Guiding Values
Building a Sustainable Food Future
Are these the values on your plate?
Historical, Cultural, and Place-based Practices
Designing a sustainable food system means sustaining the cultural values of a place. History, culture, and placed-based practices are centrally important to the meaning of food in people’s lives. When designing the future of food in a particular places it is critical to reflect upon those historical, cultural and place-based practices and consider which should be reinforced or reintroduced. That reflection will include questioning why those particular food should be preserved, what traditions they are preserving. Often there are multiple cultures and a diversity of practices in a particular place over its history. Asking how we represent the diversity that exists in local cultures, and draw from those diverse sources will be required.
Sustaining Environmental Integrity
Designing a sustainable food system for the future will require considering the current strengths and challenges in the region’s availability of natural resources. What natural resources will the area have in 2040 and which resources will becomes scarce, and how will we compensate? The ecological challenges should impress upon us the need to use our resources not only in an efficient and sustainable manner but with respect for the eco-system and future generations’ reliance on them. Innovations in agricultural methods and in the uses of natural resources are occurring, how can they contribute to the provision of assurance of abundance of foods? Consideration of the current strengths and challenges in the region’s food system will be important, for example, use of drought resistant crops, harvesting of algae and other food sources that can be grown in a future world addressing these challenges; working with limited arable land; working with extremely limited resources including water, clean air; working with limitations in plant and animal species’ ability to adapt to higher ground and air temperatures; developing new approaches to irrigation, land use, and agricultural methods.
Health and Nutrition
A sustainable food system of a place must ensure that everyone has access to healthy, nutritious foods. How do we ensure that our food future includes creating healthy, balanced meals and dishes that draw on culinary traditions and creativity and experimentation? The system should include pathways for education about healthy foods and food practices that occur throughout a lifetime.
Food Justice and Social Justice
A sustainable food system must ensure justice for the environment, animals, workers, and consumers. What practices will be necessary to ensure food justice in 2040? How will food distribution, allocation and access be conducted fairly, for example, how do we ensure that there will be no food deserts in the future? How are food justice, environmental justice and social justice interrelated in our society of 2040? How can we rethink sustainable practices from a food justice perspective? How can we ensure that workers within the food system are fairly treated? What is the role of immigrant labor in the food of our food?
Food Sovereignty
Food sovereignty means the "ability of peoples, families, countries, and communities to control their own food supplies." The globalization of the food supplies has not only dramatically reduced of the world’s biodiverse food crops but removed control over food varieties and production from communities. At one time, over 3000 plant species were used by humans for food, but today only 150 are cultivated, and of these, only a few, including corn, rice and soy, are cultivated to produce half the world’s food. As farmers around the world are telling us, the threat posed by cultivation of too narrow a selection of food crops and seed varieties was demonstrated by the Irish potato blight which caused a famine in the 1850s. To counter the risk of over-reliance on too few foods, food sovereignty protects the value of communities to control their food system which includes protecting first foods and cultivate local and indigenous varieties of plants that have been domesticated, freely sown and shared for millennia.