Opportunities to Scale-up Local, Regional Food Systems
April 6, 2011
Conversations about fairness and sustainability of our food systems have entered into a mainstream context for the many sectors that touch our everyday lives and interactions. Change is indeed upon us creating vacuums, opportunities and perhaps some unintended consequences. The giant food system has begun to react to decades of dedicated advocacy and strategic action for positive change in our food and farming systems.
Great efforts to rapidly and effectively communicate throughout networks and organizational capacity have highlighted high leverage opportunities and spurred effective action. Two years ago, it was aggregation of supply to get access to existing markets. Now, I feel the opportunity is aggregation of resources and knowledge to empower the willing. This aggregation must be both horizontal and vertical simultaneously. The food system is a very mature industry where knowledge and resources are held close by a few. Knowledge and resource dispersal will require new conversations, partnerships, shared visions and shared values.
Two of the knowledge assets in our food system are dispersed knowledge and tacit knowledge. Disperse knowledge is often decomposed into non-significant pieces so they pass through the supply chain without much notice. The other, tacit knowledge, is only mentored and shared with great trust. Value creation is often dependent on tacit knowledge. Our entire food system operates in anonymity exploiting culture, economic plight, and tradition-everything that makes a community a community- to earn a profit. A very simple example is selling a one pound box of chicken stock for $3.50 while you can purchase the whole chicken for $3.50, feed four and have the bones and other waste remaining to make chicken stock. There are a plethora of similar “know-how” strategies to profit in every wrinkle of the entire food system from the seed to the dinner plate. We human do not behave rational when purchasing or even consuming food in modern day society. To change the way we act, we must change the way we think. We have to think about food systems differently.
