I’m showing a few steps of an interactive clickable diagram we’ve been making of the food system in Southern Minnesota. We organized a giant, collaborative review of what people see going on in the food system and what they’d like to see according to an interpretive scheme drawn from the American Planning Association’s Policy Guide on Community and Regional Food Planning, and echoed in the Center for Whole Communities’ and Community Food Security Coalition’s Whole Measures for Community Food Systems: Values-Based Planning and Evaluation tool. Using the six categories that organize both the APA and Whole Measures frameworks (of thriving economies, health, ecology, fairness, cultures, and policy [and planning, making a seventh category that we have, in most cases, grouped with policy]) as a starting place to help represent the range of things that people value in the food system, we built a set of interpretive categories that we would continue to refine over the next year and would use to interpret (by qualitative “coding,” or “tagging” by theme) the interviews and observation we conducted. We also used this process of reviewing diverse perspectives on the food system to explore the ways that different people talked about similar and different goals and aspirations for a healthy regional food system. As much as possible, we organized our questions and tools around familiar phrasing and data developed in the region.
The key things we’ve found useful in this process are related to these three themes:
Explanatory depth: laying out what everyone is doing and why helps people explore both motives and contexts for how the food system has gotten to be the way it is
Negotiation between different kinds and statuses of expertise: is also helped by being able to see what and why — and is crucial both to empowering people to participate fully and developing etiquette practices that encourage and support others to participate
Institutionalizing diverse food values: figuring out how to get from aspirations to institutions helps create accountability, so that transformative food movement actions move beyond being symbolic to being practices that meaningfully support diverse values in the food system
Figure 1: The entry point to our diagram of food system work: the field guide to what makes food good
Figure 2: If you click on “economy / thriving local economies,” for example, you get to a more extensive explanation of what this means, including three sub-goals (drawn from the APA typology) that describe what this value means: 2A, food system integration in economic development, 2B, food system viability, and 2c, local markets for local foods.
Figure 3: Clicking on one of these nodes, such as 2B, food system viability, brings the user to the two key themes that had emerged in the regional discourse on food related to this sub-theme (in darker green), along with examples from diverse sources that show how this priority is phrased in the region, and what kind of work is being done about it. Each of these examples is linked back to the source documents (both the live websites from which they are drawn as well as archived copies, in case of website decay).
