No food system anywhere in the world achieves all the desired goals at the same time: healthy food, sustainable, fair and affordable. This is not a technical failure, but the result of a system that gets stuck because there is resistance to change. Where exactly does that resistance come from? And more importantly: what can you do about it, and how can you steer this process?
It sounds so straightforward: we want healthy food, produced within planetary boundaries, fair and affordable for everyone. Different goals, one plate. In practice, it looks more like a plate of spaghetti: as soon as you pull one strand, three others move along with it. No food system anywhere in the world achieves all these goals at the same time, and perhaps it is a utopian idea to think this is even possible. Food systems are historical constructs in which interests, institutions, beliefs and power all play a role. Humans created the system, but it has now boxed itself in.
‘Thirty years ago, the task was simple: produce as much food as possible,’ says Bart de Steenhuijsen Piters, Senior Researcher Food Systems and Food & Nutrition Security at Wageningen Social & Economic Research. ‘Now we expect much more. And everywhere you look, those expectations are not being met.’