SAI: Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

Well-functioning food systems are essential for food security, human health, economic growth, and national security, yet the infrastructure that powers food systems is often overlooked, outdated, inflexible, and incongruent. Rather than being seen as a cohesive whole, the component pieces of food systems infrastructure are often considered to be part of other infrastructure domains.

For example, school kitchens, food bank storage facilities, cold chain transportation, communication networks that enable recovery of surplus foods, or agricultural and foodservice workforce are often considered separately as part of education, emergency, transportation, energy, broadband, telecommunications, human, or other types of infrastructure. Failure to recognize and treat these elements as a cohesive whole would leave U.S. food systems vulnerable to inevitable future disruptions.

The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed deep vulnerabilities in food systems infrastructure, such as bottlenecks in processing and moving food, that resulted in volatility in food availability and prices and rising household food insecurity. In addition, a rapidly changing climate will further stress our food systems infrastructure.

This is a critically important time for developing a shared vision of food systems infrastructure. Without a common understanding of food systems infrastructure, it is difficult to identify the biggest problems and the most promising solutions. This SAI project uses social science research methods that tap into the expertise of a diverse array of professionals with food systems and infrastructure knowledge, including those working in food supply chains, food access organizations, and government agencies.

The first phase of the project defines and characterizes food systems infrastructure. The second phase analyzes the landscape of existing policies and investments in this infrastructure. The project's final phase explores the policy priorities of key stakeholders.

Ultimately, the goal of this SAI research is to lay the groundwork for next generation food systems infrastructure and accompanying decision support systems that can advance food security and resilient food systems in the United States.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.