The OXY Conference and the Food Sustainability Index
Located at the inspirational Occidental College (LA, CA), the OXY Conference of last week has been a really interesting and open-minding four-day experience. The conference theme, “Migrating Food Cultures: Engaging Pacific Perspectives on Food and Agriculture” invited us to reflect on and engage with the entirety of the Pacific region. One of the main pots I liked was the big focus on the roles of people, place, innovation, food production, and consumption, with attention to how these roles reflect and reinforce the social, economic, and cultural food landscapes, globally and in the Pacific area. A broad theme that was scoped down into different vertical segments.
An interesting one lies on the intersection between food sustainability and benchmarking frameworks. Several papers starting from the eighties have been pointing out how much assessing lifestyle behaviours and impacts can turned out to be critical in behaviour changing. Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance explains the tendency to psychologic stabilisation which may lead to behaviour change. Once we have a negative score, an assessment or a data visualisation about a specific action related to ourselves, the new information will make us psychologically uncomfortable because his actions no longer fit his belief about himself. And what is interesting is that, it works also in relation with others. This comparison actually increases the strength of the resulting behaviour shifting. In this case we talk about benchmarking frameworks. Benchmarking is the art of finding out how others do something better than you do-so you can imitate-and perhaps improve upon-their techniques. This is nothing new: incremental innovation lies exactly on that. What fascinates me is when those kinds of concepts are overlapping with food and wellness choices.
The reason why I was the OXY was to present the Food Sustainable Index (FSI), developed by the Barilla Center Food Nutrition together with The Economist. The Index is a exactly one of those qualitative and quantitative frameworks I am so fascinated by. Focused on three main sustainability pillars (food loss, nutritional challenges and sustainable agriculture), FSI is the result of 58 key performance indicators, scaled 0 to 100 and weighted in terms of importance. The result is a standardised evaluation framework that potentially can enable every kind of community to assess its own food sustainability level. This means visualising impacts, benchmarking, monitoring and consequently improving. Giving the importance food is playing in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, it sounds to me very exciting!
So far the FSI has been applied to 25 countries (G20 countries + Nigeria, Ethiopia, Colombia, the UAE and Israel) and 16 cities (Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Dubai, Johannesburg, Kyoto, Lagos, London, Mexico City, Milan, Moscow, Mumbai, Paris, San Francisco, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, Toronto). Interestingly, the top three counties are France, Canada and Japan, hitting just 67 out of 100. There is much more to be done it seems. Another interesting point is then than being “overall good” does not mean performing well in all the three areas. France for instance is very highly rated in terms both of food waste and nutritional challenges, given the forefront food policy implemented by the government, but it is still ranked pretty poorly in terms of sustainable agriculture. This means that assessing and benchmarking can concretely show where to focus in order to improve.
Joined by more than 200 academics in an inspirational campus on top of Los Angeles hills, OXY has been a truly remarkable divergent moment to get a broad but deep look on the food system from different angles, brainstorm and increase knowledge on different topics. FSI has been explained and shown, getting the interest from an highly academic audience as well as being compared with other existing models. Check OXY out here!
