Multi-Level Perspective: Lack of Access to Healthy Food in Pittsburgh
We started off going over the assignment brief, but were somewhat confused about where exactly to start. We looked at Geel’s map that documented the niches, regimes, and landscapes of the development of the modern-day automobile and social practices that exist at each level in class.
An insight that we gained from that exercise was that social practices are not just individual, but they are prominently formed by landscape structures (for example, the practice of shipping food on a global path and the industrial process of turning wheat into bread is a global practice).
One particular area that we struggled with was relating the sample map to what we were trying to achieve. The sample map on the automobile had a chronological element to it. We began to wonder if our assignment had a chronological element as well. We weren’t sure and asked other groups this question. When we confirmed that this assignment was supposed to only exist in the present, it enabled us to narrow things down.
Using the whiteboard, we brainstormed and documented all of the relevant areas onto our MLP. We categorized everything into the hierarchy of landscape, regime, and niche. To arrange everything on our map, we divided it into four columns: Infrastructure, Political, Economic, and Cultural in a vertical hierarchy. To make this an even more comprehensive map, we used color to indicate the various aspects of each element added to the map. The ones we used where: Technology, Practices, Business / Economic, Infrastructure, Norms, Political, and Environmental. Lastly, we added potential solutions to our map, found in the various boxes placed within.
We soon realized that there was a lot of information here and that we needed to find a good way to allow others to access the information. Where to start? Where to focus? We decided to highlight one particular segment of our map that we identified as a path dependency and the biggest area of impact.
This was to “reduce food miles” through “ending government subsidies” for industrial mono-farms, and using that money to invest in organic farming methods and technology, which would support local/organic farming to move from the niche to the regime level. Reducing food miles is ultimately about lessening our reliance on fossil fuels within the food system, which is the main contributor of carbon output within the system, and the most daunting threat to food security. Our presentation went into several examples of this and the barriers that exist to prevent improvement.
It should be noted that on the niche level, we came up with many concepts that didn’t neatly align with any of our categorized columns, and thus, the niches aren’t aligned to the Infrastructure, Political, Economic, and Cultural columns as the elements of the Regime and Landscape are. We also ran into questions on whether an element could be considered a niche or a regime. Take organic farming. While it certainly has started as a niche, and in many instances still is, the Whole Foods chain needs to be accounted for, and it is clearly part of a Regime. We postulated questions such as these and encourage future discussions and research into this vital area.
Ultimately, we realized that diet was missing from our map, and that the method and short timeframe of this assignment left much to be desired. We found it to be lacking in terms of real world impact and asked ourselves if a more experiential approach would make the scenario of food insecurity more real, more urgent, and facilitate more actionable solutions.
