#24 Get Listening. Get Curious. Get Uncomfortable: Good Food Systems Work with Stephanie Godrich

So Emily Gates, back in episode seven, talked about, like, systems and evaluation, and in episode four, John Gargani was talking about sort of scalability and scaling through a systems perspective.

So there's, like, many different conceptualizations, I think, around what people mean by a system, and I think food systems as a field or as a, as an area of focus is quite prominent.

And I know here in Victoria, for instance, there are groups who have a very big emphasis on working in food systems.

So Regen Melbourne I know is one of them, talking a lot about food systems.

But let's go back to basics a little bit.

From your perspective, what are food systems?

Food systems really include all the different processes, the people, the steps that influences food production through to how food is distributed, promoted, sold, consumed, wasted, hopefully reused as well, and how all of those things impact on outcomes like health and also societal, economic, political outcomes.

They're very interrelated, so there are lots of ways in which one part of a food system can impact another one, and that's why it's also really important that we think about it all together rather than just in isolated components.

They're also continuously changing and adapting, so we do need to be responsive to that in terms of how we work with them, how we try to influence them as well.

So we really need to think about- How they are working with each other and the different drivers that are involved in our work to influence.

I know again, in lots of systems approaches and kind of the systems space, people talk about these kind of, these key phrases or words that get used like boundary setting and interconnection and feedback loops and those sorts of things.

Even just from your description then of what a food system is, the thing that struck me immediately was how wide-ranging it is.

And when I say that, even again, going back to my farming background, I think of that kind of like pre-production, primary production stage of food.

So there's the work that goes into, for a farmer, for instance, preparing for the planting of crops, the actual growing of them, and then the harvesting, and then inevitably where they end up being sold and consumed and like you said.

But that conceptualization of the different parts of the food system makes it feel so big.

And so I'm wondering from your perspective or from your experience, how do these core systems concepts of boundary setting and interconnections and feedback loops play out in a food system in a practical sense?

Yeah, you're right.

They are complex, and they are quite broad because they have those food supply chain components that you were describing and how consumers choose what they buy based on what's available for them, how that influenced their diet, their quality of and their quantity of diet, and then the impact on those outcomes that I talked about.

With regards to interconnections, thinking about the relationships between different parts of a system, you might consider the environmental system, so thinking about land and water and how that might impact economic systems.

For example, in one year, you might have a lower yield due to climate, the climate getting drier.

There could be a lower supply then of that food.

The price of food may increase.

And thinking about feedback loops, where you have an output traveling back to influence an input, you might have food loss or waste, so food loss on a farm or food waste in a home.

If a lot of food's all lost on a farm or wasted in households and it, then it sits decomposing in landfill, it'll emit greenhouse gases, which then may impact climate change, worsen climate change, which may result in unpredictable weather patterns that destroy crops, leading to more food loss.

And so you have these different negative impacts as well.