Under the direction of James Farmer, Associate Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Sustainable Food Systems Science (SFSS) at Indiana University studies the social dimensions of food sustainability including culture, equity, and justice in food provisioning from local to global.
In Indiana and in research sites around the world we examine the production, coordination, and consumption of food value chains and the supporting networks and decision-making from individual to organizational levels. Our engaged research and advocacy for innovative solutions center on the promotion of human thriving.
We understand food systems, whether local, regional, national, or global in scope, to encompass three primary components:
- Production/supply
- Aggregation/distribution and
- Access/consumption
These components are interlocked and interact with each other to create a complex system. We take a novel approach to meet the need for systems thinking across disciplines, building on Elinor Ostrom’s (2009) Social-Ecological System (SES) framework to analytically underpin this research.