November 24, 2020

I'd like to share some gratitude this month that is rooted in two related questions: Why does the InFACT research agenda focus so much on food system outcomes, and who needs those outcomes to change? For the question about our research, I'll start with another question: How many times have you been in an academic meeting and at some point someone says something like, “You know, the problem is we're not teaching people to be systems thinkers anymore!” I'll admit that I'm tuned into that kind of comment, but I've heard it a lot over the years. People are naturally systems thinkers so it really shouldn't need to be taught; we yearn to categorize and connect ideas—about people, plants, animals, rocks…elements of any system.

Reconnecting with innate systems thinking capacity is a good idea if you're trying to improve the outcomes of a system. Our University Discovery Themes are systemic issues, complex societal challenges in which we expect to make a difference. Food security for everyone at all times, InFACT's challenge, would be an outcome of a complex social and ecological system.

Food systems literature, particularly food system research framing, consistently identifies three categories of food system activities and outcomes: availability (outcomes of food production), access (outcomes of processing, packaging, transporting and particularly distributing food), and utilization (outcomes of the ways people prepare and consume food and how they translate to health). InFACT is taking a transdisciplinary convergence research approach to systemically addressing knowledge gaps in the complex social and ecological system that produces each of these sets of outcomes. Some might think all it will take is some tweaking of the existing system, and if that's what we find I'll be delighted—but the data doesn't look good to me.

In fact, each of these outcomes falls short of food security for all in significant ways in our current US food system, and I'll just mention a few. Availability is more than sufficient for calories, but not necessarily for quality of food. Production relies upon back-breaking physical farm labor that US citizens are almost never willing to do, the exception being the small percentage of the population who work incredibly hard at operating farms, at a median income that has been negative for each of the last five years. Supply chains respond to economic competition from local to global scales, and don't often go where it's not profitable to go, creating wide disparities in access. The private and public sectors together haven't found a way to ensure access for all, as the InFACT access working group pointed out in our last newsletter. And what we might call our food culture is really a large set of dynamic cultural connections with food, but with one outcome being that the US is one of the very few nations in the world, and the only developed nation, that does not recognize a human right to food in its constitution or government policy.

Most of us reading this don't experience the downside of any of these outcomes. One of the more challenging aspects of food system transformation is that the current system really works pretty well for a majority of US citizens, who are relatively wealthy when compared with the resources available to people in the rest of the world. If you have a retail outlet nearby where you can choose and purchase the food you need for a healthy and active life without going broke, you're in the majority for whom the outcomes are fine. But the pernicious side of the food system is that it systemically fails to achieve anything like those outcomes for the rest, including one in six Ohio households before the pandemic. People for whom it doesn't work well are more likely to be elderly, single mothers, Black, Brown or Indigenous people, and the health outcomes of the pandemic have heightened awareness of the role of diet in underlying COVID risk.

First Nations people deserve special mention here, especially at this time of year when a myth of harmony and sharing with their forebears is so frequently perpetuated. If you haven't seen the “Land-Grab Universities” article referenced in last month's newsletter, you really should give it a read. The data is accessible and identifies 39 tribes or bands from which land was taken, often violently or breaking treaties to maintain an explicit strategy of conquest by taking away the means of food sovereignty and self-sufficiency. Their land was then sold to create Ohio State University's original land grant. Not surprisingly, the descendants of people whose land was taken are now among the most impoverished and food insecure in the land. That's not a history of sharing, at least not by the US, we the people. Similar histories of dispossession and injustice are shared of course by African Americans and others.

So yes, transformation is needed across all of the outcomes observed in food systems. There are scientific and technical and social and economic and cultural opportunities for improvement. We take a systems approach to scholarship in all of these areas and more, and work with people beyond Ohio State to translate discovery into better outcomes. It's a privilege and a responsibility that we share. Thanks, InFACT folks, for your commitment and your work.

Casey Hoy
InFACT Faculty Director