He challenged farmers and industry leaders at Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science forum to think creation of a foodscape with NZ’s productive land.
“Production and consumption influence our and our environment’s health.
“In itself the foodscape notion captures different agendas on healthier and sustainable food production,” Gregorini, the head of livestock production, agriculture and life sciences at Lincoln University, said.
“Foodscape is a conceptual framework that helps us focus on the opportunities to change the existing ways of food production, consumption and commercialisation, creating a new variety of future trajectories by selecting design over default.”
Ethical and sustainable trajectories promote community unity, integral health, food security, socio-ecological sustainability and resilience.
Creating foodscapes with productive land use is all about perception.
“It is not the landscape, it is an ethical and sustainable foodscape.
“Rethink and reflect new and alternative pathways.”
Landscape is a specific view of a space of a scenery from a perspective, it’s all about how we react.
Foodscape is places and spaces we acquire, prepare, talk about.
“Foodscape is used to study public health and food environments, including institutional arrangements, cultural spaces and discourses that mediate with our relationship with food.
“Food, people and places – (foodscapes is) more than an assembly of two words.”
Food environments are opportunities to obtain food through behaviours, choice, region.
“Our relationship with the land and then foodscapes has changed.
“We need to embrace complexity – complexity is not difficult. We need to juggle a lot of things, sometimes that’s not so easy.
“Let’s keep thinking of different, more functional and ethical foodscapes then we create a foodscape with our productive land.
“Creating an integration of NZ’s productive food landscapes along the rural-urban transect will create a framework of continuous productive foodscape.
“Stop talking about farms and interconnect with multi-functional systems creating integrated, connected socio-cultural production systems.”
Farming will become more complex but not more complicated in the transition to more functional and ethical foodscapes.
“And that will create opportunity not only for farms but for what we eat and sell.
“We need to provide food that enables us to live better and that fits in the way of our community.
“The way of thinking underlies the relationship of food and to that end I challenge you, farmers, to think foodscape – the marriage between food and landscapes.
“Food environments where you like to go and eat transcend the boundary of thought-scapes and the public perception of food producers.
“We need to talk about foodscapes influencing health to create wealth,” Gregorini said.
