Wasted Food and Sustainable Urban Systems: Prioritizing Research Needs

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Urban systems, geographical areas with a high concentration of human activity and interactions, will house ~ 66% of the world's population by 2050, nearly double the amount of their current population amount. Urban systems represent a critical nexus in the food-to-waste process. Across the United States, approximately 31-40% of the food supply, or over 1,250 calories and nearly 1 pound of food per capita per day, is wasted for various reasons. This direct waste represents an estimated 30 million acres of cropland, 4.2 trillion gallons of irrigation water, 780 million pounds of pesticides, and 1.8 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer "discarded" with this food waste. City food systems import vast quantities of food for their populations and businesses, and food waste represents the largest component of municipal solid waste. The food-to-waste processes in urban systems provides opportunities to develop more sustainable urban systems. Food is culture, and people have strong relationships with food. Motivating change to reduce wasted food is challenging and requires an understanding of drivers such as psychology, economics, culture, and marketing. Current momentum by cities to implement food waste strategies requires momentum in fundamental research as well. This workshop, scheduled tentatively on August 19-20, 2019, in Baltimore, MD, will convene interdisciplinary urban food system actors, experts in diverse aspects of wasted food, and researchers with the goal of co-creating a research agenda on wasted food as a sustainable urban systems opportunity. The workshop will include academics, city staff, and non-profit representatives. Members of the steering committee include representatives from Johns Hopkins University, the Ohio State University, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the University of California-Berkeley, and the Baltimore Office of Sustainability.To create a research agenda that addresses needs of practitioners while building a strong scientific basis for future work, a workshop will be held on the food-to-waste process through the convergent lens of urban sustainability, aiming for deep integration across disciplines and between researchers and practitioners. The workshop structure will blend design principles and tools from engineering, public health, economics, and public policy. These principles and tools include a participatory design approach, use of the Center for Government Excellence's Roadmap for Policy Change, an agenda shaped by the UK Design Council's Double Diamond model, and an adapted innovation framework for evaluating and culling the list of future approaches. The conference will include strong community engagement, with an emphasis on diversity and equity. Participants will come from diverse backgrounds and include city staff, non-profit and for-profit practitioners, and academic experts from a wide range of disciplines including public health, engineering, economics, government, environmental science, sociology, food service and hospitality, and business. There will be a pre-conference survey to generate relevant ideas for discussion, and field trips in order to stimulate ideas for future research directions. Conference participation will be open to interested graduate students, and the findings from the event will be disseminated to relevant stakeholders and groups. The findings will also be incorporated into onsite and online course curricula of the organizing team.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.