Lectures food, health and policy
Lecture 1: Thinking outside the box: foodscapes and
utopia
Red thread
- Starting point: What would happen if mayors ruled the world?
- Focus: cities are increasingly important actors in food systems, cities as actors of food system
transformation
- Week1 – new ways of approaching food systems, re-imagine how to think about food chains
- Week 2 – activities that happen across cities, noticed and unnoticed
- Week 3 – actual policies, how do we design new policies for food system transformation
Goals first lecture – how do these concepts (utopia and foodscapes) contribute to thinking about
food systems?
- Utopia
- Foodscapes
- (utopian foodscapes)
Utopia
- Future goals that are (never) really reachable
- Academic literature – utopia as a method to explore challenges, we need to build new
stories, old systems are outdated, when we think about utopia they help us move beyond a
final endpoint, behind silver bullet solutions, many different kinds of utopian visions, out of
framework what we consider realistic because it is a societal norm to think that things are
not realistic, we throw realism out of the window and see if we can get there
- We need new stories: beyond focus on ends & silver bullets
Food utopia: a tool to study food policy
1. Critique on the current/existing systems
- productive critique – put into question what exists (the existing)
- Openness to diversity of ideas - Challenge what we take for granted, sociological thinking,
goals is to how to push boundaries of transformative change
- Multiple ways of transformative
2. As engagement with experimentation around the future of the food system
- Move away from expecting things to be in a finished state
- Food worlds are actively in the making
- No end point, always dynamic
3. As a Process
- helps us understand time and difficulties in changing status quo,
, - political project to find new ways to talk about food, new ways to imagine food futures
Stark literature – three elements of utopia! – highly recommended!
In summary: Utopia can be used as a tool of critique, experimentation, process
- It is critique with solution pathways
- allows for diversity: no single way forward
- explore the limits of what is thinkable or realistic,
- starts dialogue about food system, engaging stakeholders
Foodscapes
to be understood as an assembly of two components: food and (land)scape (the
view/image and materiality of a scene)
to be defined as reciprocal relationship between food provisioning practices (growing,
processing, transporting, purchasing/acquiring) and landscape
the (land)scapes created, reproduced or transformed through food provisioning
practices as well as the shaping of food practices through there (land)scapes
1. using food to create landscapes, landscapes shaped by food systems and ways land shapes
our food system
2. to be understood as food and (land)scape (the view/image and material components –
equipment, machinery etc)
3. reciprocal relationship = food provisioning practices (growing, processing, transporting,
purchasing/acquiring) and landscape
4. landscapes determine what is easy and difficult to do, landscapes that are created though
food provisioning practices, and food provisioning through this landscape
5. you can also look at the foodscape of rice - how is it provided? How is it transported? Look at
different components on how rice comes at your plate!!! So how does it come on you plate,
by whom is it processed and where do the ingredients come from?
ready meals – microwave, factory, food processing, large factories – by buying it we support the
selling of those readymade meals in supermarkets – they also offer it and make us wanna buy it –
reciprocal relationship – different processes and places
artisan forms of food processing – baker, butcher, standardized, different practices of organising
food, there are varieties of foodscapes that you can imagine
foodscapes – disciplines and focus, studies
1. foodscapes research mainly in health-related fields (health promotion, public health, and
nutrition) and geography (cultural geography, physical geography) , strong focus on health
and spatial aspects
2. emerging in different disciplines – sociology, planning, anthropology, architecture,
psychology, designing and imagining different foodscapes
3. overlap across disciplines – indication of looking as ‘more than food’
4. (different people involved in growing, processing, eating, social relations within that)
5. normative priorities: normative take on foodscapes, how can we advance social justice, how
can we make things better? How can we improve health? Important in foodscape studies,
, ask yourself in what way can we change foodscapes to improve public health, there are
difference sina access to food, what can we do to create a more equal food system? (social
justice, public health, environmental sustainability and community food security)
Foodscapes – health perspective
1. primary focus on the influence of the food environment on public health and healthy eating
- where do we buy the food (obesogenic environments = obesity problems, difficult to buy
fresh food in some places (more impoverished environments),
- fruit and vegetable consumption – how can we enhance that,
- how can we improve health inequality
2. these studies emphasize:
- importance of space – how healthful or sickmaking are our environments?
- Food consumption – not so much focus on production but on the consumption, buying part
of consumption
3. Consumption environment!!
Foodscapes – social justice perspective
1. Tool to explore the social injustices that exist within food systems
2. Spatial and social food inequalities are materialized through Food deserts – areas with
limited availability and or access to nutritious and healthy food – people have to travel long
distances to get fresh food, whereas in other neighbourhoods there are a lot of
supermarkets
3. Foodscapes as a lens to investigate (structural) spatial inequalities in food access
4. Also related to health perspectives, but more focus on what is needed to enhance certain
neighbourhoods and making fresh food available in poor neighbourhoods – or provide
healthy school lunches for children for free, different ways
5. Consumption environment!!
Foodscapes – environmental perspective
1. Foodscapes as a lens for exploring environmental sustainability on the food system
2. Community food resilience, environmental perspective – broader food perspective, not only
consumption but more on transport and processing
3. Helps to understand how changing social-ecological environments are linked to community
food resilience
4. Food miles – how far does food travel from site of production to consumption, how much
fossil fuel is needed, to store it, to package it?
5. In what way can we improve environmental sustainability? So that food travels less
6. Useful for broad food system perspective – one that is not limited to production or
consumption
7. How do we treat waste, what do we do with organic waste? New trend?
8. Entire food system so not only consumption! Form production o consumption
Food is a good metaphor to understand cities
So foodscapes = health perspective, social justice and environmental perspectives
Foodscapes – scale
, 9. Macro view – city region foodscape to global foodscape
10. Meso view – neighbourhood to city foodscape
11. Micro view – institutional or domestic foodscape (kitchenscapes, tablescapes, platescapes),
different canteens, restaurants how are they organised spatially?
Foodscapes: summary
12. Definition foodscape = spatial and material (shops) manifestation and shaping of food
provisioning practices (ranging from producing to processing, trading, buying, sharing,
cooking and eating food and disposing waste)
13. Foodscapes are interlinked and nested
- Interlinked foodscapes –globalized - food processing, long distance transport, supermarket,
a lot of prepacked, processed food
- interlinked foodscapes– could also be less transport, more farmers, two pictures on the
slides!!
- Nested foodscapes – look at the slides, what is available often determines what you eat, so if
you have a lot of take away foods you may order more; or when you have a lot of community
gardens you may cook more from scratch (quite often it is not a choice what you eat – it is
determined by where you live in and you budget and where you can buy your food)
Foodscapes studies (exploring and analysing)
1. Foodscape as a tool to :
- describe and understand our food provisioning environments,
- assess their potential impact on food provisions practices:
Food mapping (food deserts?, GIS, participatory mapping)
Bodily cartography – making use of you senses, what do you like or dislike in terms of
what you see, hear, smell
Consumption surveys – where do you buy your food, what do you eat
Food diaries – follow families, how do you share, how do you buy
Food geographies & biographies
Multi-sited ethnographies
2. Foodscape as a critical transformation framework – normative aspect
3. Challenge the existing ways of food production and consumption (aligned with utopias)
4. Create different future trajectories (food imaginaries/utopias, designing and potential food
futures, spatial design – imagine different food future, can we actually feed Amsterdam from
25 km circle? Try to visualise how it can look it)
Key words
Utopia – critique, experimentation, process (of creating new food futures)
utopia – 3 spheres of changing relations – spatial, social, values
Foodscapes
1. Relational food provisioning practices
2. Spatial and material food environment
3. Form production to consumption
4. Different disciplinary perspectives
5. Different focus areas (health, environment, social and spatial inequality)
6. Tool for exploring, understanding and analysis
Lecture 1: Thinking outside the box: foodscapes and
utopia
Red thread
- Starting point: What would happen if mayors ruled the world?
- Focus: cities are increasingly important actors in food systems, cities as actors of food system
transformation
- Week1 – new ways of approaching food systems, re-imagine how to think about food chains
- Week 2 – activities that happen across cities, noticed and unnoticed
- Week 3 – actual policies, how do we design new policies for food system transformation
Goals first lecture – how do these concepts (utopia and foodscapes) contribute to thinking about
food systems?
- Utopia
- Foodscapes
- (utopian foodscapes)
Utopia
- Future goals that are (never) really reachable
- Academic literature – utopia as a method to explore challenges, we need to build new
stories, old systems are outdated, when we think about utopia they help us move beyond a
final endpoint, behind silver bullet solutions, many different kinds of utopian visions, out of
framework what we consider realistic because it is a societal norm to think that things are
not realistic, we throw realism out of the window and see if we can get there
- We need new stories: beyond focus on ends & silver bullets
Food utopia: a tool to study food policy
1. Critique on the current/existing systems
- productive critique – put into question what exists (the existing)
- Openness to diversity of ideas - Challenge what we take for granted, sociological thinking,
goals is to how to push boundaries of transformative change
- Multiple ways of transformative
2. As engagement with experimentation around the future of the food system
- Move away from expecting things to be in a finished state
- Food worlds are actively in the making
- No end point, always dynamic
3. As a Process
- helps us understand time and difficulties in changing status quo,
, - political project to find new ways to talk about food, new ways to imagine food futures
Stark literature – three elements of utopia! – highly recommended!
In summary: Utopia can be used as a tool of critique, experimentation, process
- It is critique with solution pathways
- allows for diversity: no single way forward
- explore the limits of what is thinkable or realistic,
- starts dialogue about food system, engaging stakeholders
Foodscapes
to be understood as an assembly of two components: food and (land)scape (the
view/image and materiality of a scene)
to be defined as reciprocal relationship between food provisioning practices (growing,
processing, transporting, purchasing/acquiring) and landscape
the (land)scapes created, reproduced or transformed through food provisioning
practices as well as the shaping of food practices through there (land)scapes
1. using food to create landscapes, landscapes shaped by food systems and ways land shapes
our food system
2. to be understood as food and (land)scape (the view/image and material components –
equipment, machinery etc)
3. reciprocal relationship = food provisioning practices (growing, processing, transporting,
purchasing/acquiring) and landscape
4. landscapes determine what is easy and difficult to do, landscapes that are created though
food provisioning practices, and food provisioning through this landscape
5. you can also look at the foodscape of rice - how is it provided? How is it transported? Look at
different components on how rice comes at your plate!!! So how does it come on you plate,
by whom is it processed and where do the ingredients come from?
ready meals – microwave, factory, food processing, large factories – by buying it we support the
selling of those readymade meals in supermarkets – they also offer it and make us wanna buy it –
reciprocal relationship – different processes and places
artisan forms of food processing – baker, butcher, standardized, different practices of organising
food, there are varieties of foodscapes that you can imagine
foodscapes – disciplines and focus, studies
1. foodscapes research mainly in health-related fields (health promotion, public health, and
nutrition) and geography (cultural geography, physical geography) , strong focus on health
and spatial aspects
2. emerging in different disciplines – sociology, planning, anthropology, architecture,
psychology, designing and imagining different foodscapes
3. overlap across disciplines – indication of looking as ‘more than food’
4. (different people involved in growing, processing, eating, social relations within that)
5. normative priorities: normative take on foodscapes, how can we advance social justice, how
can we make things better? How can we improve health? Important in foodscape studies,
, ask yourself in what way can we change foodscapes to improve public health, there are
difference sina access to food, what can we do to create a more equal food system? (social
justice, public health, environmental sustainability and community food security)
Foodscapes – health perspective
1. primary focus on the influence of the food environment on public health and healthy eating
- where do we buy the food (obesogenic environments = obesity problems, difficult to buy
fresh food in some places (more impoverished environments),
- fruit and vegetable consumption – how can we enhance that,
- how can we improve health inequality
2. these studies emphasize:
- importance of space – how healthful or sickmaking are our environments?
- Food consumption – not so much focus on production but on the consumption, buying part
of consumption
3. Consumption environment!!
Foodscapes – social justice perspective
1. Tool to explore the social injustices that exist within food systems
2. Spatial and social food inequalities are materialized through Food deserts – areas with
limited availability and or access to nutritious and healthy food – people have to travel long
distances to get fresh food, whereas in other neighbourhoods there are a lot of
supermarkets
3. Foodscapes as a lens to investigate (structural) spatial inequalities in food access
4. Also related to health perspectives, but more focus on what is needed to enhance certain
neighbourhoods and making fresh food available in poor neighbourhoods – or provide
healthy school lunches for children for free, different ways
5. Consumption environment!!
Foodscapes – environmental perspective
1. Foodscapes as a lens for exploring environmental sustainability on the food system
2. Community food resilience, environmental perspective – broader food perspective, not only
consumption but more on transport and processing
3. Helps to understand how changing social-ecological environments are linked to community
food resilience
4. Food miles – how far does food travel from site of production to consumption, how much
fossil fuel is needed, to store it, to package it?
5. In what way can we improve environmental sustainability? So that food travels less
6. Useful for broad food system perspective – one that is not limited to production or
consumption
7. How do we treat waste, what do we do with organic waste? New trend?
8. Entire food system so not only consumption! Form production o consumption
Food is a good metaphor to understand cities
So foodscapes = health perspective, social justice and environmental perspectives
Foodscapes – scale
, 9. Macro view – city region foodscape to global foodscape
10. Meso view – neighbourhood to city foodscape
11. Micro view – institutional or domestic foodscape (kitchenscapes, tablescapes, platescapes),
different canteens, restaurants how are they organised spatially?
Foodscapes: summary
12. Definition foodscape = spatial and material (shops) manifestation and shaping of food
provisioning practices (ranging from producing to processing, trading, buying, sharing,
cooking and eating food and disposing waste)
13. Foodscapes are interlinked and nested
- Interlinked foodscapes –globalized - food processing, long distance transport, supermarket,
a lot of prepacked, processed food
- interlinked foodscapes– could also be less transport, more farmers, two pictures on the
slides!!
- Nested foodscapes – look at the slides, what is available often determines what you eat, so if
you have a lot of take away foods you may order more; or when you have a lot of community
gardens you may cook more from scratch (quite often it is not a choice what you eat – it is
determined by where you live in and you budget and where you can buy your food)
Foodscapes studies (exploring and analysing)
1. Foodscape as a tool to :
- describe and understand our food provisioning environments,
- assess their potential impact on food provisions practices:
Food mapping (food deserts?, GIS, participatory mapping)
Bodily cartography – making use of you senses, what do you like or dislike in terms of
what you see, hear, smell
Consumption surveys – where do you buy your food, what do you eat
Food diaries – follow families, how do you share, how do you buy
Food geographies & biographies
Multi-sited ethnographies
2. Foodscape as a critical transformation framework – normative aspect
3. Challenge the existing ways of food production and consumption (aligned with utopias)
4. Create different future trajectories (food imaginaries/utopias, designing and potential food
futures, spatial design – imagine different food future, can we actually feed Amsterdam from
25 km circle? Try to visualise how it can look it)
Key words
Utopia – critique, experimentation, process (of creating new food futures)
utopia – 3 spheres of changing relations – spatial, social, values
Foodscapes
1. Relational food provisioning practices
2. Spatial and material food environment
3. Form production to consumption
4. Different disciplinary perspectives
5. Different focus areas (health, environment, social and spatial inequality)
6. Tool for exploring, understanding and analysis
