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FormalPara Food for Thought: A Call to Uproot Inequity in Chicago’s Food System AuthorGroup Author AuthorName Kristopher Walton

As a Chicago native, I have a deep passion for the well-being of the city I call home. For years, my academic and professional interests have been dedicated to ways that I can make my home a healthy and equitable place to live. Frankly, the best part of Chicago is the people who call it home. For many years, Jerry Kaufman, too, lived and worked in Chicago, and his love for the city was lifelong. Most Chicagoans share a deep passion for our city and will be quick to share our love of Chicago with anyone, whether they asked for it or not.

That love for Chicago is what drives many of us to fight for equity throughout the city. One part of that fight includes our food system. Like many larger US cities, the South and West sides of Chicago suffer from food apartheid, the past and present racially discriminatory structures that led to food insecurity in marginalized communities. Despite the many efforts to address the disparities in our food system, there is still a lot of work to be done.

The fight for food equity starts at the community level. There are many community movements that take place on the South and West sides of Chicago that address legitimate concerns such as gang violence, over-policing, and community infrastructure. With so many other concerns, food is often a second thought. While important, other things get prioritized. The question is, how do we bring light to the importance of food equity in the midst of a city plagued with issues?

The question encompasses a complex problem that requires a complex answer. We can unpack the question to figure out ways the community can band together to start a grassroots movement to bring attention to the lack of equity in our food system.

Food systems education, too, is part of the solution and it must start early. Schools throughout the city can add food and nutrition education to their curriculum and school lunches can be made to match the lessons. In addition to lessons in school, the city of Chicago should expand their support for local initiatives that promote food equity. There’s a storied nonprofit (originally grassroots) movement in Chicago related to the food system: Urban Growers Collective (in various incarnations), Growing Home, and NeighborSpace, for example, have been around for decades. There are other newer grassroots efforts as well, such as Catatumbo Cooperative Farm (https://southsideweekly.com/healing-and-funding-chicagos-food-system/).

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has a large farm to school program, with an Eat What You Grow curriculum launching during the 2022–2023 school year. Local/regional purchasing of protein and produce within a 350-mile radius of the city has been operational for many years now. CPS (in June 2017), the City (in October 2017), and Cook County (in May 2018) have each adopted a Good Food Purchasing resolution and are participating in that national program (https://goodfoodpurchasing.org/). A large coalition of organizations, including BIPOC-led groups, restaurants, and labor unions have signed on in support of good food purchasing (https://goodfoodcities.org/portfolio/chicago/).

The University of Illinois at Chicago’s SNAP-Ed programs focus on behavior change and ways to stretch peoples’ SNAP dollars on healthy foods. Additionally, there is the Eat, Move, Save program through the Illinois Universities Extension that promotes not just cost saving on nutritious food but also active life styles on a budget. Lastly, there must be affordable and quality grocery retail options in all neighborhoods.

There are many ways to increase equity in the food system in Chicago but no matter what the solutions are, they must tackle the root causes of why nutritious, affordable, and culturally important foods are not available in the communities that need them most. We cannot continue to trim branches and not chop the roots.

1 History of Food Systems Planning Pedagogy

In his 2003 keynote address at the American Planning Association (APA) National Planning Conference in Denver, Colorado, Jerry Kaufman exhorted the planners in attendance to wake up to the importance of planning for the food system, which had received attention in planning pedagogy for some time, but was far from widespread in planning practice. In the decades since Kaufman’s Denver address, planning academics have seen their way clear to regularly and more deeply engaging their students in food systems planning (Mendes et al. 2011; Greenstein et al. 2015), though planning practice—and to some extent planning pedagogy—continues to lag behind the innovations of urban agriculture practitioners. With notable exceptions (including those described elsewhere in this volume), the responsibility to plan—and plan equitably—for the food system is still rarely formalized in planning practice (Raja and Whittaker 2018) The chapters in this section of the book trace a more recent historical pedagogical arc that is tied fairly closely to traditional methods and processes used by planners, mapping the newer substantive area of food systems planning onto those traditional methods. Two of the chapters chart a clear, bold path forward to a more equitable and community-engaged food systems planning pedagogy and practice revolving around equity. If we follow this path, food systems planning pedagogy and practice can help lead the field of planning overall into a more just and equitable future.

As is often the case when a new subfield of planning develops, food systems planning pedagogy in the United States was typically piloted in either studio or special topics course formats. Planning studios allow students to apply a blend of theory and methods learned in other coursework to a real-world problem or issue, sometimes for a real-world client. Special topics courses allow faculty to explore new research interests while simultaneously meeting their teaching load obligations. Not every food systems planning course offered in the early days is covered in what follows below, but several significant courses that led the way in accredited planning programs are featured.

In 1977, an early food systems planning studio was taught at the University of Tennessee, and resulted in a report on food distribution and consumption in the city of Knoxville. This course, and a second studio course, taught at UCLA by Bob Gottlieb, were foundational in shaping Jerry Kaufman’s thinking and approach to food systems planning. The 1993 UCLA course resulted in Seeds of Change: Strategies for Food Security in the Inner City, a report that led to a subsequent master’s thesis written by Andy Fisher, one of the co-founders of the Community Food Security Coalition in 1996 and its long-time executive director. Then, in 1997, University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty members Jerry Kaufman and Kami Pothukuchi offered their food system planning studio, Fertile Ground: Planning for the Madison/Dane County Food System (Born et al. 2024; Pothukuchi and Glosser 2024). In their chapter, Fertile Ground: Reflections on the Impacts and Implications of an Early University Food System Plan, Born, Herbach, and Allan, alumni of the UW–Madison’s then-Department of Urban and Regional Planning (URPL),Footnote 1 discuss their experience participating in this early studio. At the time, the studio course was used to explore this developing subfield of planning for both faculty and students. Born et al. reflect on how their participation in the studio shaped them on a personal level—from how they think about food in their own lives, to conducting research and teaching in their own academic and professional careers. They note that the studio’s content involved addressing issues of racism, which helped to keep some of the students engaged in the field of planning (while issues of white supremacy and racism were not included in food systems planning courses early on, these topics became explicit in later studios).

In 2003, six years after Fertile Ground, Samina Raja, who had studied with Kaufman, Pothukuchi, and Caton Campbell at the UW—Madison, led an award-winning food systems studio as an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo. In Revisiting Food for Growth: Lessons from a Food Systems Studio, Judelsohn and Kelly (2024) offer a retrospective of the possibilities and challenges of a community-engaged food systems planning studio. While Raja had internalized what Kaufman and Pothukuchi said about ethics and equity, these topics were not at the forefront of her own course. The studio course did set the stage for a multi-decade relationship with community partners, however, and like Fertile Ground, influenced students to tackle food systems issues in their careers.Footnote 2

By the early 2000s, food systems planning was being taught more widely in standard lecture formats (Hammer 2004), with the inclusion of some modest service-learning components. At the UW Madison, Caton Campbell had begun regularly offering an introductory course on community and regional food systems planning to masters and upper-level undergraduate students, while Beatley and Denckla Cobb had begun offering a similar course at the University of Virginia (Mendes et al. 2011). In 2015, Greenstein et al. (2015) followed up on Hammer’s (2004) previous work, finding that the number of accredited planning programs including food systems planning in their curriculum had tripled between 2004 and 2012.

Food systems planning pedagogy in the late 1990s and early 2000s did not yet focus on the social determinants of health, as Born et al. (2024) and Judelsohn and Kelly (2024) note in their discussions of the early studio courses. Much work at this time focused on “improving human and environmental well-being” (Cannuscio and Glanz 2011), rather than disease prevention, racial health disparities, or economic injustices such as redlining. By the mid-2000s, however, the American Public Health Association adopted its own food system policy guide (Pothukuchi and Glosser 2024). This interest from a field of professional practice closely allied to planning, and the concomitant resurgence of the broader connection between planning and public health, partially authenticated food systems planning for skeptics in academic planning departments. At the same time, the emphasis, carried over from public health, on nutrition and health aspects of the food system limited a fuller exploration of the links between the food system and other systems for which planners routinely plan: this despite the clarity with which Pothukuchi and Kaufman (1999) argued that the food system should not be a stranger to planning (see, e.g. Rosenberg and Cohen 2018; Cohen and Ilieva 2021).

In the early 2000s, community food assessments (CFAs) began to be taught often in the studio course format, as a baseline method for planning students to understand a local food system, applying standard methods of planning analysis to the new food systems planning subfield (Pothukuchi 2004). Pothukuchi’s handbook, published and disseminated by the Community Food Security Coalition, remains a best practice manual for this type of work. Students conducting CFAs drew upon the traditional quantitative and secondary data sources relied upon by practicing planners, but supplemented them with qualitative methods such as focus groups to garner input from community members and urban agriculture practitioners that shaped action steps in plans and policy recommendations relevant to the communities being studied. By engaging more directly with community members, CFAs also surfaced the structural tensions and inequities in local food systems, but did not always tie them back to policy and practice. Broad (2016), however, describes a powerful use of CFA as a food justice organizing tool in South Central Los Angeles. Applying a food systems lens to cities, Ilieva (2016) identifies typologies of food system assessments that have become part of the standard urban food planning “toolkit,” and describes clusters of indicators and metrics around urban food system policy goals such as environmental sustainability, local economic prosperity, public health, fairness in the food system, and resilient communities.

2 From Community Engagement to Equity and Justice

Food systems planning courses have evolved from their early emphasis on food access, nutrition, and the physical aspects of the food system (though these remain central). Now, more planning academics are grounding their teaching in the social determinants of health (see, e.g., Schulz and Northridge (2004), and other equity issues. Today, most planning faculty drawn to teaching about the food system tend to have interests in ethics and social justice that are less theoretical and more action-oriented. Faculty offering courses on food systems planning have typically emphasized service learning and community-based service initiatives (Mendes et al. 2011). While these initiatives can be crucial opportunities for students to practice what they have learned in class, they can also be problematic. The last two decades have seen gradual movement from a one-off service learning model in planning pedagogy, particularly in community planning, towards longer-term relationships with communities, flipping the language describing the bidirectional relationship at play from “university-community partnerships” to “community-university partnerships” and adding an emphasis on community capacity building (Botchwey and Umemoto 2020; Denckla Cobb and Bingham 2024; Whittaker et al. 2017). Over time, planning academics have learned, sometimes the hard way, that they and their students should not enter communities with preconceptions about what a community needs or wants in their food environment. (Nor should they labor under the misapprehension that urban agriculture can replace the conventional food system in feeding cities.) While food systems planning pedagogy has made steps in the right direction, planning academics must more explicitly address power dynamics and how white supremacy is woven throughout urban agriculture and the food system—but only if faculty have done the work to understand and dismantle white supremacy in themselves.Footnote 3

In teaching and learning about urban agriculture and the food system, it is particularly important for faculty and students to seek out the types of knowledge that are resident in communities themselves, and to bring these bodies of local knowledge–and the experts who hold them–directly into the classroom. In a classic article that remains relevant today, Umemoto (2001) argues that learning competencies should be based on culture, ways of knowing, and ethical actions, rather than the standards or defaults of planning practice. Caton Campbell (2004) proposes that planners and planning academics “build a common table” around community food systems discourse, using stakeholder analysis to understand and bridge the values, interests, and positions of various food system actors. Usher (2015) reconceptualizes food access as a dynamic model of five intertwined dimensions encompassing “the social interactions, cultural norms, socio-political, and economic factors that influence access to resources across the landscape.” Although Usher’s model takes grocery store location as its example, the same dimensions could be adapted and applied by students in a studio course as checkpoints with communities when creating an urban agriculture plan for a jurisdiction. In addition, faculty and students alike would benefit from doing the deeper work of examining their own social identities for their impact not only on how course content is assembled, presented, and analyzed, but especially for how those identities influence interactions with communities when planning for urban agriculture and the food system. Botchwey and Umemoto (2020) offer a thoughful, detailed checklist of questions for faculty to use in designing community-engaged service learning courses from a capacity-building approach. Valley et al. (2020) offer an “Equity Competency Model” as an approach to underlie food system planning training. This model includes four domains of awareness for students (who will be future practitioners): “awareness of self, awareness of others and one’s interactions with them, awareness of systems of oppression, and strategies and tactics for dismantling inequity” (Valley et al. 2020).

In Chap. 24, Mendes offers a way forward for food systems planning pedagogy, building on her previous work. In the final chapter of this section, Mendes reflects upon a 2011 article co-authored with Nasr and others on food systems pedagogy, and how planning literature and pedagogy has evolved since that time. She identifies four themes from the literature that signify how the field has shifted since its inception: interdisciplinarity, social justice and ethics, community-university research partnerships, and systems thinking. These themes both signify early concerns of food systems planning educators and newer ideas of skills, values, theories, and methods that future food systems planners need (Mendes 2024). Looking back at over two decades of pedagogy, Mendes identifies themes of interest to early food systems planning educators: “Increased awareness of, and sensitivity to the diversity of people involved and affected by food systems issues; Increased attention to the importance of stakeholder involvement in planning processes; Higher awareness of the broader governance context of planning; Deeper understanding of the links between globalization and planning education; and Better awareness of the connections between food systems and sustainability principles” (Mendes et al. 2011, quoted in Mendes 2024).

In the decade since Mendes et al. (2011) was published, a sizable body of literature on urban agriculture and the food system has emerged. While some themes overlap with those identified by Mendes et al. a decade ago, planning pedagogy now has available to it numerous resources with an increased awareness of issues of equity, ethics, and the power dynamics that obtain in food systems between communities and universities, and communities and local governments. With respect to urban agriculture and the food system, Cadieux and Slocum (2015) warn of the co-optation of the term “food justice.” They argue that the term has often been used as a catch-all for anything related to urban agriculture and the food system, much of which does not actually pertain to justice, and that food justice is not a term that can or should be broadly applied, but instead should be intended to mean work that “seek[s] ways to intervene against structural inequalities” (Cadieux and Slocum 2015). Specifically, they say, there are four areas in which true food justice work occurs, including trauma and inequality, exchange (including themes of trust and cooperation), land, and labor (Cadieux and Slocum 2015). Community activism toward food justice and self-determination is covered powerfully in numerous examples and case studies by Broad (2016) and contributors to Alkon and Guthman (2017).

To that end, in Chap. 25, Denckla Cobb and Bingham bring us to the contested nature of food systems planning courses in the present day, explicitly acknowledging and considering the macro factors–structural racism and oppression–that have caused inequities and injustices in the food system. The authors home in on the importance of using university resources in the community as a force for good, to advance systems change through deep partnerships with neighboring communities. In a detailed case study, they reflect on historically tense town-gown relationships in Charlottesville, Virginia, and proffer a new framework by which university classes might engage with communities more equitably. They argue that the food systems planning subfield is well positioned to bridge rifts between universities and communities, both because of the nature of the subject and because planning educators have tended to approach the food system through attempts at community-engaged pedagogy (see also Whittaker et al. 2017, on the role urban universities can play in such partnerships).

We concur with Denckla Cobb and Bingham that it is critical for academics to engage actively with the myriad ways in which whiteness plays out in the food system. In working towards equity in urban agriculture and the food system, it is essential to develop a pedagogical culture that acknowledges the key white supremacy culture narratives (individualism, paternalism, neoliberalism, and universalism) outlined by Conrad (2020) and that more explicitly and transparently addresses whiteness in the food system. Urban agriculture and food systems planning courses will perpetuate systemic injustices if faculty do not make future planning practitioners not just cognizant, but conversant in how planning practice and policy making have exacerbated systemic racial injustices and disparities around food. Furthermore, those involved in food systems practice, whether as planners or urban agriculture practitioners, are frequently confronted with issues of white supremacy; yet planning educators do not always train students (future practitioners) adequately in recognizing and addressing them when they arise.

For example, larger urban agriculture projects have often been the purview of white-led nonprofit organizations that have access to land, financial and other resources, and to whom funders are comfortable making grants. BIPOC urban agriculture practitioners are often more interested in cooperatives and for-profit entities than nonprofit structures, as these allow for greater control over the direction that their organization or business takes, rather than being tied to meeting funder priorities. Furthermore, Black farmers have had far greater challenges with respect to land acquisition and tenure, as Gosch et al. (2024) outline in Chap. 17 of this book. Future planners need to know how to engage respectfully with urban agriculture practitioners to understand the challenges they face, in order to create useful urban agriculture policies and plans. Future planners need to go beyond learning cultural competency to demonstrate cultural humility (Sweet 2018) in their work and cultivate compassion for those with whom they plan (Lyles and White 2019). In addition, planners need to take care not to conflate facilitating urban agriculture projects with achieving larger food justice goals (Horst et al. 2017, this volume, Chap. 6).

Denckla Cobb and Bingham make the case for food systems planning to lead the way towards what they term equitable pedagogy: “[O]f all university faculty, it is those who teach food systems and urban agriculture courses who most need to pave this way, as food lies at the heart of a community’s identity and resilience, revealing its level of compassion, care, and inclusion” (Denckla Cobb and Bingham 2024). In the course of developing their model of equitable pedagogy, Denckla Cobb and Bingham address the four competencies that Valley et al. (2020) have argued should underlie food systems pedagogy, outlining the ways in which faculty and students engage with community partners.

Denckla Cobb and Bingham’s equitable pedagogy proposes shifting the student mindset from definitive recommendations to “a more facilitative mindset of careful observation and listening to discern community interests and needs” via qualitative interviews, practicing respectful and professional communication with students, role-playing scenarios with students, and having the class devise a set of “best practices” when engaging with community members. We encourage faculty to have community partners vet these best practices for their grounding in reality, lest students run the risk of repeating past mistakes borne of privilege. Importantly, the authors note that students should be made aware of the historical narrative between a community and its neighbor university and how “a culture of white supremacy continue[s] to manifest in stark disparities in jobs, wages, housing, and health, through guest speakers and readings” (Denckla Cobb and Bingham 2024). While the authors are referring here to their experiences at the University of Virginia and in Charlottesville, the lesson can be applied to any community-university relationship, because faculty members have all too often treated communities as learning labs for their students rather than as real communities of people living in specific places.

As a field dominated by white academics, food systems planning pedagogy needs to ensure that students grapple with the power dynamics and the historical and continuing systemic oppression present in the food system. Denckla Cobb and Bingham suggest that the classroom is a place where food justice work can easily be co-opted if not done thoughtfully, given the many constraints that come with a one-semester course. They note that by explicitly addressing historic inequities and creating multi-year, community-university partnerships that build equity in the community, we can engage in food justice in our pedagogy. By asking who is at the table and redefining what we consider “expert” knowledge, we teach food systems in a justice-oriented way. In doing so, we can also begin to address the individualism, neoliberalism, paternalism, and universalism that problematically permeate the food system and limit the effectiveness of urban agriculture and food systems planning pedagogy and practice.