Horticulturist, greenhouse manager, urban farming trainer and consultant.
Nigeria 🇳🇬
Joined December 2020
- Tweets428
- Following302
- Followers123
- Likes1.4K
About six days after I bought some potatoes, I went to boil a few, and to my surprise, some had already started going bad.
#Modupe
#FoodWaste
#FoodSystems
But what if some food is already on its way to becoming waste before it even gets to your kitchen? We usually see the waste at the end. But what if the problem started much earlier?
Because if we frame food waste as a consumer problem, we will keep looking for consumer solution
When you hear food waste, who do you blame first? The person who bought too much or the person who didn't finish their food?
Fair enough.
That pushed me to pick more from the basket to replace the bad ones, but those weren't good either. On total, I lost about three-quarter of the whole potatoes. And I wondered how this happen so quickly.
.
Say “food security” and most people probably picture the same thing: which is "making sure nobody goes hungry."
And that sounds like the problem. So naturally, we look for the obvious solution: which probably is "Grow more food."
#Modupe
#Foodsecurity
#foodsystem
Availability takes you toward production. Access takes you toward incomes, prices, roads and markets. Nutrition makes you look beyond simply producing more. Stability makes you ask what happens when the system is tested.
It's about whether there is enough food available, whether people can access and afford it, whether it meets their nutritional needs, and whether all of this can remain reliable over time.
Four things. And each one makes you look somewhere different.
And a system can work today but struggle when the next drought, conflict, price shock or bad season comes.
So what exactly are we calling “food security”?
This is where the frame starts to matter. Food security isn't just about whether food exists.
But what if that isn't the whole problem?
A country can produce food and people can still go hungry. Food can be abundant in a market and someone can still be unable to afford it. Food can be available and affordable, but not necessarily safe or nutritious enough.
Imagine your child is struggling in school, failing tests, not doing homework. How you explain that struggle in your head determines what you will do about it.
#Modupe
#Foodsecurity
This week, I want to walk through some of these frames with you, because a lot of the confusion in agriculture and food conversations isn't because people don't care.
"We don't grow enough." "We can't store what we grow." "People simply can't afford the food that's already there." Each frame leads to a different fix.
Now, bringing framing to food.
When we talk about why there's hunger, or why farmers stay poor, or why we still import food we can grow ourselves, we're also choosing a frame, whether we realize it or not.
It's the story you tell yourself about why a problem is happening, before you even try to fix it. And the story you pick decides what solution you provide.
Same child. Same struggle. Three different explanations in your head, and each one leads to a completely different action.
That's what framing means.
And if you think "this school isn't teaching properly," you don't even blame the child. You start looking for a better school, because now the problem isn't the child, it's the system around them.
If you think "this child doesn't understand what's being taught," you don't punish them at all. You get them a tutor, because now the problem is assimilation.