Currently browsing posts about: Food-systems

Food systems is the hot new term, referring as it does to everything that happens to a food from production to processing to consumption to waste.  Reports about food systems constitute a deluge.  This one deserves special mention.  Others follow tomorrow.

FAO announces a new report on indigenous people’s food systems:

Nearly 500 million people in more than 90 countries self-identify as Indigenous Peoples, with unique traditional knowledge offering rich opportunities for food security and biosecurity preservation.  Eight Indigenous Peoples’ food systems are examined in depth and revealed to be among the most sustainable in the world in terms of efficiency, no waste, seasonality and reciprocity.

The 420-page (!) report is here.

It is enormously detailed about foods, climate, geography, sustainability, resilience, and needs of the people in each community studied.

The eight groups studied:

• Forest-based Baka of South-eastern Cameroon
• Reindeer herding Inari Sámi of Nellin, Finland
• Fishing and gathering Khasi of Meghalaya, India
• Fishing and agroforestry Melanesians of Solomon Islands
• Pastoralist Kel Tamasheq of Aratène Mali
• Agro-pastoralist and gathering Bhotia and Anwal of Uttarakhand, India
• Fishing, chagra, and forest Tikuna, Cocama, and Yagua of Puerto Nariño, Colombia
• Milpa practicing Maya Ch’orti’ of Ciquimula, Guatemala

For each group, the report gives detailed information about food sources, production methods, sustainability, resiliency, problems, and issues.

And example from the Baka:

This is an astonishing resource and FAO deserves much praise for doing a deeply scholarly report like this.

The Rockefeller Foundation has produced what I view as an incredibly important guide to describing—“framing”—food system issues in ways that will encourage support for transforming the U.S. food system.

For effective advocacy, issues have to be “framed” in a way that the public can understand and respond to.

“Framing” is a concept made famous by George Lakoff.  It refers to the way political messages are designed to resonate with voters.  But it also refers to how public health messages can be designed to be more effective in encouraging people to act in the interests of their own health (wear masks, for example).

For food system change, the Rockefeller Foundation issued an action guide:  Reset the Table: Messaging Guide,

One of the consistent needs expressed by those seeking to transform the food system is a shared narrative to motivate and sustain the needed changes in the system. This narrative and messaging guide focuses on the long-term food system transformation while responding to the evolving circumstances presented by the pandemic, economic downturn, and racial justice reckoning being experienced in the United States.

Its guide is part of a longer report giving the research basis behind the messages: Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System.

Here is an example of how this kind of research-based framing works:

And here is an example of the messaging in action:

These are great suggestions for ways to talk about food issues.

Required reading!

New York City is taking big steps to improve its food system.   Two reports are worth noting, one from the Mayor’s office and one from the Health Department.

I.  Mayor Bill de Blasio and Kate MacKenzie, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy (MOFP) have released Food Forward NYC: A 10-Year Food Policy Plan.

Here’s how they introduce this impressive report:

Food Forward NYC is the City’s first ever 10-year food policy plan, laying out an comprehensive policy framework to reach a more equitable, sustainable, and healthy food system by 2031.

Food Forward NYC emphasizes the importance of equity and choice – enabling a food system where everyone should be able to access the food they want wherever they may want it. To enable this choice, we need to support both our food workers and our food businesses. To strengthen the sustainability and resiliency of our food system, we need to rethink our food infrastructure and deepen our connections with the region.

Food Forward NYC is organized around five overarching goals:

1. All New Yorkers have multiple ways to access healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food.
2. New York City’s food economy drives economic opportunity and provides good jobs.
3. The supply chains that feed New York City are modern, efficient, and resilient.
4. New York City’s food is produced, distributed, and disposed of sustainably.
5. Support the systems and knowledge to implement the 10-year food policy plan.

The full report is here.  It was prepared in response to Local Law 40 of 2020 and recommendations from the New York City Council’s 2019 report, Growing Food Equity in New York City.  

New York City is a complicated place and it’s wonderful to have all this information put together in such a coherent way.  Let’s hope everyone gets behind this and puts the recommendations into action.

II.  The Bureau of Chronic Disease Prevention at the NYC Health Department has an update on its  National Salt and Sugar Reduction Initiative (NSSRI).

In October 2018, the Bureau announced draft sugar reduction targets.  Now they have updated them and added targets for salt reduction, as well.  As I was informed in an e-mail,

The NSSRI is a partnership of over 100 local city and state health departments, associations, and health organizations, convened by the NYC Department of Health. We have set voluntary sugar reduction targets for 15 categories of food and beverages. The targets represent a 10% reduction in sugar content of products by 2023, and a 20% reduction by 2026 for food with a 40% reduction for beverages.

The current public health landscape demonstrates that diet remains critical, even during a public health emergency like COVID-19. Diet-related health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, which can increase the risk of severe illness from COVID-19, are important to address right now.

Here’s what one of the sugar reduction targets looks like:

The objective of NSSRI is this:

To promote gradual, achievable and meaningful reductions in sugar content in packaged foods and beverages. This is because intake of added sugars is associated with increased risk of excess weight, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart disease and cavities.

The targets are indeed gradual; the hope it that they will be met by 2026.

The targets are, of course, voluntary.  The best NSSRI can do is to encourage companies to comply and hold them accountable.

It’s a start.

Nick Freudenberg.  At What Cost: Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health.  Oxford University Press, 2021.   

I did a blurb for this terrific book:

At What Cost is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why food insecurity, low-wage work, chronic disease, and environmental degradation are such widespread and seemingly intractable problems.  Capitalism may not be their only cause, but it is common to all of them.  This important book provides compelling evidence for the need to join together to change this system to one better for people and the planet.

Here are a few excerpts to give you the idea:

…how capitalism has evolved now undermines health, widens inequality, worsens climate change, and erodes democracy.  Food, education, healthcare, labor, transportation, and social relationships constitute the most basic necessities of life.  Converting them into commodities that must bring profits to their producers if they are to be offered imposes a cost on human and planetary well-being (p. 15).

[Goals for food justice require] changing the dominant corporate system of food and agriculture.  Focusing on the separate goals of each strand rather than the common overarching ones has made the food movement less powerful, less able to win concessions from the highly organized alliance of food and agriculture businesses, and more vulnerable to co-optation by trade groups who offer some factions grants or a seat at the policy table (p. 274).

Corporate-controlled globalization, financialization, deregulation, monopoly concentration, and the corporate capture of new technologies, the defining characteristics of twenty-first-century capitalism, are fundamental causes of multiple and growing threats to well-being.  This commonality justifies a sharp focus on the system that is the underlying cause (p. 277).

To fix food system problems, means fixing capitalism.  That’s the problem that needs our focused attention.  He’s got some ideas about that too.

Tom Philpott.  Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It.  Bloomsbury, 2020.  

Here’s my blurb:

In Perilous Bounty, Tom Philpott probes what’s wrong with Big Agriculture—examining how it depletes California’s water, poisons water in the Midwest, and ruins soil resources—and proposes ways to reconfigure the food system to better promote health and sustain the environment. This must-read book is deeply researched, compellingly written, and thoroughly inspiring.

And here’s a quick excerpt:

We have reached the limits of “market-as-movement” to transform the food system.  In an economy marked by severe inequality, wage stagnation, and persistently high levels of poverty, the market approach excludes the population that can’t afford to pay the higher prices of organic, local food or devote time to cooking from scratch.  It threatens to create an ecologically robust niche for the prosperous within a dominant food system that quietly lurches on, wrecking the environment and making people sick.  Well-off consumers should vote with their forks three times a day, but the pace of positive change they create has been no match for Big Food’s massive inertia and the rapid advance of climate change.  But something important has emerged over the same period: the stirrings of a new form of movement politics…  [p. 255]

Read these and you will be up to date on anything known about food systems in the age of COVID-19.

FAO and Hopkins Dashboard

This gives data on aspects of food systems—supply chains, food environments,  consumer behavior, diets and nutrition, and the effects of key drivers like climate change and income, 170 indicators in all—on the food systems of 230 countries and territories.  This is one-stop shopping for this kind of information.

• Press release 
• The Dashboard 

“What struck us back in 2017 while working on the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition Report was the lack of accessible, organised, quality-checked information on food systems. Without that data, it’s difficult to identify the best evidence-based actions that could improve food systems,” said Johns Hopkins Global Food Ethics and Policy Program Director Jessica Fanzo. “It was really important to us, given the level of complexity and interconnections inherent to food systems, that the data be presented in a way that is easily usable – and that’s what the Dashboard does. Now decision makers have easy access to both data and to policy advice that is specific to their situations.”

Oxfam: “Exposed: How US supermarkets are failing their workers in a global pandemic”

Oxfam analyzed the formal policies of major US supermarkets during the first months of the pandemic, including Albertsons/Safeway, Costco, Kroger, Walmart, and Whole Foods/Amazon in five key areas: paid sick leave, hazard pay, protective gear, engagement with workers and worker representatives, and gender and dependent care. While all of these supermarkets stepped up some of their policies, none of them are doing nearly enough as they continue to make outsized profits on the backs of their low-wage workers.

Here are the Press release and the report.

CGIAR: Actions to Transform Food Systems Under Climate Change

Nothing short of a systemic transformation of food systems is required if we are to feed the world’s current and future population sustainably under climate change…we aimed to identify the high priority actions that we must collectively take now, for climate change adaptation and mitigation in food systems.  [Note: CGIAR was formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, but now goes just by CGIAR]

Here is the report.

HLPE [High Level Panel of Experts] 15: Fooc Security and Nutrition: Building a Global Narrative Towards 2030.

Following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the HLPE was asked to urgently prepare an issues paper on the potential impact of the pandemic on global food security and nutrition for an extraordinary meeting of the CFS on 19 March 2020. The key findings and recommendations from this issues paper have been updated and included in this report…The current COVID-19 crisis is unprecedented in its global scale and the situation is changing rapidly, with many unknowns. It serves as a reminder of the fragility of the global food system and the importance of global coordination.

Here is the report.

Tim Lang. Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them.  Pelican, 2020.  

I reviewed this book for The Lancet.  The online version is here.

Although Lang wrote his book before the COVID-19 pandemic, it thoroughly explains the governmental weaknesses that led to the UK’s food vulnerability and delayed and inadequate response to the crisis. Lang could not be more expert; he knows the British food policy scene from the inside, having started his career as a hill farmer, spending decades as a food advocate, academic, and adviser to domestic and international agencies, and having written previous books on food systems. His purpose here is to convince British politicians to take food issues seriously, to assume moral and political leadership, and to transform the UK’s food system to one that is more self-sufficient, more resilient, and better able to reduce food insecurity, prevent obesity, and reduce environmental damage.

I’ve been collecting sources of information about the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic on food systems.  Here are some with information that might be useful.

US Right to Know: Coronavirus Food News Tracker: Best articles on the pandemic and our food system

Hunter NYC Urban Food Policy Center: COVID-19 Food Resources and Guides