What do we value?

Can real value be measured?

The economic value of an entity — be it a service or a product — is not just the labour or the object itself, but the value it generates and the impact it has on life, both direct and indirect.

Beyond food

Take food. We don't just value food as an energy source that extends life by an amount equivalent to its calorific content. Food intake generates its worth through its quality and its health impact — low-nutritional food and empty calories do not lengthen life, or generate energy for it. This makes food and access to it an essential factor in the social determinants of health.

Quality food with high nutritional content might be a good fuel, and have a high impact on bodily function. But even the most nutritious food does not guarantee an experience — a relationship with nourishment that goes beyond the individual and the moment of consumption.

We don't just eat to live, nor do we live to eat. That framing takes it from one extreme to another and assumes the answer is binary. Transcending the immediate, the relationship with food has the power to enhance the quality of life in ways that are far reaching. When travelling, food is a major part of the experience. Food is part of our own identity, our memories and our culture. Events and milestones in our lives are punctuated by celebratory meals. Food has biblical significance — identified as knowledge which, when consumed, had the power to expel Adam and Eve from Eden. It is even the luxury that prisoners on death row are allowed to choose.

This is when food moves from being an individual, momentary experience. It gains value as a collective through which culture is created. Food cements shared experience and collective memory — built through and around it. It is, to me, a key part of the cultural determinants of life.

Therefore the impact of food as a commodity cannot be calculated in a binary equation of input to output. It is exponential — in creating shared narratives, cultures, tastes, sounds, visuals and colours, but also in creating a relationship to the source and to the ways of production. With the modernisation of food production and mass consumption, we have focused on efficiency at the sacrifice of source and social impact. We fixate on the extraction and on the input in the line of the value chain, forgetting the output — and what we call waste.

Beyond fuel

The same can be said about fuel — the energy we use for heating, lighting, transport, networking and connectivity. The fuel of modern life, regardless of its source.

The impact of fuel cannot be calculated by evaluating input versus output alone — a neutral-sounding equation that conceals a far more complex reality. We are not dealing with Einstein's law of conservation of mass-energy. To every unit of energy consumed there is an immediate impact — movement, heat — but also secondary indirect impacts on mobility, warmth and access; and then tertiary impacts on quality of life, healthy eating, comfort, peace of mind. It is never just a question of the fuel itself, but of the interconnected — sometimes unintended — ripple effect that comes out of it.

And the effects are not only positive. There are the negative impacts of pollution generated during production of oil and gas. The negative impacts on communities who live in or around areas of fuel production. The negative impacts of lack of access to energy altogether.

A constellation — interconnected value model

In both cases we insist on imagining these models as linear value chains — even when we understand they are more like an ever-widening cone than a straight line. But even a cone is not enough. Food ends up as waste — or what we have come to perceive as waste — whether in the production supply chain or post-consumption. Fuel ends up as waste: in emissions, in heat generated by machinery, in losses during transport and production, in global warming, in the side effects of clean energy production.

Net zero and ripple impacts

Sometimes the barrier to change is perception and behaviour. So — in time for the winter solstice, the new year and Christmas — how about we rethink our approach to our system models and ask the questions differently.

Can we stop calling anything waste? Can we look at it instead as a mine — a raw material in its own right for something else? Can we stop being obsessed with efficiency and start measuring the impact of our models on the indirects — the things that make life and culture a journey of experience rather than a process of production?

Can we redesign the value of the input to be continuous — in the tradition of Einstein's law of conservation of mass-energy? Can we imagine the model as a continuous Möbius strip in a four-dimensional, interconnected system? Will that help us connect the tangible values of our production and growth with their intangible values — positive, like community-building; negative, like climate impact? Will it help us redefine the framework to create systems that have continuous positive impact, instead of merely aiming at net zero?