Rethinking Nutrient Routes
for Truly Sustainable
Land and Ocean Food Systems

A Structural Lens (excerpt)

At their core, food systems exist to move nutrients from ecosystems to people. For most of human history, these movements followed relatively short and intelligible cycles: nutrients were drawn from land or water, consumed, and returned through biological processes that replenished soils and ecosystems over time. Losses occurred, but they were visible, local, and constrained by ecological limits.

Today’s food systems, by contrast, are increasingly organized around detours rather than cycles. Nutrients are extracted in one place, transformed through multiple biological and industrial intermediaries, transported across long distances, and recombined into products that bear little resemblance to their ecological origins. Each detour adds friction: energy use, material loss, pollution, and governance complexity. Yet because these steps are distributed across sectors and jurisdictions, their cumulative cost is rarely assessed as a single pathway.

The distinction between cycles and detours is not a moral one, nor a nostalgic appeal to pre-industrial food systems. Detours are sometimes unavoidable, particularly in densely populated or technologically complex societies. The critical issue is that detours have become the default design principle, rather than an exception justified by clear benefits. In policy terms, this shift has largely gone unnoticed because sustainability metrics continue to evaluate individual stages of production, not the structure of the route as a whole.

A cycle-oriented system prioritizes directness: nutrients are sourced as close as possible to their point of use, with minimal intermediate transformations. A detour-oriented system prioritizes the continuous movement of goods and uninterrupted consumption. It caters to ever increasing and more sophisticated demand, maintaining current products and consumer habits, by creating more complex and extended routes for their supply. The environmental difference between the two is far from negligible. Every additional routing step contributes to losses, regardless of how efficient, certified, or low-impact each individual stage is declared.

Crucially, detours are not simply technical necessities; they are political and economic choices. Subsidies, research priorities, trade regulations, and public health discourse all influence the stability of extensive nutrient pathways that would otherwise appear irrational from an ecological perspective. Once these pathways are in place, they mold markets and expectations, leading alternatives to be perceived as disruptive or impractical, despite being fundamentally simpler.

This lens helps explain why many sustainability debates become trapped in incrementalism. When policy focuses on improving isolated components — a more efficient feed, a lower-emission process, a better certification scheme — it implicitly accepts the detour as given. The question of whether the route itself makes sense is deferred or excluded. As a result, systems can become increasingly optimized at each step while growing ever more extractive and less efficient overall.

Viewing land and ocean food and systems through the lens of cycles versus detours does not point to a single solution. Rather, it brings to light questions that current frameworks tend to bypass: Which nutrient routes are genuinely necessary? Which exist primarily to preserve consumption patterns that are actively reinforced by markets, policy, and infrastructure? And how much ecological pressure is generated not by eating itself, but by the length, redundancy, and complexity of the paths that make eating possible?

The following sections will apply this conceptual distinction to current ocean and food systems, starting with omega-3 fatty acids and wild fish-based feed — a paradigmatic example of how detours become normalized, and how their cumulative impacts disappear from view and are overlooked in policy discussions.