Last week, the Los Angeles Food Policy Council (LAFPC) held a community networking event on the concept of regeneration, a broad idea that addresses healing and transforming our food system, and encompasses health, access, human rights, social justice, and animal welfare. In its description of the event, the LAFPC wrote, “At LAFPC, we envision regeneration as a paradigm shift–one that goes beyond extraction, beyond inputs and outputs and even beyond sustainability. To be regenerative, our food systems need to not only feed people, but restore our planet. Regenerative food systems give birth to new opportunities for transforming our earth, our communities and the people who inhabit them.”
The program included talks by Clare Fox, the Executive Director of the L.A. Food Policy Council, and Gunnar Lovelace, the co-founder and co- CEO of Thrive Market, an online wholesale buying club for organic and natural foods, and “learning hubs,” which divided the attendees into small groups to discuss how regeneration resonated with various aspects of the food system.
The concept of regeneration goes beyond “organic,” “clean,” “natural,” and even beyond “sustainable,” and the conversation at the event ranged from how to indicate such a concept to consumers, to how to create incentives for big agriculture to embrace regeneration, and whether change would start at the individual or systemic level, or both.
To see more LAFPC events, see their website, here.
On Food Law 