Friends and colleagues want to know just how progressive Berlin is in local food systems. And after living here for a year now, my answer is a solid “Hmmmm”.

It seems that this should be more easily answered. There is plenty of evidence that as a city, Berlin is on the right track; the population has low rates of obesity, fresh produce and organic food are widely available, the city operates a municipal composting system, people have been utilizing urban space for decades to grow food in Klein gardens and more recently intercultural gardens and kids learn how to grow food at the “Gartenarbeitschule” throughout the city.

So why the big question mark?

I can’t really say what defines a good food system, at least in any kind of official way. It’s really hard to measure and qualify a local food system without a set of metrics to define it. As much as I can say it appears that Berlin is quite progressive, the question remains, “compared to what?” As a food systems planning professional, I’m not aware of any comparative criteria that exists for cities to evaluate one food system against another.

Certainly indicators have been developed to measure the progress of a local food system, and this is a start. The Wallace Center in the US put out the report, “Charting the Growth to Good Food: Developing Indicators and Measures of Good Food” in April of 2009. This defines food systems progress within the following set of areas: Healthy, Fair, Green, and Affordable. The report’s main purpose is to introduce a set of tools that will help to track the supply of good food and its sustainability for the future. This is entirely at a national scale using from established public data sources that have been available for over 20 years.

The work that the Wallace Center has done is a valuable tool to help track the progress of the food system at a national level. But for specifically defined food systems, can this framework be adopted at other national, regional and local levels? At the same time how can it be calibrated to make evaluative comparisons?

As many have learned, the complex nature of the food system makes it difficult to quantify and measure. This is especially true with the mish-mash or lack of reliable local data. I believe this is why many recent food systems planning and policy efforts have not been able to get beyond the initial phases of development, yet. In most cases through the research and initial metrics, what is uncovered is that there is a huge data gap in the kind of information we need to be able to track the progress of the food system, and this takes time.

Food systems planning is largely a future oriented endeavor so we must assume that we are in the driving seat towards the future we envision.

In order to measure or qualify one food system against another we need to begin to develop a flexible measurement tool that allows us to comparatively define and measure localized food systems. An evaluation like this would have to take into account both quantitative and qualitative measurements. For example comparative percents of total land in agricultural production for domestic consumption would be a valuable data set, as would more social & cultural aspects like personal lifestyle preferences for food consumption. Ideally this could be applied at an international level as well as a localized level.

In the past decade food security, or the availability of food and access to it, has been an incentive for qualifying the ability of nations to feed themselves. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) measures the connection between hunger and gender equality. This index has been especially important to developing countries to measure progress towards food security and also for the allocation of aid through resources. While the GHI important work in the world’s poorest nations, it does not reflect the complexity of the global food system and the interconnectedness between those at the poorest level and those at the richest and how actions at either end of the scale can affect the other.

One interesting model of a more complicated framework used to measure international sustainability is the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). The EPI works by evaluating environmental sustainability relative to the paths of other countries through indicators and benchmarks in a wide range of areas. It is a future and action oriented approach. (In the 2010 report, Germany ranks #17 and the US ranks #61).

Although not all countries are able to participate in the EPI, it is an important tool to understand what qualifies a ‘good performance’ vs. a ‘poor performance’. It also has significance through its usefulness to organizations like the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the European Commission, which utilize the EPI when developing policies and programs towards collective goals.

A global index for national and localized food systems is a good goal for the next 20 or so years as the field of food systems planning develops. Naturally it would require a good deal of critical thinking, academic, and public support to help define the science behind the metrics. This would be a very important step towards trying to understand the complex relationship that food systems have with global sustainability and other areas of importance like public health and climate change.

I wonder what city or cities would be towards the top of this list? Berlin might be up there, but I’d be willing to bet there would be a lot of unlikely cities on that list, cities that are already demonstrating efforts to imagine a more sustainable food system for the future.