ENVISIONING THE BASICS OF FUTURE FOOD SECURITY Meg Curtis and Saori Ogura
Imagine a utopia where all challenges related to the way you buy, sell, gather, grow, or hunt for food have dissolved. D u r i n g t h e Tr a n s f o r m i n g Approaches to Forests and Forestry through Traditional and Local Knowledges conference, held at the University of British Columbia in August 2019, participants in a Future Workshop explored this question in a barrier-free environment. By setting aside pragmatic considerations, forgetting funding constraints, and disregarding the limitations in our current economic and political systems, participants facilitated a space for an open discussion to look at what was needed to reach a desired end-state rather than being distracted by present day constraints. In the first phase of the workshop, participants were asked to identify problems or frustrations related to the economics of food from their lived experiences. When distilled, the following challenges were identified: transport (including packaging), oversimplification of food sourcing (agriculture as the only model), market distortions, (e.g. globalization, the pressure to grow monocultures), lack of healthy growing spaces (e.g. contamination of water and soil), and knowledge transmission/security (e.g. the loss of food sourcing/ growing knowledge). Unfortunately, these challenges are not discrete, but instead are interrelated aspects within the complexity of a larger, dysfunctioning food system. In the second phase of the workshop, participants entered the utopic phase where the freedom to fantasize revealed a longing for other freedoms: the freedom to have clean drinking water; the freedom to gather food from the forest; the freedom to subsist, the freedom to grow in urban
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branchlines 32#1 2020
