Sustainable Food Policy Development

What is Sustainable Gastronomy? (Continued...)

I originally coined the term sustainable gastronomy in my regular food and culture column which ran from 2001 to 2005 in Monday Magazine. Sustainable gastronomy describes the space where the traditional definitions of food security meet the cultural and aesthetic manifestations of the human/food relationship.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food of their choice. Sustainable gastronomy incorporates this ideal, but it also views food through the lenses of anthropology, ethnicity, culture, politics, economics, geography, spirituality and the arts. These elements are critical to a comprehensive understanding of the human/food relationship; an understanding that is fundamental to development of effective solutions to the food security crisis.

So far, solutions to the food security crisis are based on an incomplete analysis of the nature of food crisis in various parts of the world. Attempting to address food insecurity and food crisis using only political/economic/scientific solutions ignores the fundamental relationships that shape human/food relationships. Food informs personal, cultural and religious identities. Food defines our relationship to ourselves and the world around us. How we feed ourselves determines, at profound emotional and psychological levels, what we value. This food in turn fuels our lives, actions, and thoughts. The perceived safety of one’s food determines personal feelings of security and trust in the government that leads them. To attempt to resolve food issues with programs and policies that do not factor in these elements is poor and ineffective practice.

The flowering of philosophical ideals regarding the human food relationship has few, if any, recommendations for concrete action at political and social systems levels. Slow Food, food sovereignty, and the organic agriculture movements are examples of philosophies that describe a more holistic approach to the human/food relationship. They posit elements of the human/culture dynamic and place a strong emphasis on the integrity regional food production. They are compelling philosophies that have garnered robust support around the world because they speak to those factors ignored by traditional food policy approaches.

Sustainable gastronomy embraces these philosophies and subsequent social movements while taking them one very practical and critical step further through the development of a hybrid qualitative and quantitative model to assess the sustainability and resilience of a given region’s food supply in order to provide concrete prescriptions for effective action at local, national and international levels.

As such there are two streams of sustainable gastronomy:
Sustainable Food Governance & Culinary Restoration