Food in Cities: The Food Trails Podcast Explores Challenges and Opportunities of Urban Foodscapes

The newly launched podcast series ‘Food & The Cities: From Policy to Plate’, by the European Food Trails project highlights the challenges and success stories of cities transforming their food systems for sustainability. In the second episode, titled “The Need for an Urban Food Revolution and the Role of Cities”, Marta Messa, Secretary General of Slow Food, and Nevin Cohen, Associate Professor at the City University of New York and director of the university’s Urban Food Policy Institute, discuss issues and possibilities within urban food systems. Together with Natasha Foote, a journalist specializing in food and agriculture, they explore what “sustainable transition” really means, especially in the context of transforming our food systems. As Messa puts it:

“For Slow Food, the term “sustainable transition” refers to a shift towards food systems that are environmentally, socially, economically, and culturally sustainable and promote agroecology as the guiding principle.”

This definition includes, says Messa, agricultural practices that respect the environment and biodiversity, fair treatment of food producers, traditional food cultures and communities, and a transparent economic system within the food supply chain, meaning fair prices for farmers and producers and support for local economies.

Food Policies to Empower Communities

The Food Trails project offers eleven partnering cities the opportunity to delve into how food systems and urban food policies can solve problems such as unhealthy food, food waste, and unsustainable foodways. The goal is to transform food systems by reimagining, developing, and implementing sustainable, healthy, and inclusive food policies. 

As Messa points out in the podcast episode, many challenges in our urbanized world are related to food. Often, food systems fail to deliver healthy and sustainable food to many while contributing to problems like climate change, waste, health issues, and economic inequality.

“Cities can be part of the answer to tackling some of these problems. They can design and implement food policies that empower their community, make the farm-to-fork journey sustainable, promote a zero-waste use of resources, and ensure people have healthy and sustainable diets. Cities hold great power in enhancing the regeneration of our food system. This is why the Food Trails project is so important; it helps to ensure a transformation of the urban food system.”

Nevin Cohen gives examples of what transformation of the urban food systems can look like concretely in a city:

“A well-fed city will have the social and human capacity to address significant threats like climate change. In practical terms, this means planning food infrastructure, such as urban farms and gardens, so that it is a tool to help us mitigate and adapt to climate change, both reducing a city’s heat island effect and absorbing stormwater from climate-induced weather events, in addition to being a source of healthy produce.”

Challenges in Urban Food Systems

The Food Trails project includes so-called Living Labs in the eleven participating cities. In these labs, the cities collaborate on various initiatives, from public procurement and food education to reducing food waste and creating local food markets. For instance, Birmingham successfully encouraged citizens in the Ladywood district to compost their food waste. One hundred sixty households participated and learned the value of organic waste management. In Grenoble-Alpes Métropole, the yearly “Month of Food Transition” inspires citizens to embrace more sustainable and healthy diets. A support program for municipalities in Grenoble Alpes Métropole has also improved school food and reduced food waste.

Parallel to the success stories from the Food Trails project, cities, and individuals continuously face challenges when developing new urban food systems models, such as insufficient food accessibility, unhealthy diets, food waste, biodiversity degradation, lack of awareness and education, environmental impact, and difficult market access to small-scale farmers, reflect the complexity of the modern food supply chain. While these challenges reflect the complexity of the modern food supply chain, they are not irreversible.

“To properly address them, it is important to involve all relevant stakeholders and ensure a collaboration between them: local governments, communities, civil society organizations, and private actors”, says Messa.

Cohen points out the need for more collaboration within cities:

“Cities are siloed. The moving parts are not in sync. That means a municipal agency responsible for treating sewage may not view urban farms as a tool for stormwater management, and the planning department may not prioritize supermarkets over banks when zoning commercial zones for redevelopment.”

Cohen suggests in the podcast that a good solution is to break down barriers between different areas of government and adopt a “food-in-all-policies” approach, where every policy considers its impact on food systems. He says this could involve creating a dedicated food policy department, an interagency task force, or a food policy council. The aim is to make sure that food considerations are integrated into a city’s environmental, housing, transportation, and economic development policies.

Collaboration is the Key to Sustainable Urban Food Systems

“Local governments can and should play a central role in addressing issues related to the sustainability of food systems, even more so since it is predicted that two-thirds of the global population will live in cities by 2050”, states Messa.

Messa mentions some successful examples of local governments in Food Trails cities putting effort into food systems transformation. For instance, in Copenhagen, the city is using public procurement to create climate-friendly menus. Today, public canteens serve 90 percent organic food thanks to an increase in plant-based menus. In Milan, the goal is to achieve zero food waste in the school canteen system. This is achieved by nudging activities for the kids to reduce leftovers and disposables. In Funchal, the city has established a workshop venue where kids can learn about food sustainability. 

Many more success stories of cities working for new urban food policies and systems can be heard in the following Food and the City: From Policy to Plate episodes. Several experts will will cover topics like food research, developing urban food policies, measuring impact, and learning from others As Marta Messa emphasizes in the podcast, constructing sustainable urban food systems  requires collaboration and a wide-ranging perspective:

“When cities adopt a systemic approach, they prioritize understanding the interactions among various actors within their local food systems rather than isolating individual components. By doing this, they can make real improvements to their local food systems, which will directly benefit the livelihoods and well-being of their citizens.”

The Food Trails Project

Food Trails is a project enabling cities to reimagine, develop, and implement sustainable, healthy, and inclusive food policies. The project facilitates collaboration among cities and researchers to encourage knowledge sharing, replication, and scaling up of best practices. The project comprises 19 European partners: eleven cities, three universities, and five organizations. It is a four-year EU-funded Horizon 2020 project. Living Labs, where the cities are trying new foodways, can be found in eleven European cities: Bergamo, Birmingham, Bordeaux, Copenhagen, Funchal, Grenoble, Groningen, Milan, Thessaloniki, Tirana, and Warsaw.