AFHVS 2016 presidential address: Decoding diversity in the food system: wheat and bread in North America

Agric Hum Values (2016) 33:953960 DOI 10.1007/s10460-016-9727-y

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Web End = AFHVS 2016 presidential address: Decoding diversity in the food system: wheat and bread in North America

Philip H. Howard1

Accepted: 15 October 2016 / Published online: 6 October 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract Diversity is important for the resilience of food systems, as well as for its own sake. Just how diverse are the systems that produce our food? I explore this question with a focus on wheat and bread and North America, and even more specically in baking, milling and farming. Although the opacity of food and agricultural systems makes denitive answers difcult, these segments appear to be increasingly uniform with respect to ownership, geography, varieties and genes. There are also important countertrends, and while efforts to resist uniformity are currently small, they are making some progress in maintaining or even increasing diversity in some areas.

Keywords Diversity Uniformity Ownership

Geography Varieties Wheat Bread

Introduction

One of the reasons that our societies (Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society; Association for the Study of Food and Society; Canadian Association for Food Studies) as well as the number of food studies programs are growing so rapidly is that food systems have become quite opaque.

It is very difcult to answer many questions we have about our food, including as one example: how diverse are the systems producing what we eat? Diversity is an important value for its own sake, and it is also important for resilience. For instance, monocultures of genetically uniform organisms in food production provided favorable conditions for potato blight in Ireland in the mid-1800s, corn blight in the United States and Canada in 1970, and in more recent years, avian inuenza in Asia and North America.

Characterizing diversity is an important task for interdisciplinary food scholars. Our ndings may help raise awareness of the often hidden risks of inadequate levels of diversity. In addition, sharing these ndings with the public has the potential to assist efforts to address these problems, and to move toward more resilient food systems. In recent years we have seen not only greater public interest in the food system, but more collective actions to demand change. This has resulted in notable successes,...