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Summary of literature Food Health And Society (RSO33306)
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Week 1................................................................................................................................... 1The spatiality of food provisioning......................................................................................1
The 15-Minute City - no cars required - is urban planning’s new Utopia?..........................4
The EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy: missing links for transformation......................................5
Game-changing potential of the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy.............................................7
Food policy: Integrating health, environment and society...................................................8
Validating the City Region Food System Approach: Enacting inclusive, transformational
City Region Food Systems...............................................................................................10
Women, policy and politics...............................................................................................14
Taking problems apart.................................................................................................14
Rethinking policy studies.............................................................................................15
Week 2................................................................................................................................. 17
Diverse food economies, multivariant capitalism, and the community dynamic shaping
contemporary food systems.............................................................................................17
Building sustainable and ethical food futures through economic diversity: options for a
mid-sized city................................................................................................................... 20
Is it appropriate to use surplus food to feed people in hunger? Short-term Band-aid to
more deep-rooted problems of poverty............................................................................22
Week 3................................................................................................................................. 26
The cultural dynamics of urban food governance.............................................................26
Urban food policies in German city regions: An overview of key players and policy
instruments...................................................................................................................... 28
Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable
food systems.................................................................................................................... 31
Week 1
The spatiality of food provisioning
For many centuries the location, size, and growth rate of cities was largely determined by the
amount of food and energy that their rural hinterland could produce. The spatial proximity
relations between specific foods (e.g., vegetables, milk, cereals, meat) and city as well as
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,the relation between location, size, and growth rate of a city began to fundamentally change
with the introduction of the railway system. Following the introduction of railroads, spatial
proximity relations between cities and agricultural production rapidly became weaker with the
introduction of new technologies, such as airplanes, refrigerated and frozen transport and
storage, and processing and packaging of food. Those changes lead to cities having more
possibilities in size, shape and place. But as cities sprawled, food systems industrialized,
and the two began to grow apart.
The separation of cities and their food systems has changed their relationship in multiple
ways. We can distinguish three spheres of changing relations:
1. Spatial: For many food items, in industrialized economies, the physical distance
between the site of production and the site of consumption has increased.
2. Social: The increased physical distance has also changed the social relations
between actors involved in different food provisioning practices (e.g., the
consumption, cooking, distribution, processing and production). Relations between
producers and consumers become more and more anonymous, which is
accompanied by an increasing level of formalization in relationships through
detailed production regulations and quality control systems to compensate for the
lack of direct contact and personal trust.
3. Values: With the growing share of processed foods, the global sourcing of food, the
year-round availability of food products, and the growing importance of supermarkets
as food outlets, there has been a change in the values that actors contribute to food
and in the conventions that shape the interactions and relations between actors in
food systems. Global industrial food systems in particular are organized around
commercial (importance of price) and industrial (growing significance of standards
and quality assurance schemes) conventions.
Although these changes are generally seen as representing the prevailing trend in food
system dynamics, it is important to note that alternatives to this mainstream globalized
industrial food system are emerging and growing. Furthermore, it is important to mention
that in some countries industrial food systems are still in their infancy and may remain
relatively insignificant.
Contemporary food system challenges
Cities become disconnected from their food provisioning systems and globalized and
industrialized food systems are on the rise. This has led to some different challenges:
- Resource depletion and scarcity: Some of the crucial resources are being depleted
at a rate that is likely to make them scarce. The most important resource constraints
for food provisioning are: (1) fossil fuel and (2) water.
- Environmental degradation: Many farming practices are increasingly perceived as
degenerative, as they deplete natural resources and are energy- and chemical -
intensive. They are contributing to environmental pollution and social degradation.
- Climate change: Climate change has and will continue to have a tremendous impact
on the productive capacity of agriculture worldwide. Some regions are expected to
benefit from global warming as this will create a more productive environment, while
many other regions are likely to suffer due to severe droughts and floods. The
relation between food and climate change is a dualistic one. On the one hand,
agricultural production is largely negatively affected by climate change but, on the
other hand, it also contributes to climate change by emitting GHG.
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, - Waste (food and packaging): Food waste: Approximately 40% of the food produced
is not consumed due to harvest losses on the farm and post-harvest losses further up
the food chain, including post-consumer waste. Packaging waste: the last decades
this has increased, due to the combined effects of population growth, increased
levels of consumption, and a growing share of processed food in people’s diets.
- Social inequalities: Typically for many cities is the significant difference between the
upper- and middle-income class, and the low-income class when it comes to access
to clean drinking water and electricity and presence of adequate sewage and solid
waste disposal facilities. Furthermore, socioeconomic inequalities translate directly
into differences in access to and affordability of food.
- Public health: More than 2 billion people suffer from diet-related ill health: obesity,
malnutrition, and hunger. Furthermore, the food system has an impact on
environmental health: more urban air pollution.
These six main food system challenges cannot be understood or addressed in isolation.
Their interconnectedness and interdependence are central to emerging nexus-thinking.
The spatiality of food-related Challenges
Although this seven-fold nexus makes sustainable food provisioning a complex issue, we still
need to add yet another layer to this complexity, which is the spatial component entailed in
this nexus. Food provisioning practices, the conditions that shape these practices and the
impacts of these practices are not only of a social, economic, and environmental nature but
also manifest themselves spatially. This spatial manifestation of practices, conditions, and
impacts is twofold: (1) There are complex spatial interdependencies between food
provisioning practices. (2) It is important to understand the spatial aspects of the nexus. With
this we refer to the existence of spatial differences in climate change effects, in food access
and availability, in diet-related ill health, in food waste, and so on.
Foodscapes
To deal with the spatial aspects of food provisioning practices and the conditions shaping
these practices we propose to use the concept of foodscapes. A foodscape is the
relationship between food, its spatial context and the viewer (the person to which this image
appears); thus, the actual site where we find food. We can distinguish between macro-,
meso-, and micro-scale food environments, or foodscapes:
- Macro level: shaped by ‘global or regional marketscapes that shape food choices
through widely dispersed international food systems that include transportation
networks, agricultural and food industries, and food distribution outlets’.
- Meso level: building environments at the community level providing ‘food landscapes
that represent eating outlets available for choosing foods that determine food
provisioning’.
- Micro level: concerns the domestic foodscape: the physical appearance of the
food, how food is served, the amount of food that is served, how, where, and with
whom meals are eaten, and how and where meals are prepared, and food is stored.
This inclusion of scale and place in the definition of foodscape points to two important
constituting elements of the concept:
1. Foodscapes are nested: the domestic foodscape is embedded in a community or
neighborhood foodscape, which in turn is embedded in a regional or global
foodscape.
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, 2. Foodscapes are interconnected: the places shaped by different food provisioning
activities - i.e., producing, processing, distributing, trading, preparing and eating - are
inextricably linked to one another.
Given the definition of foodscapes, the diversity of foodscapes is virtually endless. To
simplify and reduce this diversity there are two ideal types of foodscapes (constructed
ideal of a foodscape used to stress certain elements common to a particular kind of
foodscape):
1. Agro-industrial foodscape: This foodscape is rooted in the agricultural
modernization paradigm and is the outcome of a globalized corporate food regime.
Food and the resources needed to produce it are seen as commodities and both
entrepreneurs and consumers are best served by free global trade. Food security is
perceived as a production challenge and sustainable food production is narrowly
defined as optimizing input-output relations.
2. AGro-ecological foodscape: Is rooted in a place-based integrated paradigm with
food sovereignty as a leading motto. Food security is primarily seen as a challenge in
terms of availability, accessibility, affordability and adequacy. Sustainability is defined
in broad terms.
Designing flourishing foodscapes
Five socio-spatial design principles for flourishing foodscapes:
1. Adopt a city region perspective: This comes down to exploring to what extent and
how social and spatial connections between cities and their rural hinterland can be
re-established - without falling into the local trap, i.e., the implicit assumption that
local food systems are by definition sustainable. Because of the decentralization of
policy responsibilities, the city region is increasingly becoming the appropriate level
of action.
2. Link different levels of scale: This follows from our observation that foodscapes are
nested and thus requires spatial interventions.
3. Connect flows and close cycles: Food and food-related waste as well as depletion
of resources have been identified as two major food system challenges. Allowing
resources in waste to be recovered for flows creating value can be a means to
address both these challenges.
4. Enhance spatial diversity and synergies: There is a growing recognition that
ecological as well as social diversity is paramount to long-term resilience of food
provisioning systems. This implies the need to develop spatial intervention strategies
that support and enhance different forms of diversity, instead of reducing it. For
example, rooftop farming.
5. Conceive multiple utopias: This focuses primarily on making visible the kind of food
provisioning practices that tend to remain hidden, unrecognized, and/or
misunderstood within the prevailing food provisioning paradigm.
The 15-Minute City - no cars required - is urban planning’s
new Utopia?
The 15-minute city is a potentially transformative vision for urban planners and represents
the possibility of a decentralized city (‘a city of proximities’). The 15-minute concept was
developed primarily to reduce urban carbon emissions, reimagining our towns not as divided
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