Valentine Cadieux
\nResearch Associate, Geography and Sociology
\nUniversity of Minnesota<\/p>\n
I am a cultural geographer with an emphasis on everyday landscape and collaborative land use management, and I\u2019ve been involved in a community-university collaborative food system planning project here in Minnesota for the past two years. I describe the project a bit below, providing a bit of an overview (apologies for its length \u2013 it\u2019s a project with a high degree of systemicity!) and highlighting the experiences and aspirations that motivate me to apply to participate in your seminar. <\/p>\n
\u2028\u2028The Southeast Minnesota Food Planning Initiative (SEFPI) is a community-university collaboration coordinated by the Southeast Regional Partnership for Sustainable Rural Development. The SEFPI includes a community steering committee and over a dozen researchers plus several students from a range of fields, including Geography, Planning, Landscape Architecture, Rural Design, Horticulture, Agroecology, Applied Economics, Public Health Nutrition, Evaluation Studies, and Soil, Water, and Climate. The official goal of the project is \u201cto engage the research and outreach capabilities of our land-grant institution to respond to issues articulated by citizens in an effort to build a vibrant regional food infrastructure,\u201d with a focus on assessing possibilities of regional food production to be better aligned with regional food needs (the project website is here: http:\/\/www.regionalpartnerships.umn.edu<\/a>). \u2028\u2028<\/p>\n I\u2019ve participated in this project in two related roles. First, I\u2019ve worked closely with the director of the SE MN Regional Partnership over the entire project to help coordinate the multi-disciplinary research strands of the project, focusing on community-university and cross-disciplinary translation and engagement processes and also on integrating evaluation processes across the project (using the CFSC Whole Measures for Community Food Systems protocol)\u2014not least to help develop more capacity in the region for assessing how various food-related actions serve to further different actors\u2019 food goals. Second, I\u2019ve worked with a fantastic group of students to carry out a survey about the range of ways that people in the region understand the current food system\u2014and how they would describe an ideal food system. This survey is designed to inform and complement the ongoing process of forming a regional food policy council, and includes some open ended questions about how the food system is constituted and how people engage it and a q-survey that presents a range of different goals for food systems as expressed by food-related groups situated in different food system positions in the region. <\/p>\n \u2028\u2028As I described the project to my collaborators in pitching my part of the project: \u201cLocal food is valued for a broad range of reasons, from livelihood and health to quality and culture to the diverse agricultural and ecological systems local food systems can foster. Better understanding the goals for local food held by a broad range of SE Minnesota residents can start to unpack the difficult questions: what are the problems that regional food systems might successfully address \u2013 and how might local food address these problems? Understanding what is shared \u2013 and what is different \u2013 in the goals and values associated with local food may help develop and prioritize broader support for the benefits offered by local food. Although support for local food is currently high, just what local means is still unknown. Also unknown is the question of just what is being achieved by the different ways that different actors use the category local food. The specific, hopeful use of the idea of \u201clocal food\u201d is also becoming contentious (as the label \u201corganic\u201d has become), as a range of producers and processors claim different meanings in their uses of the label \u201clocal.\u201d Unpacking what \u201clocal\u201d means to people will help address issues that are important to the way that people meet their food needs. Finding out how commonly used assumptions about local food practices play out across the population may also help cultivate dialogue across many different boundaries of \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d that have created obstacles to cooperation in food systems.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2028\u2028We spent a year reviewing food system goals in the region, then another year surveying and working with the community to form working groups on the central issues of interest; we\u2019re now working with community collaborators to identify perspectives not well represented in our survey or the collective food system mental model we\u2019ve developed, and coding the information we have around a framework drawn from the APA Policy Guide on Community and Regional Food Planning. After two years of extensive (and intensive!) consultation with our many university and community collaborators, we are still finding that the largest challenges we face are the ones we started out with: (1) it\u2019s very difficult to figure out how to design a more comprehensible interface that helps network the many food system efforts underway, and that makes it clearer what these efforts are achieving (in ways that don\u2019t further alienate people in competing food system positions from each other) and (2) community and university participants are working in different cultures with different priorities and methods, and they have a hard time getting past these differences to address the challenges above \u2013 especially when those challenges involve critiques, as many food system interventions do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Valentine Cadieux Research Associate, Geography and Sociology University of Minnesota I am a cultural geographer with an emphasis on everyday landscape and collaborative land use management, and I\u2019ve been involved in a community-university collaborative food system planning project here in Minnesota for the past two years. I describe the project a bit below, providing a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blonsway.expressions.syr.edu\/sustainingsustenance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/55"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blonsway.expressions.syr.edu\/sustainingsustenance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blonsway.expressions.syr.edu\/sustainingsustenance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blonsway.expressions.syr.edu\/sustainingsustenance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blonsway.expressions.syr.edu\/sustainingsustenance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blonsway.expressions.syr.edu\/sustainingsustenance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57,"href":"https:\/\/blonsway.expressions.syr.edu\/sustainingsustenance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/55\/revisions\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blonsway.expressions.syr.edu\/sustainingsustenance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}