Vers une compréhension globale des systèmes alimentaires par les cercles de vie sociale

Where then should we start in the important and complex process of systematizing questions of sustainable urban food policies? The usual place to begin is with the question of food as we understand it today: produced agriculturally, distributed though market mechanisms, and consumed in restaurants and people's homes. Not dissimilar from most accounts, Wikipedia provides a changing snapshot of this dominant way of understanding food. It defines the food system as the 'growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, and disposal of food and food-related items'.2 While this sounds like a holistic account of the categories of the food system, it is a mechanical food chain from production to disposal, from farm-gate to kitchen and garbage bin"”useful in temporal terms for life-cycle analyses, but limiting when it comes to consider urban sustainability or policy questions, particularly in relation to political power or cultural meaning. In the end it tends to be an economic commodity chain with other things tacked on. In Search of an Alternative Approach: One alternative, the Circles of Social Life approach begins with the question of the human condition in general. If food is part of the human condition"”and we know that food is foundational to human life and sociality"”then how can we begin to depict that condition in a way that at once remains holistic and allows us to demarcate the domains and subdomains that are relevant to food policy? Most pressingly, how can we do so without being overwhelmed by the usual starting point of economics? Food systems approaches have begun to do this, but they tend to pass too quickly over this first step. For example, Geoff Tansey and Tony Worsley's work does this through a three-domain model. They begin with the biological, namely, 'the living processes used to produce food'; the economic and political, the power exercised over the food system; and the social and cultural., 'the personal relations, community values and cultural traditions which affect people's use of food'.3 This has a wonderful generality and is much better than the usual Triple Bottom Line approach.