http://rebargroup.org/doxa/2010/02/tacoshed/

Students at the California College of the Arts, teamed with Rebar and landscape architect David Fletcher, took part in a design seminar mapping the food and watersheds of San Francisco.  What they produced was a mapping of the “Tacoshed,” the origins of and paths taken by the materials needed to assemble a relatively common food, a taco.  From the black beans and rice to the aluminum foil used to wrap your taco, CCA mapped a complex network of food and material miles.

The concept behind the map is intriguing: to take a common food like a taco and trace its components to their sources.  While the idea seems simple-minded, analyzing things like the embodied energy and food miles of a taco can shed serious light on the sheer scale of human consumption. What is usually thought of as a good meal has been broken down into a complex system of flows and ecologies that extend to the far reaches of the globe.  Foods like rice and avocados both travel over 6000 miles to be prepared, combined, and sold in a local taco truck somewhere in San Francisco.

What this network lays bare is the unsustainability of our culture.  The abundance of cheap energy has made this possible, but doesn’t the cost of cheap energy pale in comparison to the cost of  imminent resource depletion?  Why do we need tacos wrapped in foil that came from halfway around the world?  What if the negative externalities of your local taco truck were shrunk to a 500 mile radius?  50 miles?  5 miles?  Shrinking these externalities will create a more sustainable culture.  Moreover, it will create an even stronger social network, one where people are dependent on their own land and not the land of a distant underdeveloped country.  The Tacoshed network provides a look at more than just the food miles of a taco; it gives insight into what a sustainable urban future might look like, and what we need to do to get there.