Article: Sharing Meals: Food systems leadership as a pathway to civic engagement

Posted by Stanford Social Innovation Review on November 19, 2024

What will it take to create systems change in our food system? Because of food’s centrality to how we all live—a centrality which produces complex relationships and interconnections across multiple scales—our food system is difficult to transform. For exactly this reason, it is all the more important that we find ways to do so.

Talking about “systems” can be very abstract. Let’s bring it down to earth (literally). Imagine a parcel of peri-urban farmland owned by an older farmer who is ready to retire. One path leads to this arable land being sold to a developer and turned into a small strip mall. Another path leads to it being purchased by a “farm incubator” who will make it available to refugee farmers growing culturally meaningful crops and contributing to their economic mobility. Next, imagine where these crops go after harvesting. One path leads to a conventional wholesale buyer who pays below the cost of production, since prices are forced down by cheap, subsidized imports. Another path leads them to an urban “food hub” that purchases them at a fair wholesale price, funded by health-care community investments, and packs the produce into weekly “farm shares” distributed for free throughout the urban core to individuals who have been diagnosed with diet-related disease, whose health improves as they substitute this food for the mostly non-perishable, often low-quality, and sometimes downright unhealthful food that is distributed by food banks (in turn, bringing health care costs down). Finally, imagine the food scraps left over in these community members’ kitchens. One path leads them to a plastic garbage bag, picked up and transferred to the nearest landfill, where they decompose under anaerobic conditions, which creates methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more powerful than CO2. Another path leads them to a 5-gallon food scrap bin kept outside the door, which is dropped off weekly at a community garden-based compost site where they break down through biological processes, turning into a nutrient-rich soil amendment that is returned to local gardens and farms.

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