Pandemic Pathways for Food System Sustainability

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the fragility of the global food system and its existing inadequacies in achieving food security, providing jobs, and ensuring environmental sustainability on various regimes around the world. Through a qualitative thematic-textual analysis, this thesis uses a case study of New York City to identify themes of actor expectations, either explicit or implicit, on how to address food system challenges revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic that may tip current agro-industrial food systems into an era of transformation. Data is derived from a collection of articles dated between March 17, 2020, and January 17, 2021, from New York University, which captures the landscape of food in NYC during the COVID-19 pandemic (NYU, 2021). The findings are as follows: (1) The impact of the pandemic on the city’s food system distinguished the difference between short-term charitable support and the need for an integrated system for delivering nutritious food at all actor levels. (2) The most prominent unifying expectation among actors is that while specific charity-based pandemic responses have sustainable characteristics, they do not equate to a sustainable transition dynamic. (3) All actors are coming together to envision a system that, when a stressor like COVID-19 comes along, has a support system that can be integrated into it, rather than a system that simply takes on all the qualities of the emergency food system.