ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the emerging concept of ‘circular economy’ within the wider debate on ‘re-thinking food systems’. A ‘food system design’ perspective has been adopted, highlighting how this debate is becoming progressively more polarized and ambiguous, creating de facto two narratives, each leading to the identification of very different food futures. The first narrative defines a food system that relies on practices like closing loops of key nutrients, cascading materials, and applying bio-based technologies and recovering energy from biological materials. In this narrative circular is defined as ‘opposed’ to linear, to emphasize the importance of eliminating and designing out the concept of waste. In this narrative, a circular food economy is a food provisioning system designed around the principles and practices of an industrial ecology. The second narrative, instead, takes into account agricultural and communitarian practices aiming at enhancing soil health, biodiversity, and large nutrient bio-cycles as key planetary boundaries. It considers these practices connected and embedded in wider social practices, in fact combining an ecological worldview with a social justice perspective to define ‘regenerative food systems’. In this narrative, regenerative is part of various diverse food cultures, which inform what people do, their practices in fact. The dominant perspective is around the idea of fostering food systems based on regenerative agriculture, understood both as a ‘political movement’ and as a set of social practices, while circular economy is not yet fully defined or understood. Sometimes it is even contested or neglected. In this narrative a circular food economy is a food provisioning system designed around the principles and practices of an agro-ecology. At this stage of the debate, it is hard to predict which of the narratives and food futures will become more dominant, whether the narratives will converge into a ‘unified’ narrative, and whether new narratives will emerge. Empirical evidence from exemplary cases indicates that if a transition to a circular food economy is to shape the future of food, then it will be more likely led by large agribusinesses and corporate actors, rather than a network of small-scale and community-based initiatives. It is therefore more likely that the first type of narrative will influence a transition from a linear to a circular food economy in the years to come.
