City food flow analysis. A new method to study local consumption

Summary

The aim of this paper is to present and discuss a new approach to assess a city's supply with food from the nearby region: the city food flow analysis. In view of the growing challenges of the global food system, the local level has increasingly been identified—both by citizen-consumers and city administrations—as a relevant scale to develop sustainable alternatives. Although different actors often agree on the aim to increase local food supply, the discussions and initiatives convey the lack of knowledge and data about the actual origin of food supplied to cities. Without knowing where food comes from and through which channels it reaches the consumer, it is difficult to develop alternatives that could eventually change the food system. This paper presents and discusses the city food flow analysis as a methodology to close this lack of information. It consists of a four-step approach that leads to a clear picture on the local food production around a city, the consumption of local food in a city and the importance of different supply chains for local food in the city, including retail and gastronomy. The methodology is illustrated with the example of two cases (cities). The city food flow analysis provides detailed information about the current situation of urban food provisioning, which city stakeholders can use to start an informed discussion process about necessary changes in the food system, re-embedding of cities into their territorial context. However, data are not always fully available, which is a result in itself that illustrates the challenges of re-localizing local food provisioning.