Showing results for: Local food
This discussion paper from the European ROBUST research project’s Sustainable Food Systems Community of Practice examines the benefits and drawbacks of implementing a local food policy for public food procurement in Monmouthshire, Wales. It assesses what “local” means, whether the evidence supports claims for local food’s environmental, health and economic outcomes, and how local food relates to public food procurement.
UK-based regenerative farming podcast Farmerama Radio has produced a new podcast series called “Who Feeds Us?”, dedicated to the stories of food producers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first episode in the series, “The hungry gap”, covers localised food provision in the early stages of the pandemic.
In this book (published 21 October 2020), farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje argues that a localised food system built around small-scale farming offers a sustainable, resilient solution to climate change and ecological crises.
This paper examines how localised the US food system could become by calculating theoretical minimum foodshed sizes (i.e. average distance travelled by food) for 378 urban areas under seven different dietary scenarios. It finds that (on average) foodsheds can be smaller for the low-meat diets compared to high-meat diets.
This report by UK charity the Soil Association argues that COVID-19 has highlighted the fragility of long supply chains, and that supporting shorter supply chains will make the food system more resilient and sustainable. It also gives examples of localised food supply initiatives in the UK.
This book uses case studies from Europe and North America to explore how relocalised food supply chains could respond to challenges to the food system. It argues that shorter food supply chains could in principle perform better socially, economically and environmentally than more geographically dispersed supply chains.
FCRN member Mark Driscoll has written this blog post, which argues that sustainable, healthy diets are key to building back better food systems after the COVID-19 pandemic. Driscoll points to three opportunities for rebuilding resilience in the food system: shorter supply chains and the decentralisation of food production; introducing more diversity of “visions, approaches, actors, crops, and culinary diversity” into the food system; and schemes that give citizens more agency over food systems.
According to this article by Civil Eats, some farmers in the Great Plains of the United States are sowing “chaos gardens” - fields of mixed fruit and vegetable plants such as peas, squash, radish, okra, melons and sweet corn - as cover crops between the soy and corn that are the dominant crops in the area. The produce is harvested by volunteers and donated to food banks or other community groups.
This book looks at how gentrification affects the urban food landscape in several American cities, and what activists are doing to resist it.
This blog post by Caroline Grunewald of US think tank The Breakthrough Institute argues that a global food system offers greater resilience against local production failures than a local food system, contrary to narratives that the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the fragile nature of the global food system and that local food systems are more resilient.
The UK’s Food Ethics Council has published a write-up of its event “#FoodTalks: From emergency to recovery”, which was held on 28 April 2020. The event discussed how the UK’s food system can move towards resilience and fairness during the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
FCRN member Damian Maye of the University of Gloucestershire has put together a list of academic and non-academic resources on COVID-19 and sustainable food systems. It is organised into categories including agricultural labour, food access and security, local food networks, food waste and food system commentaries.
This paper models the production of six food crops, and finds that only 11-28% of the world’s population (depending on crop) would be able to meet their demands for those crops by using only food produced within a 100 km radius, based on current production and consumption patterns. The aim of the paper is to assess the physical constraints that limit the extent to which food supply can become localised and thus inform the ongoing debates around local food and food sovereignty.
This paper uses a case study of Sheffield, UK, to explore the area of land potentially available to grow fruit and vegetables within urban areas, including both soil-based horticulture as well as soil-free controlled-environment horticulture on flat roofs.
This book examines a variety of regenerative farming systems, including agroecology, indigenous food systems, small-scale fisheries, food sharing, coffee micro-mills, foraging and reuse of food waste.
This report from the UK’s RSA Food, Farming and Countryside Commission examines four key areas of Devon’s food system: grassland and livestock production, environment and biodiversity, health and thriving communities, and new entrants to farming.
This book outlines the latest information on how food supply chains in cities can be managed sustainably, focusing on circular economy models.