The methodology behind creating the interactive infographic: ‘Food System Discovery – Actors and activities in Luxembourg’ included several rounds of literature reviews, other data collection methods, data analysis and data visualisation. The initial methodological step was a two-fold literature review; the first to find out how food systems are usually conceptualised and depicted in literature, find strengths and gaps in these conceptualisations, and provide a further development to food system approaches. It led to a broad view of the foodscape, made from the food supply circuit actors and the broader food system actors as one inseparable entity or system. The second literature review concerned theories of visualisation of data as well as theories of information and knowledge representation to find a method to depict food system data in an as complete as possible while still accessible way. Data collection after the initial literature reviews consisted in gathering information on food system actors and their activities, and the specificities of actors and their activities in Luxembourg. We relied on grey and published literature, Internet browsing, media monitoring, and other data collection activities such as interviews, brainstorming, snowballing with food actors as well as feedback sessions with students, food system actors and fellow researchers. A large database of collected data was created to organise actors and their activities in several classification levels. To do this, we analysed each actor’s mission and their main activity, and described their activities by using descriptors (descriptive keywords) for main action, sub-action, refined sub- action, produce/output and in some cases hierarchy. For the interactive infographic, this led to a four- level depiction with each new level refining the previous one (Level 1=Actor categories, each one represented by a different colourful bubble; Level 2=Actor groups, represented as elements composing the bubbles; Level 3=Actor types; Level 4=Actor examples). Regarding transposability to different contexts (other than Luxembourg), levels one and two are mostly transposable to food systems in general whereas level three is more Luxembourg-specific and level four is Luxembourg-exclusive. This document outlines the methodological approach and creation process of the interactive infographic to a varied audience, with due regard to communicating the approach to the general public. It can be used as an accompanying guide for discovering the infographic interactively.

This infographic forms part of a larger series of infographics produced by the Sustainable Food Practices team at the University of Luxembourg. The first infographic is titled ‘Food System Synopsis – The Foodscape in Luxembourg’ and is available on our website. The second and interactive infographic, titled ‘Food System Discovery – Actors and activities in Luxembourg’, derives from our first infographic and provides a deeper level of analysis, a description and definitions of all the actor groups and their activities in the food system. The interactive online version is available here. The purpose of the series of infographics produced by the Sustainable Food Practices team at the University of Luxembourg is to analyse the food system in Luxembourg in four steps – from mapping the existing foodscape in Luxembourg to elaborating pathways for the transition processes towards a more sustainable food system.  This 2nd Infographic ‘Food System Discovery – Actors and activities in Luxembourg’ (reference: IG2-v.A) allows a user to explore the previously published, first static Infographic (‘Food System Synopsis – The foodscape in Luxembourg’) in further depth using playful and interactive navigation tools. Our methodological approach to this infographic will be made available here soon. Our research resulted in the two overarching kinds of actors: those that deal directly ‘with’ food – operating at the level of the food supply circuit, and actors engaging in a varied array of activities revolving ‘around’ food – operating at the broader food system level. These two combined comprise the whole food system. The research then led to an ensuing distillation of these actors into: actor categories, actor groups, and actor types, with each level further specifying the activities taken by actors. The definitions of the actor categories, actor groups and actor types allows the infographic to be transposed to other contexts, while only the example actors from Luxembourg are context-specific to the country. For these reasons, the depicted food system is not only Luxembourg’s food system, but a more general view of food systems.  In the future we will build on the two first infographics to demonstrate interrelationships, pressure points, gaps and opportunities – and the outcome of this analysis will provide the basis for the research team to unfold pathways for potential optimisation of different leverage points within the system. 

Within the currently rising concerns around sustainability of food systems, in the related economic areas of regenerative production modes, responsible supply chains and informed consumption, there often remains a practice gap between what people know they should do and what they actually do. This is preceded by a knowledge gap: the knowledge of what a sustainable product specifically is tends not to be entirely consensual, blurred with potentially contradicting injunctions between different claims of sustainability. Instead of trying to solve this puzzle with metrics, we propose an App that makes various components of sustainability transparent, thus qualifying sustainability complexity. Our aim is not to hierarchically determine ‘the best’ sustainable choice, but rather to relationally empower consumers to choose the product with the sustainability criteria that most fit their values and priorities. Goodness Groceries is a University of Luxembourg consumer study piloting a mobile sustainable food shopping app in partnership with a supermarket chain. The App acts as a virtual shopping companion providing eco-responsible and ethical product information of selected staple food products, each time for up to four types: local organic, local conventional, imported organic and imported conventional. The information provided is based on self-assessments made by product suppliers. Each food item is granted criteria in the four main areas of Environment, Social Well-being, Economic Well-being and Good Governance, subdivided into relevant indicators (cf. SAFA guidelines, FAO 2014) – marked with easy-to-recognise icons. The user-friendly App is designed to scan alternatives of the same product via a QR code whilst shopping, to analyse if this helps consumers make an informed choice – or not, and why. Starting in Spring 2022, entailments of the (ongoing) study and App in terms of structural obstacles for researchers, necessary supply chain adaptations for suppliers and analysis of consumers’ shopping habits and App usage feedback will be discussed.

In spite of decades of research, the complexity of new technology uptake by smallholder farmers in the context of development interventions is still little understood. In order to unravel the motives for, and barriers to, technology adoption, we propose a multidisciplinary qualitative framework that expands the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework with the agronomic Agrarian system approach and the Development anthropology-based ECRIS (Rapid Collective Inquiry for the Identification of Conflicts and Strategic Groups) approach. Such a framework allows to analyze smallholder farmers’ livelihoods, agricultural activities from an ecological cum technical cum economic point of view, and social learning processes involving power relationships. Its use is exemplified by studying the adoption of stone bunds in an agroecological development program in Burkina Faso. Many farmers cannot adopt this technology fully because of agricultural production system or livelihood shaped barriers, and because of power relationships bearing on the technology uptake process.

In diesem Beitrag wird das Potential von Qualitätszertifizierungen zur Förderung eines nachhaltigen oder ethisch verantwortlichen Lebensmitteleinkaufs, sowohl in Bezug auf VerbraucherInnen als auch Akteure des öffentlichen Beschaffungswesens, vorgestellt. Es wird gezeigt, dass Governance-basierte Qualitätszertifizierungen wie Label effiziente Kommunikationsinstrumente für nachhaltigkeitsorientierte Ernährung sein können, indem sie Ernährungskompetenz und nachhaltigeres Einkaufsverhalten bei potentiell widersprüchlichen Interessen fördern, insbesondere, wenn die Zertifizierung den Mehrwert des Produktes transparent aufzeigt und die definierten Nachhaltigkeitskriterien gesetzlich verpflichtend sind. Political food communication may take many forms, including direct recommendations to public institutions and private households (cf. Reckinger/Régnier 2017), or more indirect labelling schemes that certify various types of quality – from sustainable via nutritious to ethical. The underlying governance claims differ in those cases: in the first one, priority is given to analytical, top-down information to procurement actors and to individuals of a given population; in the second one, action is rather taken in the direction of food production and transformation, be it top-down or participatory, with an associated effort to make the communicated guarantees transparent to consumers. In this article, we will analyse in a praxeological perspective the contrasting governance claims that structure a selection of labelling schemes in contemporary Luxembourg: official ones (such as organic produce, among others), voluntary and regional ones, international ones, as well as supermarket brands blurring boundaries and using overlaps of several labels. We will compare the guarantees and transparency that labels tend to offer in the socio-ecological, socioeconomic, sociocultural and socio-political dimensions of food certification, viewed as a potentially enabling or disabling form of food communication. At the same time, we will examine the potential of these aids for individual consumers’ priorities and public procurement actors’ legal framework in selecting foodstuffs with added sustainable or ethical value, asking the question if such certifications are efficient tools of food communication and ultimately of an enhanced food literacy in an arena of potentially conflicting and crowded messages.