Lack of Access to Healthy Food in Pittsburgh
Wicked Problem Mapping
Team: Michelina Campanella • Rossa Kim • Jesse Wilson • Minrui Li
As many groups undoubtedly discovered, once we started exploring our ideas and building our map, many questions and ideas arose.
What were you stumped with?
Once we began brainstorming, we asked ourselves, “What is the scope we should focus on?” There were many instances where we had to decide if a concept on the fringes of our wicked problem should be included or not. We thought about what the scope of this project was and given the amount of time we had to complete it, how complex our map should ultimately be for this assignment.
What didn’t you have time to do?
We created some additional graphics in order to explain the non-linear cycle of food. But we didn’t have time to to create a stakeholder map. We spent a lot of time discussing the inner workings of the food situation in pittsburgh, but more from the perspective of the individual than multiple stakeholders.
Why did you find the exercise valuable?
As with any exercise in communication design, seeing something laid out before you makes it that much easier to grasp. In a discussion, one can talk about problems or how different aspects of different problems are associated, but when you can visually follow the lines that connect all of these problems together, you can have a much more complete mental model. That also makes it easier to expand the model and identify areas for future intervention and how they might cascade throughout the system.
Other insights?
I think we all grasped the general ideas surrounding this wicked problem, but we had never realized just how tied into fossil fuels (and the fossil fuel industry) this particular problem is. In every subcategory, we ended up inserting a node which related to fossil fuels and their use/impact. That extent was something that we were not expecting.
Key Findings
Cultural norms: We found that the isolated lifestyle of American families contributed to their lack of healthy foods, (as well as a lack of health in general). This is especially relevant for older citizens who eat and live alone. In other societies, the lifestyles can lend themselves to greater community interaction. The American way is for the kids to leave the home, as opposed to other cultures that keep the family unit intact.
This also extends into sports culture. Regardless of income or class level, sporting events themselves offer foods (at ridiculous prices) that are low in nutrient levels and high in calories and sodium.
Education/exposure to healthy foods: We are creatures of habit. Many people feel comfortable with the same set of meals. We don’t look to see what else is out there enough, for many reasons that extend into other areas of the map. Grocery stores and restaurants can play a part in this. For example, why is venison not served in Pittsburgh? There is an overabundance of wild deer. Should the meat be available in grocery stores and restaurants create dishes that develop people’s’ tastes for it, there could be a change in eating habits.
Pittsburgh’s history & its loss of industry: Pittsburgh was a vibrant city before the loss of the steel industry. While the city has recovered in general, many areas, particularly those “mill towns” that suffered when the mills shut down have not. These areas have become food deserts with little to no outside investment, lack of quality restaurants and grocery stores, and tend to have only fast food options. In a sense, this can connect with the idea of gentrification as a solution by bringing in investments, but also a paradox because it may just displace this problem and not solve it. While it can be helpful to a certain degree, it tends to renovate an area, and not a population.
Fracking: In addition to the environmental damage caused by this gas removal method, the economic ramifications are not as apparent. Say a farmer who has worked hard on his farm for his whole life for a low wage — dependent on the farm’s yield — suddenly gets an offer from a gas company for millions of dollars. He may or may not decide to continue to farm, but now he doesn’t have to. What are the repercussions of this? Maybe he sells his farm, maybe he and his family live off of the newfound source of income. Maybe he keeps farming. But it’s likely to believe that on the whole for farmers in the area, the amount of farms will decrease and yields of locally grown crops will dwindle. The value of cheap fossil fuels over small and medium sized producers further entrenches Pittsburgh in the global industrial food system that is the main contributing sector to climate change world wide.
School lunches: An often forgotten aspect of our health is school lunches. We found in Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) their low quality lunches are made at one site and then shipped to all of the schools (around 50) each day. This not only lowers the students’ quality of health, but also lowers their standards of food quality. Education on all things (food included) starts from a young age. Why can healthy food not be a part of this?
Connections to other Wicked Problems
- Transportation: The food system is intricately interwoven with the transportation system. As you can see from the our graphic, every step from seed to sale is dependent on transporting food from one location to the next. The journey of food, whether from sea or land to the mouth of the consumer, takes several trips by boat, plane, diesel (refrigerated) truck, and the waste from each process is taken by dumptruck to the landfill. Because our food is grown, stored, processed, packaged, and distributed from places all over the world, the transportation footprint of our food system is disturbingly reliant on cheap fossil fuels and existing transportation infrastructure.
- Water: Water use in the food system is something that we didn’t explore much within our map, but it is also intimately interconnected to the production and consumption of food. Since we are operating predominantly within the industrial model, if we take a bird’s-eye-view, we start with the oceans which are being overfished, polluted from chemical fertilizer and pesticide runoff that destroy already threatened ecosystems. Farms that utilize fertilizers and pesticides (which is nearly all of them within this model) degrade the quality of the soil and in the process ruin its ability to store water. This increases the amount of water needed for crops (while simultaneously increasing chemical runoff) further depleting our water tables, reservoirs, and polluting what’s left.
Our group’s graphic shows the non-linear progression of the food cycle. Pittsburgh’s food system is imbedded within the larger industrial food system (depicted above) that is heavily reliant on cheap fossil fuels within every stage of the process.
This graphic shows the global journey of our food and the energy intensive machinery required to catch, plant, grow, process, package, and transport our food across the globe. At the end of this process, the waste is then shipped out (with more gas-guzzling, expensive equipment) and isolated in landfills, which not only pollute our water but release massive amounts of methane gas due to food decomposing without oxygen.
The lifecycle of food is naturally a circular path, where food ‘waste’ returns to the soil and the process begins again. Because we have broken apart this natural system and commoditized each stage, it is difficult to imagine how we will break away from “fossil fuel food” to an alternative model that we so desperately need.
