Week 5: Education of Planners Reflection

This week's readings touched upon the failure of planners planning for food systems. The Clancy and Kaufman/Pothukuchi articles list several reasons for this failure such as:

• Planners lacking awareness of food systems overall
• Planners do not see why there is a problem in the first place
• Lack of funding for food systems planning
• Planners see food as a rural problem

There are several other reasons, but these are the ones that stood out to me. So obviously, there is a disconnect here between planners' thoughts about food systems and doing their jobs to plan for healthy communities and cities. I think it really boils down to the lack of education of, not just the planners, but of the citizens themselves. 

I'll give the example of my background which I realize is most likely unique to me. In elementary school, I was taught about healthy foods. Alright cool, off to a great start. But in middle school, I received no health education (now granted this is in a Tennessee suburb, what can you expect?). And again no food health education in high school. My parents, (bless their hearts) while excelling in other aspects of parenting, cooking and healthy food education was not one of their strong suits. So here I am at the age of 23 in a food systems class learning for the first time about America's food issues. Not one of my geography undergraduate classes even discussed any of what I've learned in the first 4 weeks from this class already. 

So why go into all of that? Well for fellow citizens like me that are ignorant of our food issues, how are we supposed to complain to the planners and leaders that we need healthy food options when we are unaware there is a problem in the first place? This of course is what both the Clancy and Kaufman/Pothukuchi articles discuss.

Previously, the planners themselves weren't aware of the problems. And I came to the conclusion that I would have remained ignorant of the role planners can/should play with food systems if I had not taken this class. The articles mentioned solutions include graduate schools stepping up their education of students about food planning, possibly even starting specializations. Thank goodness DURP has this class. But I still feel like there is this disconnect between planning and food, even within my own department. 

So how can we better educate planners about food systems? Are there any other alternative methods that you can think of that were not listed in the articles?