Transcript for
Ep15: What scale for food systems?
[intro]
Matthew
Welcome to Feed, a podcast in conversation with those who are trying to transform the food system. I’m Matthew Kessler.
Samara
And I’m Samara Brock. This podcast is presented by TABLE. A collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University. And today we are wrapping up our theme of scale in food systems.
Matthew
We’ve been speaking to people from a variety of backgrounds from 7 different countries. We’ve talked to researchers, folks from the private sector and from civil society. And with all these different points of view, we’ve been left with a lot of food for thought!
Samara
In this episode we’ll share our main findings and reflections that we’ve learned from this series of conversations. We’ll explore where our guests agreed and where they disagreed and add some new reflections. And If you stay tuned to the end, you’ll hear what theme we’ll be exploring next!
Matthew
And this is our final episode for our first season! Thank you everyone for listening, whether you’ve been with us from the start or if you’re new to the show. Our audience regularly spans across 40 countries and we’re really thankful for all of you tuning in.
Samara
In each of our past conversations – we’ve been asking our guests how scale intersects with their work, how global or local should food systems be, how big or small should farms be, and what’s the ideal patchwork of solutions that we should be striving towards.
Matthew
Those are just a few ways we sought to explore scale. And in having these conversations, we found that scale is really difficult to talk about directly and exclusively. It tends to live more in the background.
Samara
Maybe we can begin with those who challenged this framing in the first place. We heard from a number of people who flat-out rejected the idea that global and local are separate from each other.
Sahil Shah
I think it is somewhat over simplistic to say there's either a global or a local food system.
Matthew
That was Sahil Shah, co-founder and director of Sustainable Seaweed
Sahil
You often have your agricultural inputs from one place, your production taking place in somewhere else, the labor for that production coming from a third place, exporting to a fourth place, and then actually processing that in the fifth place, which may well then be consumed in the sixth place.
Matthew
Elena Lazos Chavero, at the National University of Mexico, also spoke about how interrelated these systems are.
Elena Lazos Chavero
You cannot separate and we cannot explain the local system without also understanding the global pressures, or we cannot understand the global without local. It is complimentary, but also controversial. Of course, for example, the Milpa system that we could say, Oh, it's very local, because they are cultivating the varieties of long tradition and we have 59 land races of maize in Mexico. And we could say, “Oh, it's a very local system.” But when we see this, how it's the labor, how are the agrochemicals, how are the prices and then, all are connected with the global issues.
Samara
Lauren Baker, director of programmes for the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, reflected on how interconnected the local and global are when looking at it from a farmers perspective.
Lauren Baker
It's really hard to think about scale as kind of closed, that these are all very permeable boundaries. And so for them, this division, between the local and the global, was a really false division, because they were just kind of caught up in this reality, which is like, on my farm, I'm doing both of these things, I'm relying on all of these kinds of systems. And the system for them was very dynamic, and interrelated.
Matthew
Elena Lazos Chavero talked about how local farmers in Mexico were growing Maize using seeds from local land races and genetically modified Asgrow seeds. She complicates the assumption that small farms belong to short-supply chains and large farms distribute in long-supply chains, and she suggests that farmers may be acting practically rather than ideologically.
Elena
I was working in Tlaxcala, and there were some farmers there and they were combining Asgrow seeds, maize Asgrow seeds with local land races. I said, “How can you do that?” “Oh, yeah. Because you know, we're playing with risks.” “Ah, climatic risks. So then you are putting in one row Asgrow and in the other row traditional land races?” So then afterward what you see is a mixture that combining seeds will give like a more a bigger opportunity than if there is a drought. Of course they play with all these varieties in the sense to have a little bit more of certainty.And we could say, oh, why Asgrow? If it is a transnational, Sometimes they are really devastated by all these agrochemicals used because of the loss of fertility of their lands. And the highly dependent of these agrochemicals that are a big issue, And yeah, we can be criticizing that. But for the farmers, it's playing a lower risk.
Matthew
So we at TABLE are trying to understand why people have different visions of the food system and how they try to achieve that vision. And sometimes people’s disagreements stem from using different evidence, but other times people don’t even agree with the premise or the framing of a debate.
Samara
Right and we also might talk past each other or arrive at different conclusions because the terms we use aren’t very well defined. For example Ken Giller from Wageningen University and Klara Fischer from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences both talked about something that came up with many of our guests, the contested definition of a smallholder or small-scale farmer.
Ken Giller
We talk about something in the order of 475 million, so nearly 500 million smallholder farmers worldwide in total, that's around 3 billion people involved in those households, and that's getting on for half the world's population, more than 40% of the world's population. So it's a huge number of people. It's such a diverse group, and nearly everything that we say to try and characterize things fails in one direction or another. So I think we've got to be really careful of generalizations, they can be dangerous. And because of course, in one place, we lord family farming, or smallholder farming as a perfect livelihood. In other places, it can be a desperate situation of poverty and desperation for people. So it's, it's really hard to say “This is the state.”
Klara Fischer
I think we use the term smallholder because we want some term to talk about marginalized poor farmers or farmers who have less resources than wealthy farmers. And it's easy to categorize them by scale, but many small holders are smallholders because they are poor. And I still think it's a useful category. We need the word. We can speak of things if we don't have words, but it's important that we talk about what we mean and a smallholder can be many different sizes.
Ken
For instance, in Brazil, where many of the farms are very large, any what's called a family farm, which is really classed a small scale farm will be anything around 50 hectares or below. Whereas in a recent debate, I heard that in India, 40% of smallholders have less than .05 hectares, I mean, almost a postage stamp vegetable garden, but very important for them all the same. And we shouldn't, we shouldn't forget that. So what we put under one banner is a huge breath of diversity in all aspects.
Klara
And also, depending on where you are in the world, you know, the soil, the weather, the market possibilities, the politics, everything around it will be different. So my experience is mainly with smallholders in Sub Saharan Africa. And that's quite different from smallholders in other parts of the world.
Matthew
So they both agree that it’s easy to mischaracterize the diversity of smallholders. I liked how Klara said that we need the word “smallholders” specifically as a category to talk about and also to frame potential policy interventions, but it requires a nuanced understanding.
Samara
Another consideration here is what’s your starting point? Do you see farmers strictly as food producers, as stewards of the land, or as something else? This is what Jennifer Clapp, from the University of Waterloo, had to say.
Jennifer Clapp
Around a third of the global population is engaged in one way or another with the food and agricultural sector. So livelihoods are a really important aspect. Food and agriculture also provide important ecological services, especially when grown in food systems that are diverse and environmentally sound. They can provide biological diversity and water filtration, carbon absorption, etc. and food also plays an important role in terms of social identity and cultural heritage plays a part in rituals going back 1000s of years. And it's also important in terms of providing, you know, rural landscapes that we can all appreciate. So when we talk about food, it's really much more than just its commodity value, we have to think about all these other values embodied in what we eat.
Matthew
Sahil Shah mentioned how farms are likely to continue to scale up in size, and that we should be paying more attention to ensure a just transition.
Sahil
So I think there a huge number of benefit to operation at scale. The benefit of being larger scale really is one of efficiency. And two of economies of scale. The larger scale your farm is, the greater your ability to invest in technology, both when it comes to increasing efficiency but also when it comes to risk transfer as well. The greater your ability to purchase insurance. But I think there are risks as well. And I think often technologists speak about this as if it's clear, and if it's easy to do so. However, there are huge numbers of smallholder farmers. You have countries such as Ethiopia, where the majority of their population, and a huge chunk of their GDP is from smallholder farmers. And as you're shifting people across, it's really about understanding how are you able to maintain these livelihoods? What are the other potential climate beneficial activities that these people are able to do? If you're shifting them across to working within larger farms, what is their new role? Especially as we're shifting people across from being owner-operator towards an employee type model. And I think these are all really important considerations that are required, as we transition away from smallholder type farms towards those which are larger and more commercial. If we look towards global competition, ultimately, there will be a need for larger scale farming, just in terms of being able to provide lower cost and lower price whilst maintaining high quality produce for consumers.
Samara
While there was some overlap in their visions for the future, Jennifer Clapp and Sahil Shah had different ideas for what farms in the future should look like
Jennifer
What I find alarming is these kind of scenarios that we hear about where we can have farming without farmers, where everything becomes digitalized and automated. I find that alarming because, as I mentioned earlier, so many people are connected to the food and agriculture sector as a source of their livelihoods. And taking that away through automation, mechanization, digitalization, it takes away people's dignity. It takes away their agency, it takes away their livelihoods and I think those kind of automated and mechanized solutions can contribute to broader problems.
Sahil
When it comes to what's happening within food tech, if you look at the way, for example, where sunlight and bacteria are being used together to create proteins, by companies, such as Novo Nutrients, and Solar Foods, we’re actually looking at being able to create food without having to use agriculture or aquaculture for the first time, which is new and novel. And that adds and creates resilience to a whole new bunch of risks.
Matthew
So what alarmed Jennifer Clapp was actually the same thing that inspired Sahil Shah! Though Sahil, like Jennifer, is concerned about what happens to smallholders in the future.
Sahil
Culture and history play an incredibly important role in the food system. And that's not just on the farming side, but also on the consumer side, when it comes to what we're used to eating and why. And, ultimately, if we are looking to transform it, I think it's one that will still need to be transformed slowly, rather than overnight. And in doing so, it is really important to maintain those livelihoods and transition these people across whether transitioning them into new farms, or fully transitioning them into new occupations.
Matthew
So there are different ideas about what a smallholder is, what their role should be in future food systems and what type of futures do farmers want. There is also a debate around the evidence of how much these farmers contribute to global food production.
Samara
We had a conversation with data scientist Vincent Ricciardi about his investigation into this question.
Matthew
So how much of the world’s food is produced by smallholders – is it a third, half, or more than 70%?
Vinny
So we started to dive into the background and tried to document well, who said this first. And I think it has a really fascinating little history, this stat. It's like a zombie stat that's floating around, which so many fields seemed to have. And there was a group in 2009. They had their own nuances to it, and I don't want to throw them under the bus there. What they were trying to do is to gain awareness for smallholders saying they're a big deal. They make up a lot more food production than you might think, globally. And so this is our number we put out, they defined it in a certain way, because you can define smallholders in all these different ways. And they said 80% of the world's food or 70%, it was somewhere in that range. But it was very much like a cobbled together statistic, and they put it out there, I think, to be provocative, and then all of a sudden, that took off.
And at the same time, there were two other groups that we - we all worked on global agriculture statistics. And we all kind of came up with papers within like one or two years of each other, that had a really similar stat. So that's a good thing for science, we all agreed and we used different methods and different data, which was awesome. And it was more like 30% for farms under two hectares and then like 50% of the world's food for farms under five hectares I think. Which is, I mean, those are big numbers. But when you have the benchmark of a made up stat of 70%, it looks like less. So I think people got a little bit annoyed that we said that, but three studies, different research groups, different data, different methods, coming up with really similar numbers, and a fourth just came out too.
Matthew
We spoke to a member of the ETC Group who continues to use and promote the statistic that 70% of the world’s food is produced by smallholders. They argue that these global studies don’t include all the food produced from fisheries, from forests and from cities.
Samara
We also asked Vinny about a study he co-authored looking at the difference in things like yield and environmental impacts between small and large farms.
Vinny
So we found that there was no real difference between small and large farms and their greenhouse gas emissions per unit output. So accounting for yield and everything. So if you grew a tomato on a big farm and a tomato on a small farm, and you had the same yields, would it be different greenhouse gas emissions or not? And we found no difference. And right there somebody might say, “Oh well that means that big farms and small farms are the same so you might as well support large farms for all these other reasons.” But we need to frame this research super carefully in how we present the results and that’s something we hemmed and hawed and tried to do really precisely. What we really took away from it and tried to frame it as is, despite all of the R&D, the research and development, geared towards larger farms, it’s amazing to us that smaller farms are still on par. It’s the same result, but the interpretation is so critical for policy.
Matthew
And so you looked at yield, and you looked at greenhouse gas emissions, you also looked at biodiversity impacts. Can you speak a little bit about what your findings were?
Vinny
Yeah, the biodiversity impacts were actually like, the most consistent finding for us, we found that smaller farms were, this is all correlations, right, they're not causal studies. They're all observations. And so we found that smaller farms typically had - they harbored greater biodiversity than larger farms. Not always true, because certain bird species, like big fields, or something, but typically true. And one of the main reasons was because smaller farms, they have smaller fields, right. And when you have really small farms and small fields, you have more edges in a certain area. So if you look at a landscape, you'll have a lot more edges, you know, like in my bucolic New England small farm example, like you might see these fields and they have these rock borders to them, and then they might have really tall grasses and then they might have forests. And so you have a lot more of these edge spaces so that different types of animals or insects can hang out there and not be disturbed. And they might benefit like bees, they might benefit from coming into the field when things are flowering. And so I think that's why a lot of these places have more biodiversity around them.
Matthew
So to summarize, many of our guests agreed that smallholders are important in future food systems. Even though the category is hard to define, there are nearly 500 million smallholders across the world and several recent studies found that they produce between 30 to 50% of the global food supply depending if you categorize smallholders as farms under 2 hectares or under 5 hectares.
Samara
But not everyone thought they should stay small. Some argued that larger farms can operate at economies of scale that are better suited to produce and distribute food around the world more efficiently and at a lower cost to consumers.
Matthew
So as we said earlier, it’s not only the size of the farm that’s contentious but also the length of the supply-chain. Our speakers tended to not fall into the extremes of the debate and rather acknowledged the drawbacks of putting all their eggs in a single basket. The basket representing either a dependence on international trade or relying solely on local and regional food production.
Matthew
We’ll start with Rob Bailey director of climate resilience at Marsh and McLennan
Rob Bailey
The international food system is is vulnerable, because it is highly dependent upon not just a small number of choke points. But also a small number of breadbasket regions. These areas produce the majority of exports of things like rice and wheat and maize and soybean.
Matthew
Rob spoke about some of the international food system’s vulnerabilities, as trade is currently highly concentrated among a small number of crops and ports. We saw this vulnerability exposed in real time this year with the ship The Ever Given blocking all trade and passage through Suez Canal for almost a week.
Rob
You know, if we were to take as sort of a worst case scenario, which could be a kind of a confluence of historical events, right, let's say, for example, that we had, in a given year, a hurricane of comparable strength to Katrina that that barreled into the Gulf Coast and shut down US grain exports.
Now say that that happens, at the same time, as serious rains in Brazil flooded Brazil's roadways along which the trucks drive every year with all of the soybean exports to the ports. And if those two things happened at the same time, that would take about half of global soybean exports out of international markets. Soybean, of course, is the key crop for producing animal feed and vegetable protein.
Matthew
At the same time, Rob also argues that the global food system responded fairly well to Covid-19.
Rob
What seems to have happened naturally, is that agricultural trade has remained less affected and more resilient than general trade. So you know, which is a good thing for food security, certainly, because we haven't had an international spike in food prices. And you know, that the reliance on agricultural markets on this small number of sort of industrialized agriculture dependent crops like maize and soybeans and wheat and, you know, maybe in this case, that's been a good thing, because actually farming those crops isn't very labor intensive. It depends on large farms and lots of machinery and whereas at smaller scales, that local scales and then in horticulture, where you have more labor intensive fruit picking and things like this, there have been problems. I think, often associated not with actually, the farming but with the need for farm workforces to be in close proximity to one another. And from what I’ve seen, the bigger problems have been less one of supply and more one of access.
Samara
Brent Loken, global lead scientist at the World Wildlife Fund, expressed his concerns about how some people are responding to the pandemic
Brent Loken
And the COVID-19 pandemic has definitely raised the importance of local food production, because some of the markets have been heavily disrupted by COVID-19. So in some circles, there is a renewed push for increasing local food, which I think is great. And I think local food production is very important. But it's not going to solve the world's problems. It's not one of those panaceas that we can hang our hat up on, because it's not as simple as saying that local food is going to solve everything. Well, we find in this report is that in some cases, local food can actually drive negative impacts.
Samara 22:45
Can you explain how that works and in what context increasingly local diets might lead to worse environmental outcomes?
Brent 22:53
If we look at all the countries around the world that are facing significant burdens of undernutrition. In those particular countries, this crisis of under nutrition and feeding a population is a number one goal that these countries want to solve. Which makes sense, right. But in those particular cases, what that means is that often we have to increase consumption of more of the healthy foods, it's the fruits and vegetables, and you know, other things, as we increase consumption of food that puts pressure on the land. And if these countries tackle this problem by only domestically increasing how they produce food, and they don't increase trade, that's going to involve land, and we're going to have to convert more land. In a place like Indonesia, that could potentially involve converting more land, which could potentially drive biodiversity loss up. And that's something that we can't have happen.
Matthew
On the other hand, while Jennifer Clapp also acknowledges the importance of international trade, she makes a case for territorial markets to bring more agency to regional food systems stakeholders like local farmers.
Jennifer
And I think that diversity is also important in terms of distribution systems. They need to be fair, they need to be sustainable, and that's where this idea that the civil society mechanism that the committee on World Food Security has a report out on what they call territorial markets. And I think that is a really interesting idea, thinking about the regional, local national kinds of markets that allow more entrance. They're not just dominated by these large- scale commodity traders. They're more diverse and allow for greater entry of participants into the marketplace who have more of a say over how those food systems are organized.
Matthew
Multiple guests, including Klara Fischer, also stressed the fact that the scales of food systems are really interconnected and we need interdisciplinary collaboration to address complex challenges.
Klara
I think that can be a sort of a general recommendation that just because the problem is located in one place, it doesn't need mean that the solution is located in the same place, or in the same discipline, or you cannot connect problems and solutions in that way in general, not just regarding farming. But if we look at environmental degradation, for example, because environmental degradation happens in one place, it doesn't mean that it's the people who live there that have caused it. So we need to sort of disconnect problems from solutions and think critically about them. And we need to sort of acknowledge the boundaries of our own knowledge.
Matthew
Sophia Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, offers an example of international and national cooperation in times of crisis. Though she thinks there is room for improvement in getting the global rules around food trade right, she reflects on some positive changes since the food price crisis of 2007 and 2008.
Sophia
Since the food price crisis most countries in the world put social protection measures in place that provide some kind of basic access to food that wasn't so clearly there before. So when you see the COVID pandemic hit. UNICEF and World Bank were tracking it, but I think by within a month or two 160 or more countries had social protection measures put out and a lot of that was protecting people's access to food. Maybe it’s an acceptance of responsibility about what the state can do, that had been lacking. And then I think is sort of proven itself as an important dimension of resilience in a crisis.
Samara
Klara Fischer offered another example of this type of thinking. She has been doing fieldwork in a South African village and meeting with families there since 2008. South Africa has a system where everyone over 60 gets a basic pension, and parents of children up to 18 are also given a childcare grant.
Klara
And I have seen individual life stories change. I talked with a woman. She was very poor, she was living in her household as the only adult with a disabled grandson. *delete adult children jobs*. She was really struggling. She didn't plant her field because she didn't have the time, she was planting in her garden next to the house. Then when I was there, 2019 she was so much better off, and she was much happier. And she said yes, because now I'm old. So now I have a pension and life is so much easier. And what had happened since 2012 was that the village got the electricity, and she got the pension. So the electricity meant that she didn't have to fetch firewood for everything, she still used the fire for some things, but she had this small electric stove. And also with her pension, she didn't have to starve. And she could always put food on the table. And because many households are intergenerational, and they have some old people in the household as well, so they might have a pension or two. And that can be a basis for being able to invest in something, for example, investing in farming, or investing or starting a small business, and so on.
Matthew
So while some guests spoke about increasing territorial or regional markets and bringing more agency to local food systems actors, others cautioned about relying too much on domestic production as it could have unintended consequences ons like conserving land to host biodiversity. Some guests thought we should be producing as much food as locally as possible and then importing what can’t be grown. Others prioritized farmers’ livelihoods, some of which depend on regional and international trade.
There wasn’t a real consensus here on a path forward. Depending on the context and what scale you’re making your argument, promoting more international trade or regional production could be better for the environment and more equitable.
So what did the guests actually agree about?
Samara
Many of the guests, including Jessica Duncan of Wageningen University noted that the state had an important role to play in promoting sustainable and healthy food systems across scales.
Jessica Duncan
The second biggest challenge that I see, which is political will, the ability or the willingness of politicians or decision makers to take these bigger steps is limited and there's a whole host of reasons for that. But the urgency is clear. And the failure of governments and decision makers to take these big steps is worrying, deeply worrying.
Samara
Another key area that guests agreed on was diversity. Not just human diversity and biological diversity, but specifically a diversity of scales.
Matthew
And as we said before, there is no ideal scale, so what do they mean by a diversity of scales?
Vinny
And so if you want to have all your fruits and veggies, and grains and everything, like you need both, you need to have diverse food, you need diverse farm sizes, we keep saying. So I think that's one big takeaway. I think another one is that there's no ideal farm size for the world. And so I just think it's really context specific.
Sophia
This idea I was developing in my thesis around consonants, the idea that you don't all need to have the same piece of music in front of you to make a symphony, you can play different things, and it can harmonize. You know, it's a little bit ethereal, maybe. But I think the idea is really powerful that you don't need the same thing. You need to think about different scales, but this whole fascination with scaling up seems to me very misguided, because very often what works locally will not globally, and the good rule globally won't, won't apply in every situation.
Rob Bailey
The key thing that I would want to see more of is diversity in production and consumption. So one of the, you know, I've mentioned how concentrated production is among a small number of regions and the small number of commodities. And that has implications for consumption as well, because we're, so much of our calorie supply comes from such a small number of highly calorie dense crop varieties. There's been research that shown that as we've become more dependent on these crops, global diets have converged around foodstuffs which utilize these in their manufacturer, highly calorie dense foods. And that's associated with increases in obesity and associated non-communicable diseases.
Samara
Several speakers also reflected that the larger-scale is casting a long shadow and often not making it possible for the smaller scale to survive and thrive.
Sophia
Now with a whole other awareness of climate change and climate risk, and with an understanding of what's happened with concentrated markets and agriculture. And what do we do about that? Because we know that all of our trade models and our theories about what the benefits of trade should bring, don't apply if an oligopoly is present. And we have oligopolies all across the food system. And they're very strong internationally. It's not as if we can go international and find competition. We actually find less competition in many ways. So I don't know exactly what that looks like, you know, what is the answer? What are the regulations? How would that be? But at least stop the myth that pretends that this is somehow competitive for Cargill, but they have two competitors. It's not competitive in the sense that brings all of the benefits.
Jennifer
As I said before, I don't think it's one thing or the other, we don't want to have all big corporations controlling the system. But we also, if we have all small scale producers that can lead to other kinds of issues. And so we need a diversity and a mix of different ranges. But I think that right now, we're over invested in the idea of a global corporate food system, and we need to bring things closer to home and improve that diversity.
Matthew
So a diversity of scales is essential. Maybe that’s a little bit what we expected from the start. But still, what have we learned from all these conversations, Samara? Has this last year of looking at scale made yo u think about differently?
Samara
Well I think back to something a student said in a class that I was co-teaching on global food systems. I was asking them what they wanted to do their final project on and they said they were really interested in farmers markets but that the problem was that farmers markets just weren’t scalable. And this makes me think that the mistake we make sometimes is to think that the food system operates at a single scale. By trying to take something that functions well at a regional scale - like a farmer’s market - and scale it up to the global, it just doesn’t work. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not scalable. But just that we need to think about scale differently.
Matthew
Yeah, the dynamics operating at one scale are different than the dynamics of both smaller and larger scales. Maybe a lesson here is that we can’t apply the same type of thinking across multiple scales – whether it’s the same economic logic, the same production system, the same technological solution, or the even same policy intervention.
If we were to approach the complexity of food systems in this way, we’d have to be think less binary terms and identify scale-appropriate and context-specific ways to change and transform food systems.
This also makes me think of Vincent Ricciardi’s final reflection, and maybe this is a good place to wrap up our thoughts on scale.
Vinny
Why does it have to be so binary? Why do we need organic and non-organic? Is there a hybrid system out there where large farms implement, you know, things that small farms are doing or non organic farms are implementing things that organic firms are doing? Why can't we just have like a best of both worlds approach and I do find a lot of the food system rhetoric to be extremes, and it would just be really nice to move past some of these extremes to find solutions. And the solutions are difficult and maybe that's why people don't like to like grab on to the complexities of finding a solution. In the end, I just wish that people were less binary about the food system dreams that they have.
Samara
In our conversations about scale and food systems transformation, we noticed there was an elephant in the room. While we may share the goals of decarbonizing the food system and distributing healthy food more equitably across the planet, different perspectives on how this should be done and by whom often came down to ideas about who holds the power to drive these changes, who should have that power, and how power needs to be shifted to transform the food system.
Matthew
This issue that kept popping up in our conversations will now be the subject of our next theme that we’ll be exploring at TABLE, which is... Power in the food system!
Samara
We’ll again be speaking to a diverse group of food systems actors including policymakers, farmers, academics, grassroots activists, corporations, media, retailers and more - to interrogate how they understand power, who has it, who should have it, and how does this shape our collective future?
Matthew
So thanks again for sticking with us throughout this journey. Let us know what you thought of the first season. What was your favourite episode? Leave us a review on Apple podcasts, spotify or wherever you listen. And please tell your friends who also like to get into the weeds of these complex food systems debates to tune it too!
Samara
We’ll be taking a few months before we publish our next season, but please subscribe and follow our Feed as we’ll soon be featuring some new bonus content.
Matthew
And a big thank you to everyone who helped with this season of the podcast. We’d like to thank all of incredible guests who were also featured in this episode, in order of appearance: Tara Garnett, Sahil Shah, Elena Lazos Chavero, Lauren Baker, Ken Giller, Klara Fischer, Jennifer Clapp, Vincent Ricciardi, Rob Bailey, Brent Loken, Sophia Murphy, and Jessica Duncan.
And a big thanks to everyone who provided valuable feedback throughout the season, starting with former TABLE interns - Rachel Carlile, Wendy Jenkins and Demi Horjidk, and the TABLE research directors - Elin Röös, Jeroen Candel, and Tara Garnett.
TABLE is a food systems collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University.
Samara
This episode was based on a summary report called What scale for the food system? Moving beyond polarised debates, which you can find our website: tabledebates.org/ If you’d like to stay up to date with the events that we’re hosting and our new publications you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter Fodder through our website.
Matthew
This episode was edited and mixed by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot Sessions.
We hope you enjoyed listening and we’d love to hear from you directly about who’d you like us to talk to about Power in the food system. You can email us at podcast@tabledebates.org or join our new messageboard at community.tabledebates.org
Talk to you in a few months!
