Environments Journal Volume 36(1) 2008

COMMENTARY On the Challenge of Creating Sustainable Food Systems

David Connell
For years people have lived by the maxim, you are what you eat. The general principle is to eat food that is good for your body. If you eat unhealthy food then youll be unhealthy. This is good, simple advice. But its focused on personal diet and personal health. If we wish to create more sustainable food systems then our food choices must reflect more than personal health. The challenge of creating sustainable food systems lies not in personal health but in social health, which is the essence of a sustainable society. Thousands of years ago agriculture was a pre-condition of civilization. Today, changing agriculture is a pre-condition for changing society. It is in this sense that society is what society eats. In other words, we are what we eat. As the range of articles in this issue of Environments illustrate, food and society are inseparable. The choices we make about what food we eat affects every aspect of our lives. At a personal level our food choices affect our health. At a family level food choices affect how much time we spend preparing and sharing meals. At a city level they affect how we design the spaces we occupy, including where food is grown, processed, transported, purchased, and consumed. At a societal level food choices affect how many resources are required to produce food, including human resources, water, and fossil fuels. Ultimately, food defines the relations not only between personal health and personal diet but also the relations people have with their neighbours, their immediate environment, and the planet as a whole. The greater distance there is between people and their food the less intimate food becomes in our daily lives. Distance refers to processes that are separating people from the sources of their food (Kneen 1995: 24). There is greater physical distance between where most of our food is grown and where it is David J. Connell is an consumed. It takes longer for food to be Assistant Professor in the prepared for a meal after it is harvested. School of Environmental And the relations between producers and consumers are mediated by a greater Planning at the University number of steps and inanimate objects, of Northern British thus increasing the social distance between Columbia and is a people and food. As Jessica Kwik reveals member of the Canadian in her article, social distance also highlights Institute of Planners. concerns related to inter-generational He can be reached at sharing of food knowledge and the relation connell@unbc.ca between food and cultural tradition.
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The problem of social distance is related to morals, wherein responsibility for what one consumes is separated (distanced) from food production; likewise, responsibility for production is separated from what one consumes (Connell et al. 2008). Weve created an unsustainable food system wherein one diseased cow in North America can bring down a system of global food supply, wherein the interaction between animals and vegetables in a field on one side of the continent can lead to deaths on the other side of the continent, wherein satisfying the need for a jolt of caffeine in the morning destroys tropical rainforests throughout the day, wherein fifteen-second television commercials have a greater influence than the wisdom of elders over what food we believe is good for society. Creating more sustainable food systems is difficult because the food choices we make on a daily basis are embedded in social structures. In abstract terms, the relation between food and society can be depicted as a nested system. At the broadest level is the agri-food system, which is the realm of policy; it is the arena in which systems of governance define standards of what food is good for society. In the name of health and safety, these standards appropriate the right of citizens to choose what they think is best for society. The over-riding axiom is that policy makers know whats best. The agri-food system governs the food industry, which focuses upon relations among different players in order to understand what foods get put on which store shelves and onto whose dinner plates. The mix and size of the components of the food industry determine the intensity of industry competition and profitability, as well as strategies available to both producers and consumers. The global food industry is presently dominated by a belief in bigger is better. In contrast, a more sustainable food system can be characterized by four components: (1) more value-added production that is created locally; (2) a shorter value chain that reduces the distance between producers and consumers; (3) local choices that value social justice, economic viability, and ecological responsibility; and (4) a culture of community that binds people and food to place. However, try as we might to demand alternatives, the embedded nature of our food choices means that sustainable food systems cannot be created in isolation of existing social structures. The embeddedness of food choices has both consequences and opportunities, as evident in each of the articles in this issue of Environments. Catherine Phillips analysis of the seed regime highlights the consequences of state-facilitated corporate control. This seed regime represents a seamless relation between agri-food system policies and corporate interests of the food industry. The changing relation between seeds and the right to produce food also represents one of the most significant, and potentially the most harmful, transformations of the relation between food and society. The impacts of such transformations are far-reaching, as presented by Mary Louise McAllister Kattides and Mairon Giovani Bastos Lima. Through examples from around the world, these authors illustrate the breadth of consequences arising from the dominance of the industrial food system and associated changes in the relation between food and society. In the face of such consequences, we must also look for opportunities to re-build what has been lost or compromised. In this light, Aleck Ostry and Kathryn Morrison focus on re-building regional food industries. They present an innovative way to find gaps in the existing structure of the
Copyright Environments: a journal of interdisciplinary studies/revue dtudes interdisciplinaires.

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food industry in order to identify opportunities to re-connect local producers and local consumers. On a smaller scale, Lenore Newman reveals innovative business opportunities in urban gardening that are effectively inaccessible to the conventional food industry. The articles in this issue point to a wide range of issues. Above all, what is suggested in these articles is a movement to recognize both what has been lost and ways to build what we need. The authors have served us well to emphasize the unsustainability of a food system that has scaled up beyond the means of society to support it. In the effort to connect industrial-scale producers with markets around the world we have lost the ability to connect local producers with local consumers. Gone are the dairies that serve local markets, cold storage facilities necessary for facilitating exchange, and traditional knowledge of local foods. In the pursuit of creating more sustainable food systems, we must learn how to scale down our systems of food exchange. Farmers markets are good examples of what this means. Farmers markets are the most visible and appear to be the most viable option available to connect local producers and local consumers. But farmers markets are not only a foundation for local exchange, they are also a means for re-creating relations between people and food and, in ambitious terms, they are a means to build a more sustainable society. In this sense, farmers markets are not only places to buy fresh, local food, farmers markets are also arenas for people to exercise food choices that incorporate many aspects of value received from food, such as nutrition and health, traditional knowledge, and ethical decisions about what consumers believe is good for a more sustainable society (Connell et al. 2008). No matter how ambitious our goals for creating more sustainable food systems, our food choices remain embedded in social structures. We cannot ask farmers to produce food for local markets if local people are neither interested in eating it nor willing to pay a higher price. Likewise, we cannot ask consumers to buy local food if there are not enough local foods on the market shelves. Sustainable food systems must accommodate viability as it applies to both producers and consumers, and to both economies and cultures: a challenge we face is to figure out what is possible and what is viable. And in the end, the viability of creating more sustainable food systems rests upon the health of society: it takes a community to sustain a local food system; and it takes a local food system to sustain a community.

References

Connell, D.J., J. Smithers, and A. Joseph. 2008. Farmers Markets and the Good Food Value Chain: A Preliminary Study. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 13(3):169-186. Kneen, B. 1995. From Land To Mouth: Understanding the Food System (Second Edition). Toronto, ON: NC Press Limited.

Copyright Environments: a journal of interdisciplinary studies/revue dtudes interdisciplinaires.