Week 5 Food Blog

This week’s discussion is on the degree to which the food system plays in urban or comprehensive planning. Pothukuchi and Kaufman open their journal article expressing how lacking urban designs are with regards to food systems and their encompassing impacts on communities and neighborhoods. They note how important it is for urban planners to encompass food planning into comprehensive planning. Comprehensive planning is illustrated as a means of putting the city in a “frameworks of equity, vitality, and regional and sectoral comprehensiveness”, but seldom does food systems enter into the equation for comprehension. The article goes on to describe how a survey on over twenty planning agencies showed that even though these agencies had food councils within them, that most of the action on food issues was reactive rather than proactive. Rather than advocating for healthy food systems and the infrastructure and education needed to support them, most councils mainly responded to zoning issues that arose from commercial food distribution such as supermarkets and grocery stores.
One thing I especially noticed in the article was the observation of sprawl development in relation to food systems. When I think of sprawl I of course think of densely populated suburban areas and how these areas are supported by supermarkets, and these supermarkets are the things getting most of the attention from city council, instead of sustainable agricultural practices, alternative food distribution practices, and equitable development that promotes access. Pothukuchi and Kaufman list some of the reasons for limited attention paid to food systems by planners are because, “it’s not my turf, it’s not an urban issue it’s a rural issue, and planning agencies aren’t funded to do food systems planning”. This kind of attitude leaves the food system to be mainly controlled by the supermarkets who are more concerned with profit rather than providing healthy food systems for the public.