Food System Diversity: Toward a Relational Approach

Abstract

Diversity is increasingly invoked as part of the search for more sustainable food futures, yet its meaning within food systems research remains uneven and often under-specified. Existing conceptualisations have made important contributions by mapping diversity across production systems, value chains, and support structures, but they tend to give less analytical weight to eaters, households, and everyday food practices. This special issue and the editorial argue that taking diversity seriously requires a more relational perspective, one that begins from eating and follows food system diversity across the interconnected domains of food practices, modes of organisation and coordination, ecological variation, and governance. Drawing on food systems thinking and foodscapes, we propose a conceptual map that shifts attention from diversity as classification to diversity as configuration. The contributions to this special issue show how diversity is lived on the table, organised through alternative and civic food networks, shaped by governance arrangements, and negotiated in experimental spaces such as living labs. Taken together, they suggest that diversity is not a set of separate compartments, but an interdependent and constitutive feature of more sustainable food systems.