Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development

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Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development ISSN: 2152-0801 online www.AgDevJournal.com 20 Volume 3, Issue 1 / Fall 2012
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development ISSN: 2152-0801 online www.AgDevJournal.com DIGGING DEEPER Bringing a systems approach to food systems KATE CLANCY Issues of scale Published online 14 December 2012 Citation: Clancy, K. (2012). Issues of scale. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 3(1), 21–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2012.031.017 Copyright © 2012 by New Leaf Associates, Inc. O ctober 2011 marked the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the first food policy council in the U.S., in Knoxville, Tennessee. In the intervening year I have spent some time thinking about the trajectory of food policy councils (FPCs) over those decades. What’s impressive is how active FPCs have been in addressing a wide range of policy topics across all sectors of the food system. The policies fall into different legal categories and funding mechanisms, and range from food production to food waste; from direct markets to large retail; from loans to plans. After Kate Clancy is a food systems consultant, visiting scholar at the Center for a Livable Future, Bloomberg School of Public Health Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow at the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture. She received her bachelors and Ph.D. degrees in nutrition at the University of Washington and the University of California Berkeley, respectively. She has studied food systems for over 40 years and has held positions in several universities, the federal government and two nonprofit organizations. Her present interests are regional food systems, food security, agriculture of the middle, and policies at all levels to encourage the development of resilient food systems. three decades of FPC activity I find two things of particular interest about this phenomenon: first, the breadth of issues and the amount of human and economic resources going into the work of not only identifying policy changes but legislating and appropriating funds for them; and second, how much of this work is being done in isolation from similar undertakings around the country and even in the same state. It is the latter phenomenon that got me thinking about how to encourage more collaboration and efficiency in local or municipal FPC work. I decided that a useful way was to employ concepts that come from the world of systems thinking and analysis. Although we work on and talk about food systems, we rarely apply a systems-level analysis to our projects. Of many useful systems concepts two seem particularly suited for looking at local food policy: one is scale, and the other is feedback loops (which I’ll take up in my next column). We know that a system contains nested scales, from the largest (i.e., global) down to local subscales. We also know but don’t often act on the fact that all food systems operate across many levels of management and analysis. Experts tell us that Volume 3, Issue 1 / Fall 2012 21
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