Sustainable Food Laboratory

How and Why Americans Don't Think about Food Systems

Cultural Logic and the FrameWorks Institute investigated why and how Americans manage to remain blind to the processes of food production and distribution. In work commissioned by the W.K.Kellogg Foundation and as part of the Sustainable Food Lab, they looked into patterns of thought in order to find more effective ways of communicating (see Cognitive Analysis).

In the U.S. most people are indifferent to the whole question of where their food comes from or associate food sustainability with personal consumer choices -- their plate, their refrigerator, their children.

"The lack of a specific model of food systems means that certain kinds of information have no place to "stick" in people's minds." (p. 33)

When they are induced to think about food production their thinking reflects a generic sense of how the "modern" world works. The degree of modernization in food production is exaggerated, "modernization" is seen as unstoppable and problems (soil, water and landscapes deterioration) are the "price of progress." From this perspective it is easy to see that "sustainability" - preserving things as they are - sounds like a contradiction of modernization.

"People's default assumptions is that altering the nature of Food Systems is akin to diverting the course of modernization, a project most people would regard as foolish or hopeless." (p. 45)

Read the Summary of Findings or download the report from the right hand column of this page.