Sustainable Food Systems

Context: Working More Systemically Towards Sustainable Food Systems: A Co-Inquiry Process

A critical issue at the heart of this issue is that we lack a comprehensive, resilient and adaptive systems ontology upon which to build the structural, organisational and sociotechnical or cognitive/intelligent and technological systems we actually require. It is one thing to identify a conspicuous absence of constructive resonance across distributed, integrated information and energy-processing systems; it is altogether another to conceive, operationalise and sustain such a model.

It is at a foundational level of shared, useful conceptual vocabularies that we most often stumble, long before political or cultural difference muddies these waters with effectively meaningless inertial dissonance. Global Systems Theory is a useful tool, context-agnostic, and – curiously – it is at the level of such (a) constructive generalisation or abstraction of distributed, decentralised ontologies and systems models that we will acquire the tools and pivots to manage sustainable food systems, ecological (inter)dependencies and their associated organisational or institutional deployment(s).