Food Systems Thinker
Lesson 4.2 Working Together
At the end of this lesson, you should be able to recognize the importance of community-based works that address issues in the food systems. The systems concept that you should be able to recognize is time horizon.
Before moving forward with this lesson, download and complete the worksheet.
Activity 1: Watch a video about a community garden addressing food insecurity.
Say hi to Sharrona Moore on Lawrence Community Gardens facebook page
HIGHLIGHTS
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Sharrona and her brother, who has Crohn's disease and schizophrenia, experienced challenges and restriction going to food pantries. They found that many pantries offer limited fresh food and food with low nutritional value.
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Lawrence Community Gardens address food insecurity by donating fresh foods to pantries and neighbors, taking fresh foods to the community members who have limited transportation options, and selling affordable produce to low-income people.
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Food desert refers to limited supplies of healthy food, especially where the main options for food shopping are convenience stores or gas stations which usually do not sell fresh food. Lawrence Community Gardens supply fresh food to these places through consignment where the stores only pay a supplier after the goods are sold to reduce the risk of not selling fresh produce before it goes bad.
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Lawrence Community Gardens offer the Next Generation Farmers program to teach youths various skills from organic agriculture to small farm business enterprise. Youths communicate about health benefits of the produce while selling what they grow at the farmers’ market.
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Sharrona discussed how to identify community assets to build partnerships and friendships in the community which help move the project forward. She explained the importance of developing an elevator speech to tell a quick story and then following up with details to ask for support from an individual or an organization.
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Sharrona shared her vision of food revolutionizing the neighborhood. She got the project started from a small step that later became impactful. She encouraged us to take the first step toward the change we want to see by joining an organization that values the same thing with us.
VOCABULARY
Food access = Access by individuals to adequate resources for getting appropriate foods for nutritious diet.
Food security = The state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, safe, and nutritious food.
Food justice = The right of communities to produce, distribute, access, and eat healthy and culturally appropriate food, regardless of race, class, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, ability, or religion.
Complete the worksheet.
Activity 2: Learning about time horizon.
Always keep in mind that things take time. The length of time under considerations could be as short as seconds or as long as centuries. Typically, we focus on shorter time intervals than we should. When looking at a system, a systems thinker chooses the time horizon that is long enough to see patterns.
Don't focus on shorter time intervals than you should.
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Try making explicit the time horizon. Are you interested in the behavior of tomato prices as they move over a two-month period or a two-year period?
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Extend your sense of what is "now". Try thinking in terms of a longer block of time from last year and one year ahead. Ask yourself what was happening a year ago. What is happening now? What does the next year hold?
By extending your sense of "now", you can grasp interconnections that you may not have seen before.
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Try slowing down so that you can align more effectively with the systems you are trying to understand. Practice by taking a walk outside. Sit under a tree for 20 minutes. Shadows will move. A leaf may fall. See what you can observe by slowing down.
When you’re walking along a tricky, curving, unknown, surprising, obstacle-strewn path, you’d be a fool to keep your head down and look just at the next step in front of you. You’d be equally a fool just to look far ahead and never notice what’s immediately under your feet. You need to be watching both the short and the long term—the whole system.
Additional Resource: Using technology for a more sustainable food system.
"The real question, then, is not whether Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies will help us grow more food. It’s whether they have the potential to shift the current model to a smarter system that could leave producers, consumers, and the planet better off."
CONCLUSION
This lesson highlighted the importance of considering time horizon in order to recognize a pattern in a system. You also learned about an impact of a community garden that started from one person with limited resources and expanded to a bigger project that addressed food insecurity in the community around.
References
Booth Sweeney, L. (2001). Guidelines for daily systems thinking practice. Systems Thinker, 12(2), 6.
Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Wisconsin Center for Environmental Education, & University of Wisconsin-Extension Cooperative Extension. (2015). The Wisconsin food
systems education conceptual framework. Retrieved from https://www.uwsp.edu/cnr-ap/wcee/Documents/FSE_Framework_Web.pdf