Introduction to the US Food System

Public Health, Environment, and Equity

Roni Neff, Roni Neff

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118913055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médecine
• Subtopic: Médecine du travail et médecine industrielle

A public health approach to the US food system

Introduction to the US Food System: Public Health, Environment, and Equity is a comprehensive and engaging textbook that offers students an overview of today's US food system, with particular focus on the food system's interrelationships with public health, the environment, equity, and society. Using a classroom-friendly approach, the text covers the core content of the food system and provides evidence-based perspectives reflecting the tremendous breadth of issues and ideas important to understanding today's US food system. The book is rich with illustrative examples, case studies, activities, and discussion questions.

The textbook is a project of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF), and builds upon the Center's educational mission to examine the complex interrelationships between diet, food production, environment, and human health to advance an ecological perspective in reducing threats to the health of the public, and to promote policies that protect health, the global environment, and the ability to sustain life for future generations.

Issues covered in Introduction to the US Food System include food insecurity, social justice, community and worker health concerns, food marketing, nutrition, resource depletion, and ecological degradation.

• Presents concepts on the foundations of the US food system, crop production, food system economics, processing and packaging, consumption and overconsumption, and the environmental impacts of food
• Examines the political factors that influence food and how it is produced
• Ideal for students and professionals in many fields, including public health, nutritional science, nursing, medicine, environment, policy, business, and social science, among others

Introduction to the US Food System presents a broad view of today's US food system in all its complexity and provides opportunities for students to examine the food system's stickiest problems and think critically about solutions.

Chapter 1
Food Systems

Roni A. Neff and Robert S. Lawrence

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Learning Objectives

• Explain a systems approach to food systems.
• Describe a public health approach to assessing food systems.
• Provide a broad overview of the US food system, including its key dimensions, components, and challenges.
• Discuss different approaches to food system change, including public health and human rights, and provide examples of changes underway.

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Think back to the most recent meal or snack you ate and try to answer these questions:

• Where did the food originate, how was it processed, and how did it get to you?
• How much did it cost, where did the money go, and why?
• How healthy was it?
• How did producing it affect the environment? Workers? Animals?
• Why did you choose it?

Most of us can answer a few of these questions for some of what we eat. Few of us can answer all of them for everything we eat. We at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future created this textbook to help students of the food system answer questions such as these, not only in relation to their own meals but also for the entire US food supply. To understand the breadth of relevant issues and the opportunities to affect public health, the environment, equity, and other outcomes, we need to examine the food system as a system—complex, diverse, global, and interconnected.

THE FOOD SYSTEM AS A SYSTEM

A system is a network of interacting components that together form a complex whole. The food system is a system encompassing all the activities and resources that go into producing, distributing, and consuming food; the drivers and outcomes of those processes; and, the extensive and complex relationships between system participants and components. The food system's functional parts include land-based parts (e.g., agriculture, farmland preservation); environment (e.g., water, soil, energy); economy (e.g., distribution, processing, retail); education; policy; social justice; health; and food cultures (Peemoeller, nd). Although a system's components themselves are important, it is the relationships among components that make a system a system. To give a simplified example, what we eat affects what is produced, which in turn affects what we will eat. Studying systems focuses our attention on the many ways these relationships may play out—including considering cascades of effects, unintended consequences, feedback loops, and the most strategic and practical ways to intervene for change.

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system

A network of interacting components that together form a complex whole, though they are influenced by factors outside their boundaries; also, systems approach, systems thinking, systems theory: approaches, thought patterns, or theory that focus on systems; typically contrasted with linear approaches

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food system

A system encompassing all the activities and resources that go into producing, distributing, and consuming food; the drivers and outcomes of those processes; and all the relationships and feedback loops between system components

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Factors outside a system's boundaries, such as in the social or biophysical environment, also influence change within systems (and vice versa). For example, the food system is driven in part by food system policies. These are part of the system, but also lie within the social environment. The system is also driven by policies that lie primarily outside of the food system's boundaries, such as immigration laws. The food system can be analyzed using categories including scale, production type, governance, drivers (e.g., population and climate change), food security, and supply chains (Clancy, 2011).

Is there one food system? In some ways, yes—it's all connected. In other ways, we can understand this grand system as a network of interconnected subsystems (or systems that are components of a broader system) existing at different scales from local to global, and across geography and time. There are food systems in Baltimore and Annapolis, and a food system in the state of Maryland that encompasses both. All of these interact in different ways with each other, with the US food system, and with food systems around the world that send us products and shape the food prices experienced by consumers from Baltimore to Bangkok. That's why in this book you will sometimes see the term, food system, and sometimes food systems. Figure 1.1 provides a concept model of the food system (Nourish, 2012).

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subsystems

A system that is also a component of a broader system (e.g., the food production system is a subsystem of the food system)

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Figure 1.1 The Food System

Source: Nourish Food System Map, www.nourishlife.org. Copyright 2012 WorldLink, all rights reserved.

The model depicts multiple interacting systems: biological, economic, social, and political. In the biological system, components including biodiversity, land use, and climate change interact to create or destroy nutrients, which feed into agriculture (chapters 11, 12). Agriculture also uses additional inputs, or resources, including water, soil, energy, and sunlight, as well as chemicals, labor, and know-how. From agriculture comes food, which travels through an economic system (chapter 7) from wholesaling and food processing (chapter 13) to a distribution system including transport and stores, restaurants and farmers markets (chapter 14), and from there into the social or demand system. That system comprises the many environments in which we live (chapter 17) and make food choices (chapters 15, 16), and the factors that drive such choices, including culture (chapter 9), marketing (chapter 10), and behavior change interventions (chapter 18). Coming out of the demand system are money, which travels back up through the economic system, and varying levels of civic engagement, which plays into the political system affecting food (chapter 8). This graphic depicts waste as the main output of the system, and indeed it is an important one, as described in focus 15.3. Other important outputs not depicted include effects such as health (chapter 2), environmental quality (chapter 3), equity (chapter 4), food security (chapter 5), and community food security (chapter 6.)

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inputs

Resources and materials entering a production system, such as feed, drugs, energy, water, and labor

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Imagine that the static diagram shown in figure 1.1 is animated, with flows of inputs and outputs moving constantly back and forth across every arrow. Each piece, whether small or large, is separately animated with its own internal logic: every farmer, every farm, every aquifer for irrigation, every crop, every distribution truck and driver, each policy maker making policy that shapes those activities, and so on. Turn on the switch and let it roll, change, and evolve—that's a food system.

Systems approaches devel...