Food Systems Academy

Background

It's funny how what seems like a simple idea when you first have it turns into something much bigger and more complicated. That's what's happened to me with this project.

It started with a conversation in Canada. Alison Blay-Palmer was giving me a lift from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Fredricton, New Brunswick where the Canadian Association for Food Studies was meeting in May 2011. While chatting, I asked if it might be useful if I put up a lecture on the web that she could use with her class sometime. She thought it might be.

Fast forward to a discussion the following November with a playwright and video maker Sarah Woods at the final conference of the This is Rubbish project, for which I'd been a mentor. She convinced me that simply filming a lecture was a poor way of communicating. Far better, she said, to speak directly to the viewer.

By early 2013, many conversations with a wide range of people later and some seed funding in place, I filmed a pilot video with Sarah as director and Richard Gott, cameraman and editor.

By now, the idea had become to develop a series of open access online talks, for use by those teaching some aspect of food and farming – but open to anyone to watch. They aim to provide an overview of the complex and multidisciplinary nature of food systems. Everyone I'd asked to contribute had been happy to do so and I had a good line up of potential talks.

I also feel that thinking about food is a way into understanding the challenges we face as human societies dealing with unjust histories, contemporary inequality, climate change, and other issues like competition over resources. It also illuminates the opportunities that exist to deal with them.

We got a pilot ready by spring 2013. Back in Canada again, I showed this to a group of potential users at a graduate student workshop on Food, Agriculture and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario in mid April. After very useful feedback, we revised it and make it available on the web in June 2013 through my website. Since then it's been used in classes in few places (see here for comments).

It was around then that Bill Davies from Lancaster University also came on board. He liked the potential line up and saw a use for the talks in a MOOC – massive open on-line course – on Global Food Security the University was planning. As we worked on the next few talks, with in kind support from staff and students at the University of Bradford's Media School, it quickly became clear that making these things was more complicated, time consuming and costly than I had imaged at the start.

In fact, I didn't really think that far ahead. I just pushed on with the idea because it seemed the right thing to do in today's world with the possibilities the internet throws up for sharing ideas and experience. (In the early 1990s, I'd written The Food System - A Guide with Tony Worsley, who was in Australia. We'd never met again after I had spend a month in 1990 in Australia planning it out with him. After that we'd swapped chapters and material over the early precursor of the internet – JANET, the joint academic network, with phone plugged into rubber cups, weird noises and very slow transfer rates. This is the 2010's version of that.)

By late 2013, and after some months of discussions, developing a project plan and costings, I received funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to pay for the support I needed to develop the initial range of talks. The funding is split over 2 years and ends in March 2016. This site was launched in September 2014 with 12 talks and three more were added in 2016. Since then a range of conversations, interviews and stories have been added through the blog.

Thanks for reading this far and do let us have your feedback.

Geoff Tansey

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