Food Systems and Health

Sara Shostak, Brea L. Perry

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786350923
• eBook ISBN: 9781787148901
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Policy

In recent years, the ways in which food is produced, distributed, and consumed have emerged as prominent health and social issues. With rising concern about rates of obesity, food systems have attracted the attention of state actors, leading to both innovative and controversial public health interventions, such as citywide soda bans, "veggie prescription" initiatives, and farm-to-school programs. At the same time, social movement activism has emerged focused on issues related to food and health, including movements for food justice, food safety, farm worker's rights, and community control of land for agricultural production. Meanwhile, many individuals and families struggle to obtain food that is affordable, accessible, and meaningfully connected to their cultures. Volume 18 of Advances in Medical Sociology brings cutting-edge sociological research to bear on these multiple dimensions of food systems and their impacts on individual and population health. This volume will highlight how food systems matter for health policy, health politics, and the lived experiences and life chances of individuals and communities.

PART I
FOOD SYSTEMS AND HEALTH OUTCOMES

FOOD SYSTEM CHANNELS, HEALTH, AND ILLNESS

Jeffery Sobal

ABSTRACT

Purpose – Food system channels are proposed to be major components of the larger food system which influence health and illness.

Methodology/approach – Food system channels are defined, discussed in relationship to other food system components, considered in terms of historical food system changes, examined in relationship to wellbeing and disease, and proposed to have useful applications.

Findings – Food system channels are broad, organized, and integrated pathways through which foods and nutrients pass. Channels are larger in scale and scope than previously described food system structures like chains, stages, sectors, networks, and others. Four major types of contemporary Western food system channels differ in their underlying values and health impacts. (1) Industrialized food channels are based on profit as an economic value, which contributes to a diversity of inexpensive foods and chronic diseases. (2) Emergency food channels are based on altruism as a moral value, and try to overcome gaps in industrialized channels to prevent diseases of poverty. (3) Alternative food channels are based on justice and environmentalism as ethical values, and seek to promote wellness and sustainability. (4) Subsistence food channels are based on self-sufficiency as a traditional value, and seek self-reliance to avoid hunger and illness. Historical socioeconomic development of agricultural and industrial transitions led to shifts in food system channels that shaped dietary, nutritional, epidemiological, and mortality transitions.

Implications – Food system channels provide varying amounts of calories and types of nutrients that shape wellbeing and diseases. Sociologists and others may benefit from examining food system channels and considering their role in health and illness.

Keywords: Channels; food systems; stages; health; illness

INTRODUCTION

Human food systems are physical, biological, social, cultural, economic, and political entities that include many components and processes that produce nutrients and calories essential for promoting health and preventing illness. In contemporary western societies, food systems are vast enterprises of such great size and complexity that they may appear to be unfathomable. There are a variety of ways to think about food systems, their parts, and their activities, as well as the range and scope of what is included in food systems (Sobal, Khan, & Bisogni, 1998). This raises the question of what are the major divisions in the current food system. This chapter offers one way to conceptualize parts of the food system using the concept of food system channels as components of the larger system that offer different pathways for nutrients and calories to shape wellbeing and disease. Food system channels include multiple foods, span production and consumption and nutrition, and offer a new way to link embodiment of foods with health and illness. Medical sociologists may benefit from thinking about food system channels as they consider historical food system dynamics, present variations in health and medical issues across food channels, and engagement in actions to shape and reform food systems.

In the following sections, I first define and provide support for the concept of food system channels, and then differentiate channels from related conceptualizations of components in the food system. Then I describe how food system channels are involved with health and illness, and consider historical changes in food system channels, wellbeing, and disease. Finally, I suggest how this new concept of food system channels may be applied by medical and other sociologists, policy and program workers, and others who desire to reform the present food system.

FOOD SYSTEM CHANNELS

Food system channels can be defined as broad, organized, and integrated pathways through which foods and nutrients pass. They offer a conceptual tool that provides a unique perspective for thinking about food systems and health, with different health consequences emerging from different channels. Thinking about food system channels helps understand individual and population processes related to health and illness. Food system channels are larger in scale and scope than most existing conceptualizations of components of food systems, and offer broad views that provide wide perspectives about major changes in health and illness.

It is important to note that food system channels represent flexible pathways that foods take through the system. Channels are not truly distinct. Channels coexist with each other, have fuzzy boundaries, and include intersections, overlaps, and interpenetrations between channels. Mixing and sharing of foods occur across and within channels. Channel sharing and channel swapping occur for some foods and nutrients, showing that pathways through channels are not bound by determinative predictability of paths within and between channels. Specific foods may travel in parallel forms in different food system channels, such as manufactured chickens in an industrialized channel and local free range of organic chickens in an alternative channel (Dixon, 2002). However, even though food system channels overlap, blur together, and operate situationally, their lack of fixed boundaries and rigid processes do not negate their recognizability as entities in human food systems.

Food systems include structures (akin to anatomy) and processes (akin to physiology) that have been previously identified and used to think about food systems. Food system channels are large structures that include other structures like food stages (such as production and consumption) and food sectors (such as the meat sector and the wheat sector). They also involve processes like collaboration and opposition by various actors in the food system (such as farmers and grocers). Channels usually occur across the full scope of a food system, but may operate in only some stages in part of the system. Additionally, food system channels interact and intersect with other factors like culture, socioeconomic status, and gender.

Others have employed the term “channel” in analyzing food systems in narrower ways than it is used here, such as economists focusing on communication through food “marketing channels” (Markowitz, 2008; Renard, 2003). Food system channels are conceptualized here as larger in scale and scope than other food system components like stages, sectors, and chains that will be discussed in the next section.

Four major types of food system channels are proposed to operate in contemporary postindustrial westernized societies: (1) industrialized channels, (2) emergency channels, (3) alternative channels, and (4) subsistence channels. These distinguishable types of food system channels vary in their biophysical and sociocultural characteristics, underlying values, and health outcomes. Each type of channel serves differently as a conduit for varying amounts and types of foodstuffs to become foods that deliver nutrients for consumption and bodily processes that influence health and illness. The major values motivating participants in these channels differ substantially, and these values shape the ways they deal with health and illness. These four types of channels are described in the following sections.

Industrialized food channels are based on economic values, like profit, that lead to the efficient production and thrifty consumption of acceptable and adequately safe foods. Industrialized channels include entities ranging in scope from corporations supplying seed through growers, processors, distributors, consumers of industrialized foods whose bodies use nutrients that are involved in health and illness. Industrialized food channels dominate the majority of the present western global food system, and are hegemonic as they are seen and treated as conventional, core, and mainstream food structures (Kloppenburg, Lezberg, De Master, Stevenson, & Hendrickson, 2000; Lyson, 2004). It is almost impossible in contemporary western societies for other food system channels not to interact, interpenetrate, or mix with foods or processes in the industrialized channel.

Industrialized food channels are currently based on corporate economic principles that focus on maximizing profit (Stout, 2012). This focus on profit presently outweighs considerations like health and culture, which leads to pressures to produce the least expensive rather than the healthiest or most socially meaningful foods. Profitable foods in the food system often contribute to obesity and major chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases (Nesheim, Orea, & Yih, 2015).

Emergency food channels are based on altruism as a value, and apply the ethical principal of beneficence to use charity (Poppendieck, 1999) to overcome limitations of industrialized channels and deal with diseases of poverty (Adams & Butterly, 2015). Emergency food channels are diverse entities that extend from planting crops and gardens to feed hungry individuals and families, gleaning wasted foods for redistribution, processing foods to distribute to those who need them, offering food aid and meals to those who are food insecure, and the consumption and embodiment of the nutrients in these emergency foods to produce health and avoid illness. Emergency channels emerged in reaction to gaps in the industrial channel that led to problems with availability of sufficient foods for some individuals (Poppendieck, 1999), especially those who are experiencing or nearly experiencing poverty (Poppendieck, 2014). However, Sen (1981, p. 1) described how “some people not having enough food to eat” is not necessarily caused by “there not being enough food to eat,” and emergency food is needed not because of insufficient food stocks in society as a whole but because of social systems that fail to provide adequate food to all citizens. Emergency food channels help those temporarily in poverty (Rank, Hirschl, & Foster, 2016) experiencing hunger and food insecurity, as well as providing food to people who are impoverished for longer periods as they serve individuals experiencing extended food insecurity.

Medical and epidemiological discussions consider diseases of poverty to be undernutrition, infection, and accidents (Adams & Butterly, 2015), and only in recent decades have people experiencing poverty become widely affected by diseases of overnutrition like diabetes and heart disease. Long food system channels extend from agriculture to the body, and deal with the multiple diseases of poverty including undernutrition (being deprived of society’s overall food resources) as well as malnutrition (eating society’s leftovers that lead to chronic diseases).

Actors in emergency food channels, such as volunteer groups, foundations, and government agencies, operate under different underlying motivations than those of industrialized channels, being morally rather than economically oriented (Poppendieck, 1999). These value-based moral roots produce different decisions than the profit-oriented industrialized food channel entities, often including health as one (but not the only) goal in providing food.

Much food in emergency food channels is produced in industrialized food channels (Prendergast, 2016). However, emergency food channels are increasingly becoming independent from industrialized food channels, establishing their own vertically coordinated portions of food chains as they try to most efficiently, economically, and effectively offer the most food to the greatest number of hungry and food insecure families and individuals.

Alternative food channels are based on justice and environmental values that promote use of foods that are natural, vegetarian, sustainable, and local in production, consumption, and bodily health. Alternative channels are entities that range in scope from organic farms to humane food processing plants, cooperative groceries, healthy cooking, clean eating, and the pursuit of noncontaminated nutrients that are embodied to achieve health. Cultural and geographical identities are often emphasized in alternative channels to resist industrialized globalization of foods in the worldwide commodity chains (Bowen & Gaytan, 2012). The alternative food channel inclu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Part I Food Systems and Health Outcomes
• Part II The Social Determinants of Consumption
• Part III Alternative Food Institutions and Ideologies
• About the Authors