Agrifood systems in Asia face a myriad of sustainability challenges related to declining environmental health, loss of food diversity, and the deterioration of small-scale farming. On the consumption side, over-reliance on globalized food flows limits consumer agency, decreases food security, and impacts health. How do we respond to these challenges?

  Research on food system sustainability presents two broad approaches: 1) maintaining existing food systems by increasing the efficiency of production, eliminating loss/waste from the system, and eliminating meat consumption; 2) complete system transformation to distributed, regional/local, short supply chains centered around agroecological production, sufficient food consumption, and absolute reductions in energy and material throughput. The maintenance option, if acted on seriously, has the potential to cut carbon emissions in half (see Springmann et al. 2018, Falk et al. 2019, Willet et al. 2019) in a short amount of time. FEAST argues that such approaches, while moving in the right direction, don't do enough to change the underlying structures of production, distribution, consumption, and food governance to reach the 1.5^o C climate change goals and may be unviable in a highly unpredictable climate and post-carbon world. FEAST research is line with complete food system transformation, and aims for re-imagining and re-creating regional, small-scale food systems designed for a post-growth world and food lifeworlds that re-value food as a commons.

  The ways in which food is currently provided, consumed and governed need urgent change, but we lack understanding of how agrifood transitions emerge and take root (e.g. Bui et al 2016), and the role of existing and alternative institutions and policy (e.g. Meadowcroft 2011), social practices (e.g. Shove et al. 2012, Spaargaren 2011), and economic arrangements in advancing sustainable food transitions (D'Alisa et al. 2014, Infante & Gonzalez de Molina 2013).

  The FEAST project takes a transdisciplinary approach to explore the realities and potential for sustainable agrifood transition at sites in Japan, Thailand, Bhutan, and China with significance for the entire region. We analyze patterns of food consumption, food-related social practices and their socio-cultural meanings, and agency to change deeply-held cultural dimensions. We map and evaluate food systems specific to national, regional, and local production, distribution, and consumption contexts. Building upon that work, we engage in action research to partner with stakeholders to envision desirable and plausible futures and to initiate food citizenship-oriented experiments and actions. FEAST co-designs and co-produces socially-robust knowledge and mechanisms that challenge mainstream economic thinking on consumption and growth, work to redefine the notion of long-term food security at the regional level, and engage society in a public debate on our relationship with food and nature that questions shared beliefs and values to reacclimatize consumers as citizens and co-producers in the foodscapes around them. FEAST contributes to a growing body of research that merges the literatures of sustainable food consumption (iPES-Food 2015, Lykke Syse & Lee Muller 2015, Reisch et. al 2013) and social transformation/transitions (Grin et al. 2010, Spaargaren et al. 2012). 

  FEAST will produce four types of knowledge relevant to catalyzing agrifood transitions: 1) contextual knowledge of contemporary national, regional, and local food systems (production,distribution, and consumption); 2) co-produced visions of alternative food consumption and production practices and municipal transition plans identifying research, education, and policy needs; 3) modelling and scenario-based knowledge to inform coinciding deliberation and planning processes; 4) and knowledge related to intervention strategies— such as niche incubation, social learning and market transparency— on the execution and effectiveness of workshop-based consensus building toward collective action and market-oriented information- providing tools (eco-labels, food LCA smartphone app). A significant portion of the research is transdisciplinary in nature and many final outputs are geared for public use —including collective visioning and creation of new, empowered institutions to implement food policy. These “lighthouses” enable this project to have real-world impact beyond the five-year research period.

 

Contribution to Program 3

  Since the beginning of the third phase, FEAST has contributed significantly to the program mission, title (lifeworlds is a concept that FEAST deals with), and in providing intellectual space to co-develop concepts and methods for the program at large. In particular, FEAST brings intellectual robustness to the program (as well as to the entirety of RIHN) by way of introducing concepts and theories that have not yet been sufficiently absorbed by ongoing projects and the institute. FEAST has initiated discussion on key concepts such as lifeworld, sustainability, and well-being; on theories of social (ie. transition, transformation) and mindset change (ie. individual, social, and mutual learning); economic (degrowth, sufficiency, informality,  doughnut economics, commons, value chains) and political alternatives (decentralized, participatory governance & new institutions); and design and planning (food waste to production & rural-urban linkages; food and energy co-production; urban greenspace and infrastructure; self-reliant local food production systems). All of these concepts are available as integrative spaces to coalesce individual research project trajectories and results into a broad, but coherent narrative around the challenging program task of “designing lifeworlds of sustainability and wellbeing.”

  We plan to follow up on the WSSF2018 collaborations through an edited volume with the tentative title “Food baskets for post-growth Japan: revaluing informal and wild food practices as provisioning systems.” Sanitation project members will author a chapter.

  Over the course of the last year, two FEAST researchers, Kazuhiko Ota and Rika Shinkai, devoted a portion of their working hours to co-leading a thematic integrative exercise for the entirety of Program 3, including three workshops.

                

<References>

Bui, S., A. Cardona., C. Lamine & M. Cerf. 2016. Sustainability transitions: Insights on processes of niche-regime interaction and regime reconfiguration in agri-food systems. Journal of Rural Studies 48: 92-103.

D’Alisa, Giacomo, Federico Demaria & Giorgos Kallis (eds). 2014. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. Routledge

Falk, J. et al. Exponential Roadmap 1.5. Future Earth. Sweden (September 2019).

Grin, John, Jan Rotmans & J.W. Schot. 2010. Transitions to sustainable development: new directions in the study of long term transformative change. Routledge.

Infante Amate, Juan & Manuel Gonzalez de Molina. 2013. ‘Sustainable de-growth’ in agriculture and food: an agro-ecological perspective on Spain's agri-food system. Journal of Cleaner Production 38: 27-35.

iPES-Food (International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. 2015. “The New Science of Sustainable Food Systems: Overcoming Barriers to Food System Reform.” iPESFood.

Lykke Syse, Karen & Martin Lee Mueller (eds). 2015. Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge.

Meadowcroft,James. 2011. Engaging with the politics of sustainability transition. Environmental Innovations and Societal Transitions 1: 70-75.

Reisch, Lucia, Ulrike Eberle & Sylvia Lorek. 2013. Sustainable food consumption: an overview of contemporary issues and policies. Sustainability, Science, Practice,& Policy 9, 2.

Spaargaren, Gert. 2011. Theories of practices: Agency, technology, and culture. Global Environmental Change 21, 3: 813-822.

Spaargaren, Gert, A.M.C. Loeber & Peter Oosterveer. 2012. Food Practices in Transition-Changing Food Consumption, Retail and Production in the Age of Reflexive Modernity. Routledge.

Springmann, M. et al. 2018. Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits. Nature 562: 519–525.

Shove,Elizabeth, Mika Pantzar & Matt Watson. 2012. The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How is Changes. Sage.

Willet, W. et al. 2019. Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet. 393 (10170): 447-492.

Each project working group (WG) has made progress on their research plans for FR4.

 

WG1: Food System Mapping & Modelling

  WG1 has collected and generated GIS datasets, publicly available statistics, and consumer surveys to map the “origins” and “destinations” of food flow from international and domestic wholesale markets to their place of consumption at the regional/city level at sites in Japan (Kyoto, Noshiro, Nagano). Consumer surveys and “personal foodsheds” have also provided a baseline regarding food consumption habits and localized spatial patterns for food procurement that are used by other WGs. Using satellite imagery, the current condition and potential for urban agriculture in Kyoto City was analyzed and saw a 10% decrease over a ten-year period. WG1 also measured the environmental impact of domestic food consumption in Japan by calculating its ecological footprint (EF)-- EF of food consumption for all 47 prefectures in Japan shows a discrepancy between EF in urban (high EF) and rural areas (low EF) as well as in high- and low-income households. WG1 research showed that supplying 100% of food calories for urban areas such as Kyoto from surrounding agricultural land is a difficult challenge, but the first step toward achieving greater local/regional food security and a sustainable diet may be to focus on increasing the availability of critical missing nutrients. WG1 is now asking the question “how much of the food nutrition gap can we conceivably supply locally through changes in production (agroecological), distribution (regional food system), and consumption (diets)?” and is developing a model to study this interaction for Kyoto. This approach allows us to rethink self-sufficiency in cities based on nutritional needs.

 

WG2: Collaborative Approaches to Food Citizenship

  WG2 is interested in the development of civic food networks (CFN) as alternative forms of food governance and their impact on food policy and agrifood system transition at the municipal and regional scale. Stakeholder workshops and reflexive action research methods are used to explore consensus building and legitimization processes leading to food policy, and the role of future visions in planning and policy undertaking. 24 public events, 20 major workshops, and many more meetings with diverse food system stakeholders have been held over the course of the project. Many forms of workshop facilitation and mediating/exploratory tools have been developed, including games, forms of role-playing and enactment, as well as discursive formats. For example, a pluralistic futures approach was used in workshops held in Kyoto combining visioning, backcasting, and serious gaming to allow participants to “play” and experiment with possible futures and how to govern food system transitions. Last year, seven workshops and public events were held across the four Japanese sites (Kyoto: 3, Kameoka: 2, Nagano: 1, Akita: 1) on a range of issues relevant to local food policy and the issues stakeholders feel are urgent and actionable. FEAST initiated networks have formed new organizations akin to “food policy councils” to lead the process of negotiating with municipal governments to actualize local food policy on issues such as children’s canteens, intellectual property pertaining to seeds, food distribution, and school lunch programs. Insights into civil society-based governance mechanisms and processes of legitimacy building unique to the Japanese context are some of the significant outputs from this work.

 

WG3: Agroecological Strategies in Policy and Practice

  WG3 explores policy and practice dimensions of agrifood transitions toward agroecological production in Japan and Bhutan. Fieldwork and analysis on support structures, and pathways into agriculture for new organic and agroecological farmers in Japan has been consistent over the course of the project (Hisano et al. 2018, McGreevy et al. 2018). A major accomplishment for this WG, was the completion of a household survey in six rural Bhutanese districts on agricultural and food consumption change (n=440) with the help of the Royal University of Bhutan, College of Natural Resources (MOU). Results are wide-ranging and pertain to changing patterns of meat consumption and the relationship to imported foods, generational gap in what is consumed (more processed food for younger generation), insights into how farm labor and income have changed over time, strong seasonal variance in how people procure food, and the consumption and perceptions of meat and organic products. Recent focus has been on the question of scaling up agroecology and examining the working dimensions on agroecological farms.  Additionally, the status and future of pollinator health and stewardship is being researched as a necessary part of agroecological (urban) food systems.

<References>

Hisano, Shuji, Motoki Akitsu, & Steven R. McGreevy. 2018. Revitalizing Rurality under the Neoliberal Transformation of Agriculture: Experiences of Re-agrarianisation in Japan. Journal of Rural Studies 61: 290-301.

McGreevy, R. Steven, Kobayashi, Mai, Tanaka, Keiko. 2018. Agrarian Pathways for the Next Generation of Japanese Farmers. Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

  

WG4: Co-designing Agri-food Eco-branding Tools for Supporting Sustainable Regions

  WG4 research is concerned with conducting innovative experiments for supporting the sustainable development of small-scale farming and farmer livelihoods via carbon offsetting techniques and co-designed marketing schemes. Last year, the eco-branding case study developed in Kameoka for COOL VEGE® was presented and submitted to the MAFF organized workshop as proposed at the MACS-G20 (the meeting of G20 agricultural chief scientists). Toolkits and guides for other municipalities to use an open eco-branding scheme will be finalized next year. Critical to the success of local food production for consumption schemes is the willingness of locals to buy locally produced food. A survey and choice experiment (n=320) found that tourists value local coffee more than residents in Northern Thailand (Nan), which has implications for food localization valorization strategies in developing countries as local food must be “embedded” in place. 

 

WG5: Food Chain Transparency

  The database of over 1.6 million processed food products was merged with FEAST generated data on fresh products and the smartphone app is scheduled to be released in beta by early spring 2020. Consumer-side app user testing and the development of an online platform with voluntary data updating are seen as possible future steps. 

 

WG6: Decolonizing the food system imaginary

  We were successful in securing Kaken funds for this research and began working on spatial informal food mapping in Kyoto and fieldwork on wild food procurement practices, such as fishing and eating hunted meats. This work will continue next year and give us a better sense of what kind of role informal food practices play in creating sustainable “shadow” food systems and in composing wild food baskets in a post-growth Japan.

 

Here is a brief overview of some of the many FEAST 2019 research results.

●FEAST produced a total of 15 research papers, 1 edited volume, 2 translated works, and 59 presentations at major academic conferences and lectures for the public in 2018-2019. Selected outputs are below:

-Second special issue in the Journal of the Japanese Institute of Landscape Architecture (Vol. 83) on the theme of “Landscape in a post-growth society: the possibility of degrowth” in which there were eight contributions from FEAST on a variety of themes, including new commons, landscape politics of sufficiency, and food movements & degrowth.

-FEAST’s transdisciplinary, action research approach on urban food system sustainability in Kyoto was featured in a paper on reducing the environmental footprint of cities (Journal of Cleaner Production).

-FEAST hosted a session at the Global Research Forum on Sustainable Production and Consumption Conference held in Hong Kong entitled “Food futures in Asia: imagining and experimenting with post-growth food procurement and consumption to redefine rural-urban linkages” in which six papers were presented.

-Through our collaboration with the Global Footprint Network and WWF Japan, we were able to produce an informative booklet on regional differences in ecological footprint aimed at municipal level policy makers. A paper based on this data is being drafted.

●Other major results are:

-How can we reimagine neighborhood foodscapes? GIS mapping and fieldwork were carried out to map land use in Western Nagano City—this data will be used to develop new land-use scenarios and spatial designs to re-imagine land use and food production with neighborhood committees and residents.

-How do civic food networks develop in Japan? Over 20 meetings, workshops, and events were held in Kyoto, Kameoka, and Nagano, to catalyze civic food networking and co-design food policy measures. For example, ideal future school lunches were envisioned in Obuse Town and plans are being made to input results from the visioning process into the general policy planning process. The need for culturally-specific approaches to civic food policy development that center on concepts of social expectation and “side-to-side” pressure are unique to Japan.

-Can agroecological production scale-up? Fieldwork to answer this question was conducted on “lighthouse farms” (leading, influential farms) (n=15) in Japan with colleagues from UC-Berkeley. Agroecological practices and the socio-economic capacity of farms to act as models for territorial development was assessed for 18 different indicators per farm. The assessment tool is being developed for wide-spread use.

-Do household insect products contain neonicotinoid pesticides? A citizen science project to assess the degree to which neonicotinoids are present in household insect management products found 21 outdoor and 40 indoor products contained neonics. A survey of Kyoto residents found widespread support (78%) for banning neonics in Japan.

 

Project organization and methodology

　The project is arranged into six working groups (WG), each with its own “work package” to conduct over the five-year period. Each working group has one or two chairs that oversee research activities and assist in planning, managerial processes, and strategy building. Each researcher at FEAST HQ liaisons with a particular WG Chair and helps in managing WG-related duties. Major decisions are deliberated on by the project executive committee composed of 13 core members (including WG Chairs) and FEAST HQ. The executive committee meets together twice a year to discuss budget allotment, research plans, and coordination, once at a retreat in the summer and once during the FEAST Annual Assembly.

FEAST will enter its final year and the primary focus will be on writing and publications. Limited data collection and stakeholder engagement will take place to wrap up research activities and transition to the “post-FEAST” phase where research results, toolkits and tools, policy plans, and educational materials will be unfurled in total. In some instances, institutions for local food governance initiated through the efforts of FEAST will continue their activities into the future.

 

Informal food practices and diverse food economies: We are interested in the potential that informal food practices have in creating wide-spread food provisioning opportunities as part of regional/local food systems in a post-growth, 1.5^o C oriented world. We theorize that the interlinkages between informal food practices at urban and rural sites can compose alternative food systems and represent one form of a diverse, resilient food economy that will be necessary in the future for local food security. Building on past FEAST fieldwork and interviews, follow-up fieldwork in Japan, Bhutan, and Thailand will be conducted in coordination with overseas collaborators using funding from the Kaken project “The role of informal food practices in convivial post-growth rural lifestyles”. An edited volume on this work is planned, tentatively titled “Food baskets for post-growth Japan: revaluing informal and wild food practices as provisioning systems.”

 

Future agrifood policy action plans and evaluating civic food networks & institutions: This work will take place in Thailand and sites in Japan. 1) Working with colleagues in Thailand, the results from workshops held in Bangkok in Dec. 2019 on future scenarios of food practices will be compiled and published. The feedback from stakeholders will be reintegrated into a series of concrete scenarios and written into policy action plan proposals for the city’s Public Health and Urban Planning departments, as well as into research papers. 2) Similarly, policy action plans will be developed at each of the Japan sites as roadmaps for future food system transition based on previous action research. We will also perform a series of follow-up interviews at each site in Japan (Kyoto, Kameoka, Noshiro, Nagano) to evaluate the social impact of the transdisciplinary process at each site with special emphasis on processes of legitimacy building and trust.

 

Transitioning everyday food consumption and production: Stories from a post-growth future: FEAST plans on hosting the next RIHN International Symposium as a capstone event for the project. Possible keynote speakers have been identified from the fields of sustainable consumption and production, degrowth, and agrifood sociology to help lead a discussion on how to reimagine and enact models for food production, consumption, and governance that are viable, desirable, and possible outside of the growth paradigm. Some questions that will be addressed at the symposium through highlighting FEAST research: 1) How do we redesign food production around the principles of agroecology so they might regenerate ecological synergies and sprout the seeds of sovereignty? 2) Food futures are political-- how do civic food actors rally around desirable food visions and find agency in transforming their foodsheds? 3) As food is so ingrained in culture and the rhythms of daily life, the repatterning of a post-growth food system has profound implications for the future of lifestyles, work, and health. How might sustainable food practices reconstitute foodscapes of sufficiency and conviviality, in which the line between consumer and producer is blurred? 4) Finally, can our relationship with food and agriculture redefine socio-cultural ideas of the good life and enable alternative worldviews that embrace ecological and social limits? We are planning a publication from the papers presented at the symposium.

 

Spin-off projects at RIHN and beyond: Multispecies stewardship and regional food system transition were two themes developed over the course of FEAST—new projects by FEAST members on these themes are currently running as Incubation Studies (IS) and have the potential to continue FEAST research into a new phase in the future. The two IS projects are “Living in the bioregion: decentralizing the primary industries” led by Norie Tamura and “Multispecies Cities: Co-designing more-than-human well-being in the Asia-Pacific” led by Christoph Rupprecht. In addition, Kazuhiko Ota submitted Core research project proposal on serious gaming methodology and approved as well. Our collaboration with Utrecht University’s Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development will develop further through a Vidi grant on anticipatory governance and simulation gaming and two PhD students will work with FEAST. Many FEAST members have also made ties with a comparative project between the UK and Japan on “Comparative Ruralities” funded by the AHRC of the UK and the ESRC that will continue next year.

 

Academic and “lighthouse” public outputs: As FEAST enters its final year, we will focus on academic publication and production of outputs for public education. We plan on finalizing policy reports at sites in Japan, Thailand, and Bhutan, developing K-12 curriculum for exploring food futures through the lens of school lunches and local food security, and a series of serious board games on the topic of good food governance. In addition, the following outputs are planned:

Food transparency smartphone app: This app provides data on the environmental, social, and health impacts of individual food products. A prototype developed using a redacted version of a 1.6 million entry food product database and uploaded to Apple’s Testflight service is currently under its final upgrades and will be released in the spring of 2020 and limited user testing will follow.

Open climate-friendly food eco-brand starter kit: A series of toolkits aimed at farmers, brand owners, certification bodies, and municipal governments will be released to help guide communities through the process of establishing their own regional ecological-brand based carbon-negative farming techniques (ala. COOL VEGE®).

Civic food networks and local food governance institutions: The hope is that the civic food networks in Japan advanced through FEAST action research over the past four years will continue on into the future and enact the future food policy plans that were developed at each site.

Academic outputs: Over fifty academic papers and three edited volumes are currently under development for publication based on FEAST research. We suspect this will be the beginning of a multi-year post-project effort at publishing papers based on FEAST research and data. Next year, we anticipate publications in journals such as Global Sustainability, Agriculture and Human Values, Futures, PLOS One, Journal of Cleaner Production, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, Journal of Consumer Studies, and Sustainability Science among others.