Tag: complexity

David Middleton Sustainability Conference: 28th September 2021

This blogpost provides the inputs to the afternoon workshop I’m facilitating at the Sustainability Conference on 28th September. A more comprehensive version, with links to more info (including answers to the questions), is in this document the 21st century challenge:...

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Its scale and complexity: When gut instinct works and when it doesn’t

This blogpost summarises this brief paper: Shining a light on the UK food supply system: Its scale and complexity. The preface to it explains that out gut instinct doesn’t work in alien environments — such as the scale and...

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How fresh produce gets from a farm to you

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Covid-19 commentary: The Four Rs — Risk, Resilience, Recovery and . . . Ratios

Recovery: When to start? The answer is always now. So, where do we start?

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Food System Transformation #12: A summary of the blogpost series

This blogpost is a summary of this series of blogposts on food system transformation:

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National Food Strategy #8: Supply chain permutations are endless

I asked the two workshop participants who’d drawn up the original of the e-version of the supply chain map for their comments on it.

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Five levers on our food system

Birmingham spends some £3.4bn every year on food and drink, yet the cost of obesity to the city has been estimated to be £2.6bn, with a further £448M being spent here on dealing with alcohol related harm.

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Our food system as a ‘black box’

Imagine the food system is a black box. You can’t see what’s going in, nor see inside it. But emerging from it are all the food and drinks bought by all of us in Birmingham today. On the outside are a...

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Why we need to think differently about our food supply network

Our food supply network is a complex system. And therefore has certain features which we need to take into account when we think about it, or seek to change it.

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How useful is this PMCC Framework?

We’d like your take on this new thinking tool we’ve devised. Given how opaque and complex the food sector is, we’ve come up with this framework to help people ‘see’ the organisations involved one way or t’other with the...

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