Emerging Assessment Tools To Inform Food System Planning

Food system planning is an emerging field engaging planners and planning organizations, civic leaders, citizens, food policy councils, and others interested in creating more sustainable food systems. Planning practices are being developed to address the complex soil-to-soil food system, which spans production to consumption to reuse and recycling of waste. Community engagement is critical to fostering interactions within the full spectrum of food system stakeholders — from farmers and ranchers to planners and local officials to individual and institutional consumers. A growing body of assessment tools is being developed to inform this process. As most of these tools are relatively new, there is little research that addresses the different methodologies or evaluates their use as planning tools. This paper outlines a variety of approaches and suggests further research to evaluate their efficacy.