Food systems

The value of food system approaches lies in the potential to capture and unravel complexity, to provide policymakers with a tool to navigate trade-offs, and to guide policymaking in the efforts required for pursuing meaningful sustainability. The strength of food system approaches is related to their ability to help a community identify and address barriers to change, frame food-related challenges, and predict the consequences of specific decisions. Food system approaches provide a conceptual framework that can facilitate communication among stakeholders to develop shared views on food-related issues. Because actors are a component of food systems, their views can contribute to create more accurate representations and actionable knowledge. With the emergence of sustainability as a generally accepted policy frame, food system approaches are increasingly promoted as the way to overcome the barriers imposed by reductionism to academic disciplines and fragmented perspectives, and to address the interconnected dimensions of current food-related challenges.