The local food dashboard

The emergence of local food systems is a global grass-root movement that needs to be more systematically analysed and more intelligibly presented to show how these initiatives collectively contribute to more sustainable food production-consumption patterns.

How do local food systems perform in relation to social, ecological and economic sustainability? How is small-scale food production linked to rural development?

With the help of on-site observations and interviews in Uppsala and Västerbotten counties in Sweden, sustainability performance for these initiatives is evaluated at farm and landscape level. A simple graphical tool - a local food dashboard - will be developed that can be used by both producers and consumers to support decision making for developing more sustainable local food systems.

Local food initiatives exist in a number of different forms in Sweden and the focus of the project is on the most established - such as the farmer's market or farm shops - but also on the new initiatives that are rapidly developing around the country, such as shreds, meat and vegetable boxes and cooperative agriculture.

What makes a local food system sustainable?

Because local food initiatives are very diverse by nature, their contribution to shaping a more sustainable food system is often difficult to assess in an objective manner. It is however important to be able to connect their practices to some key food sustainability principles.

We set to employ an online Delphi-like method inspired by the approach implemented by Boylan et al. (2019), i.e. “a structured, iterative process of collecting opinions and providing controlled feedback […] to reach a consensus on complex issues among a panel of experts”. The ‘online’ in our case means that these opinions are collected through remote one-on-one interactions as researchers are individually replying to an online survey without discussing between each other. To undertake this, we have chosen to crowdsource expert insights by developing a survey addressed to scholars working with sustainability issues (but not necessarily food sustainability), predominantly at SLU, in order to get a broad but informed understanding of these implications. In the first section we asked respondents to assess their degree of agreement with a series of statements about local food sustainability (“A sustainable local food system is...”).

To design the survey, we have used and adapted the works of Todorovic et al. (2018), Schmutz et al. (2018) and Boylan et al. (2019) in order to identify a list of the main defining features of sustainable local food systems. The respondents were asked to provide their own assessment of what a sustainable local food system entails by agreeing or disagreeing with various statements. In the survey, the statements were not categorised and their order was randomized each time. However, for the purpose of this brief analysis, it is interesting to relate the statements with the three pillars of sustainable development (economic, environmental and social).