Transforming Our Food System

In the United States, it’s estimated that up to 40 percent of the food produced is never eaten, while 10 percent of Americans are food insecure. Food is being wasted at every step of the food supply chain that connects farms to forks—from production to distribution to stores, restaurants, and consumers.

It doesn’t have to be that way, says Illinois Institute of Technology Associate Professor Weslynne Ashton, a sustainable systems scientist who holds dual appointments at the university’s Stuart School of Business and Institute of Design (ID). Currently, her practice and teaching includes projects on the local and national levels—two of which are supported by the National Science Foundation and that are focused on increasing equity, sustainability, and resilience in urban food systems. The projects are tied together by a vision of the circular economy in which there is greater circulation of resources—food, as well as money, knowledge, and social capital—that can strengthen communities and mitigate climate impacts.

She’s part of a network of researchers aiming to change the status quo and find ways to reduce wasted food nationally, supported by $15 million in NSF funding over a five-year span. The project, Multiscale Resilient, Equitable, and Circular Innovations with Partnership and Education Synergies (RECIPES) for Sustainable Food Systems, brings together more than 40 researchers at 14 universities and institutions across the country, led by American University. The RECIPES team includes experts drawn from environmental science, engineering, economics, anthropology, design, and other fields.

“The goal of this project is to transform what we know and what we do about wasted food,” Ashton says. “We’ll look closely at how food waste is being generated, find opportunities to minimize the waste, and optimize solutions that reuse or recycle those wasted resources as much as possible. Then there’s implementation—how do we put solutions into practice?”

“Current efforts to address this challenge have varied from very grassroots and community-oriented, to local government initiatives, to private investment and industry coalitions,” she notes. “With RECIPES, we’re trying to pull information together from multiple sources nationally and investigate how to use that data for more comprehensive solutions.”

For example, one line of inquiry being pursued by Ashton and some other project members is to explore options for using food that is inedible. “We’re looking at anaerobic digestion, composting, and converting that organic material into land improvement or into biogas,” she says. “So we’re considering the technology and the markets for biogas and other types of material.”

In Chicago, Ashton has begun with a landscape assessment to identify key players in local efforts to address wasted food, such as the Wasted Food Action Alliance, and to understand the existing ways that food is being collected, repurposed, renewed, and reinvented in communities across the city.

According to Ashton, building partnerships with people, businesses, and organizations that work directly in all aspects of the food supply chain is crucial to the project’s success.

“Insights about approaches that have worked in different places can be shared [with people elsewhere] to replicate and adapt in their communities,” she says. “We’re building up a body of generalizable knowledge about [how to develop] solutions to wasted food and making sure that research is communicated to stakeholders who can use it.”

Ashton and Illinois Tech are the only RECIPES partners in the Chicago area, and the project leverages and amplifies Ashton’s longstanding, community-based engagement through both her research and teaching with food systems and the circular economy locally, including, for example, efforts to develop urban agriculture, food waste, and energy hubs.

Ashton serves as co-leader of ID’s Food Systems Action Lab, where students are using design and other disciplines—such as business, sustainability, and engineering—to develop new approaches and tools that can help communities envision and build more equitable, effective, and sustainable food systems. In the spring 2022 semester, her project-based courses at both Stuart and ID provided opportunities for students to learn about and co-develop social enterprise and wasted food solutions with Chicago-based community partners.

Illinois Tech students in business and design have been involved in Ashton’s work with RECIPES, as well as with the Community Food Mobilization in Chicago (CFMOB) project, for which she recently received a $50,000 Civic Innovation Challenge planning grant from the NSF.

Led by Ashton, CFMOB is a group of community organizations, civic partners, and academic researchers that is exploring pathways for urban Black, Indigenous, and people of color farmers and other small, local food producers in the Chicago x region to self-determine their participation in the city’s foodshed, including becoming suppliers to large, institutional buyers of food such as Chicago Public Schools.

“Our overall thrust [at CFMOB] is to make the food system reflect the people who are part of it,” says Ashton. “That means what kinds of food are produced, including culturally affirming foods, how and where food is produced, how people are involved—as entrepreneurs, workers in the food chain, as buyers and eaters—and what is done with wasted food.”

With the planning grant, CFMOB is eligible to compete in early 2023 for the next phase of CIVIC—a $1 million implementation grant to support a year-long pilot project by the group in Chicago that could serve as a model for communities elsewhere.