Sustainable Food Laboratory

¹ The effort to find effective explanatory models in French builds on a previous project already completed by Cultural Logic in the U.S., commissioned by the FrameWorks Institute on behalf of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. That project, in turn, built on a round of exploratory research conducted by Cultural Logic and Public Knowledge. In this section we briefly review several of the most relevant results of that earlier work, because they provide the foundation of the current effort.

Qualitative Research Findings in the U.S.
Average Americans have no easily accessible mental picture of the food system as a whole.
Members of the public can call to mind various bits of knowledge about how food is produced and distributed, but these scattered ideas do not add up to a clear understanding that food arrives at our plates via a complex arrangement of technical, business and social systems – one that may be guided by choices we make as a society.

Instead, Americans’ thoughts focus on “little-picture,” “plate-centric” perspectives.
Obviously, it comes more naturally to think about one’s own day-to-day experience than about broader and more abstract systems, both because the experiences of shopping, cooking and eating are familiar and evoked in our minds on a regular basis, and because they are simply easier to understand. They are a better fit with our usual, everyday manner of thinking about the world.
Importantly, there are also strong emotional reasons to think about food in this way (and not to think about food systems at all). Food is associated with being nurtured, with comfort, and with social ties – a perspective that is not necessarily compatible with that of the “responsible manager.” These associations have not gone unnoticed by food marketers, who consistently depict nostalgic or idealized scenes of eating, cooking and even food production. (To take one example among many, a well-known American manufacturer of baked goods depicts benevolent elves as the producers of the products.)

When people are pushed to take a broader perspective, they tend to think in terms of “Generic Modernization.”
The fact is that Americans can easily be induced to think about how food is “really” produced – as opposed to the fantasy images in their minds and in the media. And when this happens, they are able to produce some reasonably accurate facts and images about “huge farms,” “factories,” chemicals, etc.
On the other hand, this more “realistic” narrative about food is not very particular at all – it typically does not include reference to farm runoff, soil depletion, overuse of water, etc. – and it is informed by a generic understanding that “everything” in the modern world is getting less natural, more industrial, more high-tech, less personal, more automated, etc. In fact, this story is not very much about food, and it can be difficult to keep the conversation focused on food systems per se once this mode of thinking is evoked.
Worse, the Generic Modernization story is associated with an implicit Faustian-like bargain, in which the price of our many comforts is the sacrifice of Nature and natural ways, as manifested by pollution and gradual depletion. Taken to its logical conclusion, the Generic Modernization story ends with a Millennarian notion of eventual judgment/catastrophe, neatly leaving out any role for Responsible Management.

A Simplifying Model in the U.S.
The U.S. simplifying models effort involved work with some six hundred fifty subjects, and exploration of many different explanatory strategies.
Importantly, the domain of food systems is so rich that there is a very wide variety of ideas and facts (Expert Propositions) that might be considered central to communications on this issue – from the fact that there are mechanisms and supply chains behind each and every food that people consume, to the fact that increasing consolidation in the food industry leads to particular problems, to the problem of low wages and working conditions among agricultural workers, to environmental and conservation issues related to land and oceans, to ideas about global food markets, and so forth. One of the most important tasks of the U.S. simplifying models project, based on a combination of trial and error as well as cognitive analysis, was identifying which facts and propositions offer lay people the most useful window into the topic as a whole, and which are most susceptible to being effectively communicated (not necessarily the same list).
There are at least two very different ways of arriving at these “target propositions”:

• The consensus approach

Perhaps the standard way of answering this question is through a democratic process in which various advocates, who represent divergent perspectives, hash out among themselves a reasonable compromise – typically a short statement produced by a committee, that amounts to a kind of middle ground among often divergent opinions. Unfortunately, the resulting statement typically cannot be effectively communicated to the public because it lacks conceptual/cultural coherence – it simply does not make sense to laypeople.

• The cognitive approach

The approach taken by Cultural Logic in the U.S. research represents a fundamental departure from the consensus approach, in that decisions about which are the central expert propositions are not made a priori, but are themselves arrived at as part of the research process. Specifically, the US research was aimed at identifying expert propositions that are both most effective at getting ordinary Americans to think more deeply about food systems and the problem of sustainability, and most susceptible to being communicated to a broad public.

In the end, the idea that proved to be both most helpful most effectively communicated was the idea of a “Runaway Food System” that is threatening vital “Foundations” we depend on. The Runaway System involves methods and practices that are increasingly powerful and in need of management and control, and the Foundations at stake (of life and of the food supply) include local ecosystems, fertile soil and a fresh water supply. According to this two-part idea, our approaches to supplying ourselves with food have changed radically and grown ever more powerful and less controlled in recent decades, with consequences that cannot be accepted or ignored.
This “Runaway Food System/Vital Foundations” concept can be expressed and illustrated as follows, for instance:

Experts are increasingly concerned about what they call our Runaway Food System. The way we produce food today has radically changed, and now has the power to alter the Foundations of life as we know it almost by accident. Farming chemicals like pesticides and weed-killer are permanently altering our soil and water. Genetic engineering is changing the nature of the plants and animals we eat. And mile-long fishing nets are dragging the ocean floor and altering ecosystems. America needs to retake control of this runaway food system before it does more damage to the foundations we depend on.

Explanations along these lines helped produce conversations that focused on approaches to food production per se (as opposed to more generic problems with the modern world), that took a big-picture perspective, and that involved the idea that we can and must exercise more careful control over how food is produced.
(It is important to note that the paragraph cited here is not intended as anything like final “copy.” Rather, it is one particular format for expressing the key ideas, adapted to the requirements of our testing methodology.)
In addition to the qualitative evidence from conversations based on this explanatory approach, the model was included in a “priming survey” conducted by Public Knowledge, LLC. Priming surveys are nationwide telephone surveys that compare people’s responses to a variety of indicator questions about food systems, based on which explanations and perspectives they were offered early in the conversation. The priming survey produced quantitative evidence that a brief exposure to the simplifying model helped people adopt more productive perspectives on food systems (especially when combined with the idea that we should think about food systems in terms of the Legacy we are leaving to future generations).

A Comparison Between U.S. and European qualitative findings
Following completion of qualitative, descriptive research in the U.S. (by Cultural Logic and Public Knowledge, commissioned the FrameWorks Institute on behalf of the W.K.Kellogg Foundation) and in Europe (by Optem) it was possible to produce a tentative comparison of these findings (tentative due to differences in method and in the research questions focused on in the different studies). An earlier memo on this topic is reproduced as an appendix to this report (“Patterns in Thinking about Food Systems and Sustainability: Comparison of Qualitative Findings in the United States and Europe,” by Joseph Grady, Ph.D. and Axel Aubrun, Ph.D. Cultural Logic, LLC, for the King Baudouin Foundation). Among the most relevant findings from this comparison were the following:

• Europeans are more sensitive than Americans to various points related to food system sustainability. They have at least a slight “head start” in thinking about such issues as the environmental impacts of agriculture, the potential unreliability of the food supply, social justice issues (e.g. related to farmers’ incomes), and loss of tradition.
• Europeans also have a stronger sense that government should take a role in appropriately regulating food-related industries, though they may be very skeptical regarding government officials’ motives.
• Europeans demonstrate rather more resistance to rhetorical messages, and are, for example, more skeptical of the motives of “big business” than are Americans.
• In terms of conceptual knowledge – such as clear understanding of what “sustainability” means, Europeans and U.S. residents are not very far removed from one another. While Europeans are often able to make better guesses about what some key terms refer to, due to heightened general awareness of environmental threats, for instance, they do not have a clear sense of causal mechanisms. As a result, they are not able to infer much about policy choices. In short, there is room for an educational communications effort (or component) in Europe, as there is in the U.S.

Given this background, Cultural Logic’s French research was designed to test whether explanatory messages parallel to those that worked best in the US could also work well in the French context. A positive answer to this question would be taken as a promising sign that more broadly international messages can be developed.