Sustainable Food Laboratory

¹Gradual Degradation model is one of the primary cognitive/conceptual challenges that emerged over the course of the research. It constitutes a considerable obstacle to effective public engagement on food system issues, as well as to public education on these issues.

Sustainability per se is a conceptual “black box” – the closest commonly available understanding is “Gradual Degradation.”

There is no evidence that the concept of (un)sustainability – in any of the senses used by experts – is clear or familiar to most French people. Despite years of discussion of this word (“durable”) and idea in the media, it has not entered people’s minds – presumably in part because of the lack of a specific effort to talk about it in ways that people can understand and recognize as important.

As a result, most people fill in the “black box” of (un)sustainability with a model that can be called Gradual Degradation. An early finding of this round of research was that relative to U.S. citizens, French people are more aware of and concerned about the overall degradation of the environment caused by industry and other facets of modern life. Gradual Degradation is a powerful model that correctly captures several aspects of the problem of (un)sustainability, including depletion of resources, pollution of the environment, and loss of traditional practices.

On the other hand, the Gradual Degradation model has two important negative consequences:

• It makes it very difficult to keep people focused on the topic of (un)sustainability in the expert sense – i.e. the idea that certain practices cannot be continued because their effects are impossible to tolerate, and can lead to “collapse” of various kinds. (Importantly, the expert sense of (un)sustainability refers to a qualitative change while the Gradual Degradation model involves something more like a quantitative diminution of air quality, the diversity of wildlife, the beauty of the landscape, etc.)

• The familiarity and dominance of this model makes it very difficult for relevant information to sound new.

¹Towards a Cross-Cultural Simplifying Model for Food Systems: Finding from French TalkBack Research, Axel Aubrun, Joseph Grady, Cultural Logic LLC, Commissioned by The King Baudouin Foundation