To begin with, here are some interesting statistics.
21% of total UK energy use is in food supply.
Supplying the food to each UK household requires 10 barrels of crude oil each year.
One-third of UK food is imported – one of the lowest self-sufficiency ratios in the EU Between 1988 and 2002 imports increased by 38%
Imports of vegetables have doubled, of fruits have tripled.
50% of veg and 95% of fruit in the UK is imported.
Over half of food imported into the UK in 2002 was indigenous produce.
“In 2004 the UK imported 17.2 million kilos of chocolate-covered waffles and wafers and exported 17.6 million kilos: we imported 10.2 million kilos of milk and cream by weight, from France and exported 9.9 million. The figures for the same trade with Germany were 15.5 million kilos and 17.2 million. Germany sent us 1.5 million kilos of potatoes and we sent them, yes, 1.5 million kilos of potatoes. We imported 43,000 scarves from Canada and exported 39,000. Drink is swilling around the international markets. The UK imported £310 million worth of beer in 2004 and exported £313 million worth. For spirits the figures were £344 million and £463 respectively”?. New Economics Foundation. ‘The UK Interdependence Report’ (2006).
Rob wrote a chapter about town scale food strategies for a book a few years ago called The Food Producing Neighbourhood which you can find here. The best report on the oil dependency of our food system was produced by Sustain and is called Eating Oil - food supply in a changing climate. Also an excellent article called The Food We Eat - following the food chain back to Iraq. A wonderful new book on rethinking our cities as farms is Andre Viljoen’s ‘Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes’. You can read Rob's review of it here. There is also some great stuff about involving kids in growing food in schools.
Recommended Reading.
Whitefield, P. (2005) The Earth Care Manual. Permanent Publications. By now this should be your bible! You can Rob's review here.
Fern, K. (1997) Plants for a Future: Edible and Useful Plants for a Healthier World. Permanent Publications. Indispensible guide to unusual plants and their possibilities.
Jeavons, J. (2005) How to grow more vegetables than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine. Ten Speed Press. The guide to growing very high yields of food very intensively. A classic and rightly so.
Whitefield, P. (1996) How to Make a Forest Garden. Permanent Publications. Does everything it says on the tin really.
Larkcom, J. (1998) Grow Your Own. Frances Lincoln. One of the better ‘everything a gardener needs to know’ books. Fits in a (large) pocket.
Guerra, M. (2005) The Edible Container Garden: Fresh Food from Tiny Spaces. Gaia Books. An excellent permaculture guide to an abundant back yard.
Also; Fukuoka, M. The One Straw Revolution. Hard to find but available here
Stout, R. (1976) The No Work Garden Book. White Lion Publishers. Out of print but findable second hand.
Here is a review Rob wrote a while ago giving a round up of all the different books in print on growing food in small spaces.You might like to see the Podcasts from the recent Soil Association conference. They give a very good overview of peak oil and agriculture