner and friend Greg Keller as we look towards 2020.