While being a Slow Food member here in Pisa I do appreciate a good piece of fast food every now and then, especially after a long night out or when there is no time to sit down and eat a whole meal. That is also why I was very happy to read the following news article in the Dutch management magazine (MT Magazine, 13Th of April, by Peter Boerman) that I have briefly translated for the readers of our blog.

Sustainable fast food? Yes, it exists! In less than 20 years Chipotle has built a chain of 1,200 restaurants in United States of America. Now they want to conquer Europe. What is their secret?

1. Never bend for conventions.
In 1993, former top chef Steve Ells started for himself. With Chipotle he wanted to prove that eating fast does not have to have to be a fast food experience. He opted for fresh ingredients from organic farms. So all the ingredients used for tacos and large burritos, which are filled right for your eyes in the restaurants, are organic. It proved to be a huge success: what began in 1993 with 1 restaurant, in 1997 there were already 14, and in 2005 about 500. Revenue rose to $ 1 billion in 2007, and became more than double last year (2011). And against all conventions, says Ells. “People said that the food was too expensive and the menu rather limited. Both proved to be wrong. “The strategy of Chipotle is different: where most fast food chains work with a franchise model, the green McDonald’s remains the owner of all the restaurants. This way there is more control over what the customer is served.

2. Keep your employees.
Where the normal fast food industry has a high turnover, does Chipotle virtually everything to keep his more than 30,000 employees in account. The restaurant owners receive $ 10,000 for everyone they hire and who later grows into manager position. Also the company tries, unlike many other fast food chains, to build good ties with suppliers, the local farmers. This way at least 50 % of an ingredient used by the chain is locally sourced during the harvest season.

3. What you say counts.
Steve Ells thought that customers would run to his restaurant if he would tell them that there are no antibiotics in the food prepared for them and that the meat used by Chipotle was coming from animals razed without the growth hormones. That turned out to be not such a tasty story. So that is also why Chipotle, under the now famous slogan, “Food with Integrity”, prefer to say that it provides better ingredients for better taste and healthier food. It might look like the same message perhaps, but one that comes across much better. However, the company is trying as much as possible over the Internet to provide insight into where the food comes from via its web page on the internet.

Good news for the discerning consumers like many of us, who now can eat fast food without feeling guilty. Another interesting fact about Chipotle is that it also managed to tap into a potentially a very interesting market of ethnic food. A few years ago (in 2009) Jan-Willem van der Schans and I worked on a project that tried to identify the possibilities of producing for the ethnic food market by the Dutch farmers. The fastest growing ethnic food on a world wide scale was at that time Mexican. Therefore I think that Chipotle will be successful in Europe as well, which also means new opportunities for local organic farmers.

The Rural Sociology group in Wageningen is celebrating its 65th anniversary. To celebrate, Femke Hoekstra and myself interviewed some of the awesome people that have been part of the history of the group.  You can check out their stories here:

http://happysixtyfive.wordpress.com/

Visit our blog and stay tuned because there will be more coming in the next weeks.

Enjoy!

Half the world’s population is now urbanised and cities are assuming a larger role in debates about the security and sustainability of the global food system. Hence, planning for sustainable food production and consumption is becoming an increasingly important issue for planners, policymakers, designers, farmers, suppliers, activists, business and scientists alike. The rapid growth of the food planning movement owes much to the unique multi-functional character of food systems. In the wider contexts of global climate change, resource depletion, a burgeoning world population, competing food production systems and diet-related public health concerns, new paradigms for urban and regional planning capable of supporting sustainable and equitable food systems are urgently needed. This book addresses this urgent need. By working at a range of scales and with a variety of practical and theoretical models, this book reviews and elaborates definitions of sustainable food systems, and begins to define ways of achieving them. Four different themes have been defined as entry-points into the discussion of ‘sustainable food planning’. These are (1) urban food governance, (2) integrating health, environment and society, (3) urban agriculture (4) planning and design.

For more information about the content of the book or about online ordering of the book, please check the website of Wageningen Academic Publishers.

Endorsements

‘This is an important compilation on a timely topic. It brings together the work of planners and designers from both sides of the Atlantic, and challenges us to think about how to create food systems that deliver healthy, just, and sustainable communities and vital places. The book moves dexterously between the grassroots and policy halls and draws valuable lessons for theory and practice.’

Dr. Kami Pothukuchi, Department of Urban Studies & Planning, Wayne State University

‘To address the problems of urban food production we need to look at the city in a completely different way. This timely book will act as an important source for those who have an ethical interest, not only in food, but in improving the quality and justice of life in our city communities.’

Prof. Flora Samuel, School of Architecture, University of Sheffield and member of Royal Institute of British Architects Research and Development Committee

‘This publication provides a lot of “food for thought”, not just for persons professionally involved in the food sector and officials dealing with national food policies, but especially for local and regional authorities, urban planners and architects, NGOs and community based organisations, health and environmental officers and concerned consumers. Against the background of the growing awareness of the elevated social, health and ecological costs of the mainstream globalized agri-food system, this book analyses the emergence of a new vision and many initiatives that seek to reconnect (sustainable) production with (sustainable) consumption …. Hence, the book delivers what is promised in its title: it discusses new concepts related to food and sustainable urban/regional planning based on a critical review of innovative practices at various levels.’

Ir. Henk de Zeeuw, Director RUAF Foundation

 ’For those who work to address the future challenges facing city development, this book is a must. Why? Because today practitioners and professionals are being asked to understand urban food production within a social, economic and ecological context. This book shows us how these connections are being made. The chapters are accessible and fascinating and will help beginners and experts to deal with food production in their everyday work.’

Dr. Carlo W. Becker, bgmr Landscape Architects Berlin/Leipzig and Technical University Cottbus

The BBC has reported a fascinating story of short food supply chains booming in Greece’s economic depression. Called the ‘Potato Revolution’, farmers and consumers are organising to cut out the middleman and slash prices of basic foodstuffs, starting with potatoes and moving on to rice, flour and olive oil.

The BBC story can be read here and there’s also a video here (but it may not be accessible outside the UK).

This new movement started in the north of Greece, and is now catching on in Athens. I would really like to hear what others working on urban food systems and alternative food networks make of this.

It seems to me that this is a four-way reconfiguration of food provisioning in the country worst hit by the Eurozone crisis. Consumers are creating demand, producers are stepping in with supply, and local authorities, no doubt mindful of the political implications of food prices in economic crisis, are now playing a coordinating role. As for the supermarkets, they’re being forced to slash their prices as they’re being drastically undercut.

Supermarkets, the embodiment of the global, industrialised food system in our towns and cities, have enjoyed a mutually supportive alliance with local authorities for decades. After all, the multi-level policies that support the industrial system and its pantheon of middlemen stems from the post-war period when leaders of the global north pledged that their populations would never again teeter on the edge of famine. Kalimera, the CAP!

I’m intrigued by the potential long-term implications of this new ‘revolution’.

Is it a temporary coping strategy among people who can no-longer afford to put food on the table? Or, in an era where cheap potatoes are the new ambrosia, will supermarkets go the way of Demeter, ancient goddess of grains and harvests, and lose their deity over the food system forevermore?

Has Greece gone full circle from direct farmer-consumer food supply, to the global model, and back again? Or does this represent just a widening of the margin in which alternative food systems operate around the edges of Big Fat Greek Retail?

Hungrily waiting your thoughts, Purefoodies.

Yesterday 8 March 2012, the first ‘Day on urban agriculture’ took place in Almere. The program included contributions from urban agriculture entrepreneurs, policy, housing corporations, education, civil society, to name a few.  All in all, the contributors showed that urban agriculture in the Netherlands is moving to the next level and beyond the hype.

Special guest was Wayne Roberts from Toronto, Canada. In his talk, he stressed that we should use urban agriculture to deal with urban problems and thus using food as a lever. Basically he said that we should not ask what the city can do for urban agriculture but what urban agriculture can do for the city (freely citated after John F. Kennedy). In his talk, he praised the recently developed Almere Principles on sustainable urban development, in which urban agriculture takes a prominent role. He called it one of the most promising urban strategy documents he had ever come across (more on the Almere principles see this article).

Earlier, Jan Ferwerda, general director of Plus Retail, took the stage and promoted his supermarket, Plus, which apparently has the biggest organic assortment of any supermarket. Besides promoting his store, he also said that he thought urban agriculture was not just a hype but part of an important and lasting development that values local and sustainable food. In his view, fair (both local and distant)products should be prominently displayed on the shelves. Plus’ local fair trade brand is labelled Gijs (a very Dutch name) and seemed quite promising. Their vision on food supply for the future however could be summarised as convenient, enjoyable and healthy (in Dutch: gemak, genot en gezondheid).

In one of the breakout sessions entrepreneurs from Rotterdam and Amsterdam talked about their urban agriculture businesses which are going to take off this spring. One of the businesses, Uit je eigen stad from Rotterdam, has different components including vegetables, small fruit, chickens, aquaponics and also a restaurant, a shop and much more. They focus on bringing people together and showing them where good food comes from, inspired by initiatives such as SPIN farming, Sweet Water Organics and Growing Power. The three initiators have interesting backgrounds from real estate, organisational advice & change management and care farming. Another business from Amsterdam, De Groenten uit Amsterdam (or Grown Down Town) uses LED lights and ideas from vertical farming (creating 500m2 on just 100m2 floor space) to grow crops (using similar technology as we have seen in Plantlab but in this case also using crops that are growing in their own little plastic shells with nutrients and water already inside the bags). Both urban agriculture businesses are still looking for some funding to kick-off their plan. Uit je eigen stad has already received many requests of potentially interested shareholders and therefore sales seems to be one of their minor concerns especially in comparison with the enormous amount of regulatory barriers they had already taken conquered.            

Yesterday, the biggest Dutch national news broadcaster had an item on urban agriculture (and featured Uit je eigen stad), which was still announced as a ‘new’ phenomenon in the Netherlands. I suppose for the majority of the Dutch urban agriculture is still new and unknown and to have an item on the 6 and 8 o’clock evening news is therefore pretty ground breaking. You can watch the news item here.

Another interesting article was posted here. Jan Willem van der Schans (from LEI) created a map of the more ‘serious’ commercial urban agriculture activities in the Netherlands. He differentiates between ‘open (unused) space’ and ‘empty (derelict) building’ initiatives of which we have currently many due to the crisis.

After many years of preparatory hard work – we have much to look forward to this year with a new generation of  urban agriculture businesses in the Netherlands taking off.

Bill Gates recently announced a commitment of $200m for assisting smallholder farmers in developing countries to increase their agricultural productivity. A much needed and welcome financial investment to be sure. But what conditions are attached?  And what constitutes ‘sustainable agriculture’ according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?

A look at the website suggests a faith in technology and innovation. Part of this faith in technology and innovation is reliance on ‘improved’ genetically modified seeds. In turn, this is part of the process of commodifying and controlling seeds, which makes farmers dependent on breeders, and devalorises their existing knowledge and farming practices developed over generations. Smallholder farmers become dependent on ‘expert, scientific’ knowledge related to the management of the new seed varieties,  instead of being able to rely on their existing indigenous knowledge of seeds. An earlier post also refers to this issue and debates on pro and anti biotechnology. The point is, without clear agreement on what is understood by sustainable agriculture, without scrutinising assumptions, the long-term benefits for ecologies and small farmers are not guaranteed by such philanthropy.

Food sovereignty is based on a rights-based approach advocating healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and, importantly, the right to define one’s own food and agriculture systems. The importance of upholding equal social relations free of oppression and inequality is an important point of departure within food sovereignty.

Olivier de Schutter- United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food clearly advocates agroecological ways of production in order to be able to feed the world, fight rural poverty and combat climate change.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does commendable work in many different areas. In critical agrofood literature the foundation’s approach in the agrofood arena is described as being in the neoliberal tradition, weakly reformist, and aiming at minimising or reducing as far as possible the worst of the negative social, economic and environmental effects of the current food system (Giménez & Shattuck, 2011).  As for its faith in (highly contested) technology and innovation, we cannot deny that technology and productivity is very important in improving agriculture and creating sustainable food systems; the problem is that they are not enough.

Without a clear commitment to agroecological methods and a commitment to a rights-based approach, as is characteristic of food sovereignty approaches, and discernible in Olivier de Schutter’s approach, I am not persuaded that this type of philanthropy benefits smallholder farmers in developing countries over the long term. If  it makes smallholder farmers in developing countries dependent on the types of innovations and technologies of advocated Western ‘expert science’, then over the long-term, won’t  it create a new set of perhaps, worse, problems for smallholder farmers in developing countries?

Reference

Eric Holt Giménez & Annie Shattuck (2011): Food crises, food regimes and food movements: rumblings of reform or tides of transformation?, Journal of Peasant Studies, 38:1, 109-144

Credits: 5 ECTS
Duration: 4 days
Time: 8-11 May 2012
Location: Aalborg University, Ballerup

Organisers: Prof. Bent Egberg Mikkelsen and Assoc. Prof. Michael Søgaard Jørgensen

Deadline for registration: 1 March 2012

(Surely you wouldn’t expect something conventional from me.) 

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Lit Review

Scholars agree on one point:

Food crisis.

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Food systems

Unjust, unsustainable;

Something’s wrong.

***

One billion

Underfed, undernourished;

There’s enough.

***

One billion

Badly fed, badly nourished,

Unhealthy.

***

The verdict:

It’s a broken food system …

Can be fixed?

***

Who’s in charge?

The market, state, third sector?

You and me?

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Do we have

A right to food, right to health?

Some say so.

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Can we have

Security, sovereignty,

Food justice?

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Can we have

Good, clean, fair for everyone,

Everywhere?

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What’s to come?

Health, goodness, justice (‘peace, love’)?

We can hope.

***

What’s your view?

Your ideas, your visions are

Most welcome.

Project team

Last week Foodlinks held its third face-to-face project meeting in Tirrenia on the west coast of Italy. This was quite an important meeting since the project is almost half over and we have struggled quite a bit with finding a clear focus for the activities in the communities of practice. The main aim of this meeting was to agree on activities and tasks that will interest people enough to engage actively in the online period.

Interestingly, online activities increased considerably a few weeks before the meeting as CoP facilitators and CoP members were discussing and preparing this meeting. Activities needed to allow for the knowledge brokerage process to take place as well as to have a clear content focus to make the exchanges meaningful in the first place. The groups chose different methodological approaches including group model building, peer review, speed storytelling, “the wheel”, ritual assent/dissent which they later in the week discussed for its usefulness before sharing their findings with the other CoPs. A speed networking session also allowed for some cross interaction on the final day of the meeting as this had been quite limited as the CoPs split up early in the week. During the next meeting in the Basque, CoPs will exchange more so that we can discover more commonalities and linkages between the different subjects.

speed networking

tool training

Although the CoPs followed their own process, they more or less came up with a similar output such as an evidence document to support decision making on short food supply chains or a ‘Tirrenia charter’ on public procurement. Working on a collaborative document can be quite challenging especially with people from different backgrounds, with different needs and ideas so this promises to be an interesting process. More information on what these documents are about and how you can contribute can soon be found on the Knowledge Hub which is also open for external people to join.

To simplify online collaboration, we organised two evenings for tool training. These were attended by those members who had a specific question on some of the online tools used (‘how do I add a document to the intranet’? or ‘how can I export my mindmap and insert it into the wiki’? and so on) or just wanted to experiment and learn to work on the new Knowledge Hub platform.

On Friday I shared some results of the monitoring data we had collected so far, especially the results of the social network analysis we undertook which allows us to see whether our knowledge brokerage activities are effective; whether we are able to create more interactions between different actor groups and if these new connections are used.

Olga and Leo from Purefood, both based at Pisa University, joined the short food supply chain CoP. Click here to watch a short reflection by Leo on his experience last week or watch some more photos.

Recently I came across an interesting news item from Russian Internet sources where social capital concept has been applied to blogging. Popular, among Russian Internet users, blog hosting LiveJournal (“Живой журнал, ЖЖ”) started a new system of calculating the popularity rankings of its blogs and community diaries for all of its users, based on social capital.

Social capital is understood by the company as index of communication between people and is displayed in the statistics of the site for all of those interested in numbers. The new system, according to its creators, can be excluded from ranking blogs that are artificially popular. For example, when blogs are being followed by so-called “blog bots” (accounts of non-existing people).

“The rating on the basis of social capital is valuable because the new system reflects only the “live” traffic and allows the owners of the diaries to adequately assess their position on the “blog court”” – says the head of LiveJournal Russia Ilya Dronov.
At the moment, LiveJournal has 5 million registered blogs. The audience of LiveJournal numbers 65 million people, 29 million of them live in Russia.

Looking at the literature one can briefly define social capital as value generated by a (social) network. Social capital is the main theme of my particular interest in research on innovation within alternative food networks. I wonder if the same operationalisation of the concept can and should be applied to our Easy to Digest blog.