3
The Sustainable Food Lab: From Farm to Fork
How and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of this world—and what is to become of it.
— Michael Pollen, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
One sign of genuine strategic intent is doing things because we personally think it’s a good idea, as opposed to doing something because we are told to. At Generon I found genuine strategic intent in abundance. Behind a relatively conservative front, I found myself part of a tiny group that had taken upon itself a mission to address “ten global problems in ten years.” No one had asked us to undertake this mission and we had no authority from anyone to take it on.1
The means of undertaking this mission was called the change lab. Change labs are first-generation social labs. They’re prototypes because they draw on a relatively narrow base of approaches, whereas next-generation social labs draw on a much wider range. During the life of Generon, several change labs were attempted.
The core idea of the change lab came from Leadership in the Digital Economy, coauthored by Joseph Jaworksi and Otto Scharmer.2 They argued that “doing well in the new economy requires the enhancement of a particular capacity: the ability to sense and actualize emerging realities.” The lab from its very first conception was concerned less with planning and more with emergence.
In a change lab, a group of stakeholders work to surface their own ideas for what will effectively shift a system from its current unacceptable state to a desired future state. The change lab starts by bringing participants together around a broadly defined area, usually represented by a question. We call this activity convening. The question has to be sufficiently broad to appeal to a wide group of stakeholders and sufficiently open as to allow people to pursue multiple directions in addressing the challenge they are concerned with.
Over the course of a change lab, this diverse group goes through a common journey, which in broad strokes consists of seeing the system with their own eyes, connecting to their own personal commitments, and quickly prototyping seed initiatives on the ground. These phases of activity— called Sensing, Presencing, and Realizing—are drawn directly from the U Process,3 an innovation process that informs the underlying architecture of first-generation social labs.4
During my time at Generon I was principally involved in three change labs: the Sustainable Food Lab, the Bhavishya Lab, and one focused on aboriginal issues in Canada, which was prompted by a series of teenage suicides in a community off Vancouver Island. Although we worked with the First Nations and other stakeholders on this issue for many years, this effort was unsuccessful. One of the issues was the definition of the problem we inherited—that aboriginal communities were the problem that needed to be fixed.
The habitus at the heart of this challenge was many centuries old: most responses to the challenges faced by aboriginal communities were built on reconstituting the status quo. Almost every attempt we made to evolve away from the status quo was blocked. I still struggle with this failure, thinking often about the communities we worked with and pondering our role and what we might have done differently.
THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM
The story of the modern global food system is the story of unintended consequences. It’s the story of a causal logic run amok. It’s the familiar story of how we’re all intimately connected without quite grasping just how intimately. It’s the deeply disturbing story of a system characterized by historic injustice that continues to produce injustice today. It’s a story that goes to the throbbing, bleeding heart of sustainability. It can, without being hyperbolic, be called the mother of all systemic problems.
Food is perhaps the first complex challenge humanity has faced. From our time as hunter-gatherers through the era of modern mega-farms, we have struggled to figure out how to feed ourselves. The modern food system somewhat magically supports a world population that our ancestors would have found unimaginable. Agriculture is the largest industry on the planet, employing an estimated 1.3 billion people.5 And prophecies of its collapse are as old as writing. Famine is a specter that has haunted humanity for ten thousand years, as far back as the invention of agriculture.
The world’s population is projected to grow from its current 6.5 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050.6 World food production probably needs to double in the coming decades.7 This has enormous implications. The expansion of agricultural activity as currently practiced would severely impact already-stressed natural resources. Agriculture and livestock production use about half of the habitable land on Earth, which doesn’t even include vast quantities of water and fossil fuels.
If world food production does not grow fast enough—given that one billion people on the planet go hungry today (despite there being technically enough food in the world to feed them)—what will it mean to add three billion more? The question isn’t simply how to feed the world population; the question is how to feed all of us in such a way that we don’t simply degrade our ecosystems to the point where they collapse under us.
Food is necessary for life. This means that market-oriented approaches to supplying food are problematic. From a pure market-oriented point of view, high demand for scarce resources is a recipe for high prices and high profit margins. This formula for profit is fine when we’re dealing with a non-subsistence commodity, such as an iPad—no one will die if its demand far exceeds supply and its price goes through the roof. But when food is treated as a commodity, all sorts of issues arise.
One key problem in a market-oriented food system is the issue of factoring in what economists have come to call externalities, that is, the environmental costs associated with producing food. An often-cited example of this involves factoring in all the environmental costs (the cost of water being a big part) of a Big Mac from McDonald’s. Instead of costing a few dollars, it would cost a few hundred dollars.8 The fact that the consumer is not paying for these externalities raises the question: who will pay for them? Typically such resources are extracted from the commons, hence the expression “tragedy of the commons.”
Due to changing lifestyle choices (more people want to eat meat) and increases in population, the demand for food is growing, which creates a race to the bottom where meeting demand through strictly market mechanisms will lead to the eventual collapse of our ecosystems.
The goal then is to figure out what sustainable food actually looks like, that is, food that’s sustainable from multiple angles—from environmental to financial. How is it possible to meet the world’s food needs while maintaining a healthy planet? This is the question at the heart of the Sustainable Food Lab.
THE MULTIPLE AND CONFLICTING LOGICS OF FOOD
What is sustainable is most intriguing for me. Sustainable agriculture for a rural population of two billion is one thing, for six billion evenly divided [between rural and urban] is another and for nine billion, which is mostly urban, is an entirely different thing. You don’t solve that—no matter how big you are—alone.
—Food Lab Champion9
Through a grindingly painful process I realized that there actually isn’t a single overriding logic guiding the global food system. Rather, there are multiple, conflicting, and sometimes faulty theories, profoundly disconnected from each other, that contribute to its incredible complexity. Where these theories do meet, more often than not, the engagement is violent, with supporters of different beliefs seeking to exploit, delegitimize, or even destroy the other.
The Food Lab grew out of a breakfast conversation in 2002. That breakfast, in some ways, was decades in the making. It brought together four people who represented different approaches in handling complex social problems that had been maturing for many years.
The first was Hal Hamilton, a farmer and a long-time food activist. He had decades of experience, relationships, and focus on the sustainability of the food system. Don Seville, who worked with Hal, and Peter Senge represented systems thinking, a school of thought associated with Donella Meadows, one of the authors of Limits to Growth. Meadows first articulated the idea that the planet had a limited “carrying capacity” in terms of how many people it could support.10
Finally, there was my colleague Adam Kahane from Generon. Adam, for all intents and purposes, represented the change lab, an approach that was new to the scene and potentially offered an alternate path to the well-understood problem of sustaining global food systems.
The breakfast conversation “started exploring the possibility that the polarized debates over agricultural sustainability might benefit from the application of the ‘U’ method, which offers a process to foster breakthrough thinking and action on complex, cross-sector problems. The conversation later expanded to include Andre van Heemstra, Jan Kees Vis, and Jeroen Bordewijk of Unilever and Oran Hesterman of the Kellogg Foundation.”11
The Food Lab launched in 2004 in the Netherlands, after almost two years of work by the original breakfast group and others. It started as a two-year process, with some thirty-odd participants (called lab team members). Funding came mainly from the Kellogg Foundation with smaller amounts contributed from a number of other donors.
When I started working with Generon, the Food Lab was on the verge of launching. Even so, the exact constitution of the participants had not been finalized. In particular, the focus was on bringing in the corporate sector and ensuring adequate representation from a group that clearly formed a major part of the global food system. Without corporate sector participation, the Food Lab was arguably dead in the water because of the key role it played in the global food system.
Unilever was a major supporter of the Food Lab. Antony Burgmans, the Chairman of Unilever at the time, was what we called a champion. Jan Kees Vis, then a Sustainable Agriculture Manager for Unilever, participated as a lab team member and, in subsequent years, became a key champion of the lab. He also emerged as a driving force in Unilever’s ambitious attempts to source all its supplies from sustainable providers.
Before the lab launched, frantic negotiations and calls were being made to increase corporate participation. This effort by and large succeeded. The interesting thing I observed about corporate sector participation was how fragile it seemed and how much fear there was around the corporations walking out.
At the launch meeting of the Food Lab I was cautioned against recommending any reading to the participants—anything that might jeopardize their participation, especially literature critical of the global food system. (Interestingly, the readings listed in official lab documentation were mostly written by climate-change skeptics and defenders of industrial agriculture, with no references to the vast literature critiquing industrial agriculture.) This attitude within the support team, called the lab secretariat, was offset by the noncorporate sector participants, who initially included a broad spectrum of people critical of the growing corporatization of the food sector.
Everything about the Food Lab was carefully constructed. It consisted of a series of physical gatherings and workshops, which brought lab team members together to go through a shared innovation process, built on the U Process.
The venue for launching the Lab and its first workshop was the Blooming Hotel in Bergen, situated on the Dutch coast, off the North Sea. The hotel had been a folk school, a key education movement in the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries that provided a practical education for the children of farmers.
The focus of the change lab was “on practical initiatives, beginning with new or improved food supply chains, developed as a central focus of the Food Lab from the determination expressed by many [lab members] to make change ‘on the ground’ through practical action, pilot projects and viable full-scale food system interventions.”12 The hotel’s history echoed and mirrored the practical aspirations of the Food Lab.
WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE?
Eugenio Peixoto, Secretary of Agrarian Reform from Brazil, at the opening session of the lab, spoke powerfully about the issue of food equity. He spoke about “food apartheid” where consumers in the Global South were forced to eat genetically modified, processed, unhealthy food because it was all they could afford, while in the Global North consumers were able to eat organic, wholesome food at reasonable prices. These voices were critical to the lab. They provided the space allowing for more honest and deeper conversations.
Three characteristics about the lab struck me as novel and were likely unfamiliar to the participants. The first was the constitution of the lab team, that is, the core participants. This was a very diverse multi-stakeholder peer group. While groups can always be more diverse, the initial constitution of the lab brought together a wide range of organizational representation, political positions, and geographies, coupled with a relatively good gender balance. The rule of thumb behind the constitution of the lab team was “diverse and influential.” This idea came straight from Adam’s work with scenario planning and, in particular, the success of convening diverse participants for the Mont Fleur process in South Africa.13
The second novel aspect of the lab was the lack of a predetermined set of outcomes. The strategic goals of the lab were stated in various ways, but they were largely fuzzy. These included statements of purpose, such as “The purpose of the Sustainable Food Lab is to accelerate the movement of sustainably produced food from niche to mainstream” and “By 2018, the majority of the food bought and sold around the world is in a sustainability program in which such improvement is planned and measured.” This fuzziness served to bring a diverse group together because participants could interpret the strategic goals in their own way. A more formalized and quantitatively precise set of goals would interest a narrower set of stakeholders, thus reducing diversity.
The core process that the lab was built on, the U Process, largely eschews predetermined and planned outcomes in favor of emergent outcomes. Part of our challenge as a secretariat was to convince participants that there was a genuine openness to outcomes, that the process had not been gamed in any way, with the conveners and the secretariat pushing some secret agenda.
This was another reason for caution in disseminating any material that would betray the biases of the secretariat. The emergent nature of the process was very different from a purely planned approach, where sets of outcomes are exhaustively defined, usually by a single problem owner, and then the task becomes execution. This approach would not work with a diverse group for a number of reasons. If a single problem owner were to define the goals and strategy, then, by definition, this ownership would not be shared, and the probability of alignment with diverse stakeholders goes down. So from a very pragmatic point of view, both the fuzziness of the goals and the emergent nature of the process allowed for the convening of a diverse group. This did not mean that everyone was comfortable with that openness.
Indeed, on the very first day of the lab there was an outcry over the lack of formal definitions. Participants demanded that the secretariat define the term sustainable. Since this was the Sustainable Food Lab, what was the definition of the word? Members of the secretariat, by luck, insight, and belief, held up their hands, telling the participants that it was up to them to define the word, and reminding them that this was day one of a two-year process. We thus avoided a common trap in diverse gatherings, of getting bogged down in futile debates about language. In time, participants gained an understanding that multiple definitions of the word sustainable were prevalent across the system and, of course, within the lab itself.
The most interesting part of the first day for me was the exercise in which we asked people to bring two objects, one more sustainable and one less. That exercise brought out all the group’s diversity in startling color. One corporate participant had some Kraft and RJ Reynolds Lunchable pizzas as his unsustainable product. He called it a “product abomination” because it was marketed to kids and their parents as a healthy product, and, in fact, it was the exact opposite.
One of the French participants had cheese from eastern France, produced by farmers in little cooperatives, as his more sustainable product. To my surprise, he had picked a box of raw cane sugar from Brazil as his less-sustainable product. He explained that it was unsustainable because 800,000 Brazilians labored to produce it under really terrible conditions and to import such a product was a joke. I noticed Eugenio keeping a poker face and one of the other Brazilians sort of going red in the face—but neither said anything.
Afterward we were standing at the tables looking at the products, and Antony Burgmans from Unilever was looking through the less sustainable ones. He innocently picked up the cane sugar and asked why it was less sustainable. The red-faced Brazilian from earlier was standing next to him, and he started snarling about it. I mentioned the 800,000 workers as Burgmans beat a hasty retreat. The Brazilian mumbled something about “fucking Frenchman” and said, “Zaid, come to Brazil and I’ll take you and show you the cane plantations and we’ll see what’s what.” And he did.
This leads us to another novel aspect of the lab. The first part of the Change Lab, drawing on the U Process, involved participants suspending their pet strategies and focusing their energies on understanding the current reality of the global food system. In other words, for this part of the process at least, what the participants believed or wanted mattered less than understanding what already was. While the participants might want a single definition of the word sustainable, the reality, whether they liked it or not, was that the word had multiple definitions and there were in fact multiple realities.
These definitions could be observed. When we took participants on a learning journey to visit an organic coffee processor in the Netherlands, they understood sustainable to mean environmental sustainability. When we visited a multimillion-dollar sugar cane grower and manufacturer in Minas Gerais, Brazil, they understood it to mean financial sustainability rather than environmental or cultural.
These skills of suspending had to be learned, and they proved to be initially challenging for a number of participants. One senior EU policy advisor, on being told that she had to “suspend judgment,” asked in disbelief, “For thirty years, I’ve been paid to exercise my judgment, and you want me to stop?” Another participant told us that he was not some yogi and that it was an impossible request. The learning journeys we ran in order to understand the global food system in time became one of the most enduring parts of the Food Lab.
The lab in practice was a negotiated space where strategy was concerned. While the process was fixed, in some ways rigidly so, the strategies that the lab team could execute were entirely open. Part of my challenge was therefore to grasp what it is that the lab team members were negotiating over.
SYSTEMIC SPREAD BETTING
Innovation is always a numbers game: the more of it you do, the better your chances of reaping a fat payoff.
— Gary Hamel, The Future of Management
What turned out to be perhaps the most critical workshop of the lab took place in the unlikely surroundings of the Schloss Leopoldskron. The Schloss is a palace in Salzburg, Austria, built in 1736, with a dramatic history. Framed by a little lake and the snow-capped northern edge of the Alps, it’s also the building where The Sound of Music was filmed.
In these grandiose surroundings, the lab team members firmed up the pilot projects that they were to undertake over the coming year. They devised six initiatives, which included sustainable fisheries, smallholder farms in Latin America, responsible commodities, and a business coalition for sustainability.
The initiatives had been decided at the previous workshop, so we entered the Schloss with ideas for what each of them would look like. The task now was to flesh them out and start prototyping them as quickly as possible.
The workshop was fraught with tension, partly because we had decided to open up membership of the lab. Almost thirty new people joined the lab at this point. This had a major impact on the quality of trust and shared understanding in the room. We struggled mightily to hold the integrity of the lab together to avoid having to start again.
In working on these issues and reflecting on the nature of the challenge that the lab was confronting, I came to some realizations about the nature of the work. The first is that social labs are not projects. A project has a beginning and an end. Project-like thinking has been the dominant approach to addressing societal challenges. Doug Reeler, from the South African organization Community Development Resource Association (CDRA), remarks on the trend toward “projectization” in development:
The relationship between Governments, donors, NGOs, CBOs, growing legions of freelance international development consultants, private companies and even some social movements is increasingly being shaped by this trend of putting Projects to tender, paying people as service providers to achieve centrally determined outcomes.… Development funding is fast becoming a marketplace governed by tender processes and business-talk.14
Reeler observes one of the deeper consequences of this: “Short-term Projects are effectively replacing established organizations as implementing vehicles.”
While a lab is sometimes referred to as a “platform for innovation,” it is perhaps easiest to think of the Food Lab as a new type of organization, a multi-stakeholder institution. It is a platform for innovation, but it aspires to be a stable platform—not one that will go away after a few years. Projects therefore, emerge from the platform. Some of them are successful and some of them are not. The work of the institution is to generate a constant stream of innovations.
These innovations can be understood as a form of systemic spread betting. Since we don’t know in advance what will work to change or shift a system, we spread our bets, much in the same way a venture capitalist will spread risk by betting on a range of start-ups in the hope that at least a few will succeed. In fact, it’s fairly well understood by VCs that most of their investments will fail.
The lab process generated an initial portfolio of initiatives. Some of these initiatives started and ended, some of them succeeded and continued, while some of them failed. The point is that the Sustainable Food Lab acted like an engine for generating new innovations. That doesn’t mean, of course, all the innovations coming from the Food Lab will succeed. As any Silicon Valley insider, venture capitalist, or innovator will tell you, innovation arises from a community of people focused on trying out lots of things and learning their way to successful innovations.
The nature of complex social challenges means that perhaps, more than anything, what is required is a stable platform, an institution that can bring together diverse capital, talent, and strategic direction to build collaborative responses. It also means that the challenge is highly unlikely to simply go away. Humankind has suffered hunger, poverty, and injustice for its entire history. It would be, at the very least, hubristic to think that we are about to completely eradicate these challenges from the human condition.
How is it possible to meet the world’s food needs while maintaining a healthy planet? When first confronted with this question at the heart of the Food Lab, I didn’t appreciate the absurdity or difficulty of the challenge. The more I learned about food systems, the more the question felt to me like a koan.
In Zen practice, a koan is a particular type of question that, on the face of it, seems not to make any sense. It’s used with students to provoke great doubt and gauge their progress in Zen. For example, “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” The more I pondered the question at the heart of the lab, the more paradoxical and problematic it seemed. From a pragmatic point of view, however, the value of a koan is not in answering the question, for there is no answer. It’s that the Zen student, in struggling with the question, arrives at a new way of being, valuing, if you like, the very nature of the struggle. The struggle generates value, producing new insights and change. Treating a koan like a project is a recipe for failure.
Hal and Don continue to lead both old and new lab team members in a productive struggle to come to grips with the koan at the heart of the lab. Almost ten years since the first workshop in Bergen, the Food Lab is going strong.