Food Distribution System Research Articles

Continuous flow system for biofilm formation using controlled concentrations of Pseudomonas putida from chicken carcass and coupled to electrochemical impedance detection

Most studies dealing with monitoring the dynamics of biofilm formation use microbial suspensions at high concentrations. These conditions do not always represent food or water distribution systems. A continuous flow system capable of controlling the concentration of the microbial suspension stream from 104 to 106 CFU ml−1 is reported. Pseudomonas putida biofilms formed using 100-fold, 1,000-fold or 10,000-fold diluted bacterial suspensions were monitored in-line by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and total plate counts. Randles equivalent circuit model and a modified Randles model with biofilm elements were used to fit the EIS data. In Randles equivalent circuit, the charge transfer resistance decreased as the biofilm formed. The log colony counts of the biofilm correlated to the charge transfer resistance. In the biofilm model, the biofilm resistance and the double layer capacitance decreased as the biofilm formed. The log colony counts of the biofilm correlated to the biofilm resistance.

Extraintestinal Foodborne Pathogens.

In general, foodborne diseases present themselves with gastrointestinal symptoms caused by bacterial, viral, and parasitic pathogens well established to be foodborne. These pathogens are also associated with extraintestinal clinical manifestations. Recent studies have suggested that Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, which both cause common extraintestinal infections such as urinary tract and bloodstream infections, may also be foodborne. The resolution and separation of these organisms into pathotypes versus commensals by modern genotyping methods have led to the identification of key lineages of these organisms causing outbreaks of extraintestinal infections. These epidemiologic observations suggested common- or point-source exposures, such as contaminated food. Here, we describe the spectrum of extraintestinal illnesses caused by recognized enteric pathogens and then review studies that demonstrate the potential role of extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli (ExPEC) and K. pneumoniae as foodborne pathogens. The impact of global food production and distribution systems on the possible foodborne spread of these pathogens is discussed.

Food Banks and Retail Markups

Food banks play a critical part in the food distribution system. In this paper, we examine the impact of food bank donations on retailer markups using a unique store-level data set on donations, labor employment, sales, and capital employment. We frame our empirical model of food bank donations and store-level markups in terms of a theoretical model of quality-based price discrimination and retail sales. We find that stores that donate more food to the local food bank are able to charge higher markups - 33% higher - after controlling for the well-known endogeneity problems that bedevil production analysis. Our findings suggest that donations are not necessarily only altruistic gestures on the part of retailers, but rather part of a symbiotic relationship between food banks and food retailers.

Značaj uvođenja direktnog kanala distribucije hrane proizvedene od strane poljoprivredne proizvodnje u jednoj ekonomiji

The agricultural sector should be organized in such a way that agricultural products that create highways in the form of production and sale of food should be supplied through direct food supply distribution chains. In addition, the food distribution system should target food produced and sold locally, which has gained increasing importance over the last three decades. Thus, agrarian observation enables fierce market competition, high distribution and logistics costs, as well as small individual size of shipments, etc. Using agricultural business modeling and design approaches requires new aspects of innovative logistics and modern information and communication technologies. All this makes it possible to evaluate and evaluate different ways of distributing food. This paper draws attention to the importance of the direct model as a channel of distribution and access in the organization of agriculture as an activity. After that, it is possible to make precise analyzes that can be used to refine the model of business processes with the formation of various ways of food distribution.

Inovativno rešenje u modeliranju kanala distribucije hrane kao faktor uspešnosti organizacije poljoprivredne proizvodnje

Profit maximization in the agricultural sector should go in the direction that will enable agricultural products to be marketed through a realistic distribution channel. This applies in particular to the distribution channel of the food supply. In addition, the food distribution system should focus on the dominant observation of the production of food produced inland. Food distribution should take into account market competition, distribution and logistics costs, the existence of unequal quantities of food shipments, etc. That is why it is of great importance to adopt realistic models that will appreciate modern innovative ways of logistics that will help real food distribution. In addition, up-to-date information and communication technologies should be respected to support such distribution approaches. This paper draws attention to the importance of implementing a possible new food distribution model based on an innovative approach.

EPICS Urban Farming: Bringing Sustainable Fresh Food to Gary, Indiana

EPICS Urban Farming is a team of seventeen undergraduate students designing and implementing an aquaponics and food distribution system in Gary, Indiana. With the area being a food desert, most people turn to corner stores for food that is easily accessible and cheap but unhealthy. From this diet, there are quite a few widespread health concerns that the population of Gary, Indiana, faces daily. For example, obesity, diabetes, and heart conditions are some of the most common diseases that plague the community. Urban Farming is working to aid in combating these issues with the partnership of Pastor Marty Henderson, who has also worked toward this through his organization, Peace Garden and Farms based in Gary, Indiana. The target audiences of this outreach are single parents, the elderly, and households with no vehicles. We currently have two teams, each focusing on production of fresh produce and distribution respectively. The aquaponics team has designed an automated aquaponics system to provide fresh leafy greens, and the community-based agriculture (CBA) team helps distribute the fresh produce from the aquaponics system and educate the community about how to prepare the produce for it to be healthy and enjoyable. This semester we are taking the first steps of installing the complete system by implementing a fish aquarium in Gary in order to create a biome for the fish, which will then be used as a part of the aquaponics system. The CBA team has also begun testing their distribution methods and recipes with a small kickstart group of families in Gary, Indiana.

Australian rangelands science – a strategic national asset

Producing, processing and distributing food is the biggest thing that humans do on the planet. In aggregate terms, agriculture has been very successful in ensuring that global food production has more than kept pace with global population growth over recent decades. However, in recent years concerns have intensified about the quality, equity, sustainability and resilience of the food system. Only around one-third of all people on Earth are eating a healthy diet. The food system is the biggest user and polluter of land and water, the biggest driver of habitat and biodiversity loss, and on track to be the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. The recent emergence of a novel coronavirus and the resultant COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the systemic risks to human health from current food production and distribution systems. How to produce more, healthier and safer food, much more efficiently and sustainably, in more difficult climates, and how to share it more equitably, is an existential challenge for humanity. Australian science, and rangeland science in particular, is well-placed to play a leadership role across the Indo-Pacific in this endeavour. The Australian innovation system in agriculture and natural resource management has long had to contend with highly variable climates and extreme weather events, to produce competitive products for global markets with minimal subsidies. The know-how, and associated policies and institutions developed in doing so, are a strategic national asset and an important element of Australian soft power in our region.

Exploring technological management innovations that include artificial intelligence and other innovations in global food production

By the year 2050, the world's population is expected to reach 9.8 billion, and 11.2 billion in 2100. Non-declining or levelling world population growth is the most significant hurdle to sustainable agriculture and food security. Today, about 1 billion people are chronically hungry, and this crisis is a result of inefficient food production and distribution system, and undeveloped agricultural land that is leaving room to grow food for the additional 2-3 billion people globally expected by 2050. This research offers to various practitioners, learners, and academicians' data from emergency literature on technological innovations to help overcome agricultural concerns for meeting a process improvement initiative.

"It's Still an Animal that Died for Me." Responsibility and Meat Consumption.

The aim of this paper is to explore the way people engaging in a more or less strict reduction of their consumption of food of animal origin (de)construct their responsibility regarding the food production and distribution system. Starting from a description of the crisis in meat production, it contributes to the understanding of the way people who are sensitive to these issues position themselves by focusing on the notion of responsibility. Ciarán Benson’s work on positioning serves as theoretical background. Through the analysis of interviews and a qualitative experiment with people who changed their consumption of food of animal origin recently, several dimensions along which responsibility is constructed are identified. Those are 1) who bears responsibility, 2) towards whom or what, 3) the action that is considered, 4) the knowledge implicated and 5) the power to act in that situation. The main proposition of the paper is to enhance Benson’s approach through the inclusion of a collective “we.” The study took place in Switzerland, where meat consumption is the norm. This context also implies a certain room for maneuver in the choice of products, as well as the presence of debates around the ecological and ethical implications of meat production.

Food System Study of Martin County, Florida


 Martin County, Florida has a rich agricultural history with farming and cattle ranching being important economic drivers since the early 1930s. Nevertheless, the county struggles to meet the balance between food supply and demand. Farmers often face challenges finding sizable, secure, well-paying markets, and the most consumers do not participate in local food transactions. This 4-page fact sheet written by William A. Messina, Jr., Lisa House, Yvette Goodiel, and Carol Albertsand published by the UF/IFAS summarizes two studies conducted to examine agricultural production in Martin County and its food processing, distribution and marketing systems and infrastructure to better identify potential constraints and opportunities for the local food system.https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fe1071

Food: Location, Location, Location

This article examines the question of why local food has become, for many activists and scholars, a core concept for understanding food systems and globalization and for challenging systems of injustice and inequality. I begin with the French concept of terroir, which is often translated as the “taste of place,” and examine why this term, part of France's cultural common sense, is difficult to implement in other places. I then consider efforts to use local foods to grapple with the forces of globalization and efforts to use ideas about local food to moralize capitalism and humanize food distribution systems. I examine the relationship between movements for food sovereignty and food justice with local foods. Finally, I explore the uses of local foods as part of efforts to develop, assert, and sometimes market local, regional, or national identities.

The development and use of an assessment tool to capture changes in the food pantry nutrition environment and system of food distribution.

Rural food pantries aim to improve food access but low-quality nutritional environments and prescribed systems of food distribution may limit these efforts. Voices for Food (VFF) is a six-state U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded intervention, including community coaching and a VFF Food Pantry Toolkit to guide food pantries in transitioning to a healthier nutritional environment and a food distribution system based on client choice and support.The purpose of the article was to create a novel tool (MyChoice Scorecard) to assess the food pantry environment, including client choice, and to use the tool to quantify change in VFF intervention pantries compared with comparison pantries longitudinally over the 3-year study period. Food pantries in rural, high-poverty counties in six Midwestern states participated in a longitudinal, matched treatment and comparison study. Pantries were assigned to treatment (n = 12) or comparison (n = 12) group. A MyChoice Scorecard was completed pre-, mid- and post-intervention. Mixed models were generated with MyChoice Scorecard score as the outcome and included main effects for intervention group and time since pre-intervention visit. Pre-intervention, MyChoice scores did not differ significantly between intervention and comparison pantries (8.5 ± 1.5 vs. 9.1 ± 1.5, p = .19). Marginal mean values for MyChoice Scorecard score differed significantly between treatment and comparison groups at both mid-intervention (14.6 ± 1.4 vs. 10.8 ± 1.4, p = .05) and post-intervention (21.8 ± 1.2 vs. 11.8 ± 1.2, p < .001). The MyChoice Scorecard, either alone or as part of the VFF intervention, can be used by community public health professionals, such as Extension staff, to document and facilitate meaningful change in the nutritional environment of food pantries.

Participation in S-LCA: A Methodological Proposal Applied to Belgian Alternative Food Chains (Part 1)

In social life cycle assessment (S-LCA), the use of a participatory approach to define and select assessment criteria and indicators (C&amp;Is) is recommended given the specificity of social issues, but it has been, for now, rarely implemented and presents methodological challenges. Within a participatory action research project gathering academic researchers and field actors, we tested the applicability of configuring a C&amp;Is list for S-LCA, together with chain actors of three alternative food distribution systems active in Belgium. The purpose of this article is to present the results of this work and to examine the methodological limits, requirements, and contributions of such an approach. The participatory approach is an appropriate method to build a list of C&amp;Is standing out from other studies, with the identification of ambitious and innovative C&amp;Is relating to value-chain actors (VCAs) stakeholder category, on chain governance and transaction modalities. In our case, it required an adaptation work of C&amp;Is to the S-LCA requirements and the use of a specific theoretical approach to articulate C&amp;Is within a coherent framework. Finally, this kind of work seems useful to give ground to the S-LCA Guidelines’ list of subcategories, which was built through a rather top-down expert-based approach.

When food regimes become hegemonic: Agrarian India through a Gramscian lens

AbstractThe concept of food regimes, as developed by Friedmann and McMichael, has proven useful in analysing how systems of food production, distribution, and consumption are linked to cycles of global capital accumulation and identifying the contradictions and conflicts that underlie them. A question that food regime analysis is relatively less able to address, however, is how food regimes become established and endure with the apparent acquiescence of those who are the victims of their contradictions and inequities. In this paper, I argue that a deeper engagement with Gramsci's theory of hegemony may help to address this lacuna in food regime analysis. To illustrate my case, I draw on studies of rural India from the colonial period to the present day, highlighting the ways in which the hegemonic mechanisms of consent and coercion have been crucial to the consolidation of each of the three food regimes identified by Friedmann and McMichael.

The Rural-Urban Food Systems’ Links with the Agenda 2030: From FAO Guidelines on Food Supply and Distribution Systems to a Dairy Sector Application in the Area of Bogota

What should be the policy to meet urban food needs in developing countries and those in transition? This is a key question of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which was posed into the “FAO’s methodological and operational guide to study and understand Food Supply and Distribution Systems (FSDS) to cities in developing countries and countries in transition” in order to face the current overwhelming increase of urban population and the increasing urbanization pressures on food systems. Following some previous work in the field where it was argued that clarifying the various problems and structure behind Food Supply and Distribution Systems (FSDS) in urban environments is vital to assess policies that aim at meeting urban food needs, the purpose of this paper is to show that the methodological approach known as system dynamics modeling and simulation can lead, in terms of knowledge and/or theoretical contribution, to the unfolding of complexity in this area of research as well as bring into the analysis the relationships across a few goals of the Agenda 2030. As an additional result, we show how the developed model can be applied (case of the production of milk for consumption in the city of Bogota, Colombia) to analyze the dynamics of food supply and distribution systems in urban environments.

A stochastic planning framework for the discovery of complementary, agricultural systems

One of the greatest 21st century challenges is meeting the need to feed a growing world population which is expected to increase by about 35% by 2050. To meet this challenge, it is necessary to make major improvements on current food production and distribution systems capabilities, as well as to adapt these systems to expected trends such as climate change. Changing climate patterns may present opportunities for unidentified, geographical regions with adequate climate patterns to produce high-value agricultural products in a profitable and sustainable manner.This paper focuses on the design and planning aspects of a discovery process to unearth agri-food supply chains capable of generating attractive return on investments. A stochastic optimization framework is used to develop planting and harvesting schedules for a set of identified regions with complementary weather characteristics. To address the high-level of variability in the problem context, a two-stage stochastic decomposition method is used to consider a larger number of scenarios. As part of the solution process, a modeling scheme is developed that learns past interactions between entering discretized, weather scenarios and optimal first-stage solutions. In this context, machine learning and dimensionality reduction techniques are used to iteratively estimate each region's probability of belonging to first-stage solutions based on previous solution-scenario results. The implementation of the stochastic framework is shown through a case study applied to multiple locations within the US southwest states of Arizona and New Mexico.

Sugar ecologies: their metabolic and racial effects

ABSTRACT In this paper, we articulate sugar ecologies as the product of an unequal and racist system of food production and distribution. We trace the flow of sugar from its sources in the postcolony and racial capitalism, into sociocultural systems we call sugar ecologies the social systems that drive global sugar production, industrial processing, patterns of distribution and consumption. These systems encompass networks of economic, political, scientific, and ideological practices that link global systems of agricultural trade under racial capitalism to the hyper-local contexts of biological exposure and metabolic processing of sugar. Sugar’s pernicious effects are magnified by forces which guide sugar into Black bodies, becoming the source of extraordinary levels of toxicity and chronic metabolic disease for Black people the United States. This burden of metabolic disease, which also affects metabolic function and gene expression, also creates demand for for-profit health services that palliate, but do not treat the root causes of, chronic illness resulting from exposure to sugar. The kind of metabolic analysis we enact in this paper remains an underutilized yet illuminating framework through which to reframe our cultural stories and political analyses of sugar ecologies in the contexts of the Anthropocene, environmental racism and food justice.

Pembuatan Prototipe Aplikasi Distribusi Pangan Berbasis Sistem Informasi Geografis (SIG)

Food distribution and supply chain are the main problems to achieve food security in Indonesia. Geographical gaps, poor transportation systems and social differences in Indonesia induce a high complexity challenges to implement a perfect distribution system that can suitable with Indonesia characteristic. The purpose of this research is building a prototype for food distribution application using geographical information system (GIS) that can be implemented in Indonesia. GIS can visualize the entire data layer into a map which is easier to analyze. Indonesia consists of 34 provinces that spread over many island, each has specific geographical profile and transportation problems. This can be used as data layers with other instruments which related with food distribution in Indonesia. Building a food distribution application prototype is part of developing food distribution system which produce prototype of the system. Prototyping approach is being used to evaluate the designing result of GIS with analyzing features for food distribution in Indonesia. Final result for this research is an application that can be implemented into food distribution system that can create a stable food security in Indonesia, for all of the provinces.

Film Review: An Analysis of Food Narrative in the Indian Film Lunchbox

In the review of the Indian film The Lunchbox, Peina Zhuang shows that although food is central in human relations and social development in modern India, the transformation of food production and distribution systems at the micro level reveals, resists, and reinforces the conflicts between tradition and modernity. The food in the traditional Bombay lunch remain because of the lunchbox delivery system, but this comes at a cost. While in the very moment that it threatens traditions by, for instance, effacing the caste sources of the food, the lunchbox delivery system reifies the patriarchal relegation of women to the kitchen. Complicated in its implications, The Lunchbox is an entertaining take on India’s rapidly transforming food scene.

Detection of fish species substitution frauds in Italy: A targeted National Monitoring Plan

Fighting food frauds is a ceaseless challenge because of the constant evolution of fraudulent practices and for the consequences both on consumers’ and on globalized trade. In Italy fish is a vulnerable commodity for frauds thanks to the high national production, importation and consumption and it is important to monitor the entire food chain in order to detect and prevent fraudulent actions, such as species substitutions, which is considered the most common fraud in seafood.Aim of this study was to realise a targeted Monitoring Plan to estimate the prevalence of fish species substitutions in Italy. As a first step, Italian fish supply chain, from production to selling, was analysed, in order to identify products and chain points at risk, by reviewing literature and by involving, in two focus groups, food inspectors and representatives of the large scale food distribution system. Then a monitoring plan was designed by sampling three fish species considered at major risk for their economic value and/or large consumption, i.e. tuna, grouper and flat fishes, at different selling points (wholesale markets, retail markets, fish shops and supermarkets). From February to March 2017, 242 samples from fresh, frozen or transformed whole fishes or fillets were sampled in 13 Italian cities (5 in Northern Italy, 2 in Central Italy, 3 in Southern Italy and 3 in the main Islands). Samples were analysed by “FINS” (Forensically Informative Nucleotide Sequencing), using two markers: cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene (COI) as first option and then mitochondrial cytochrome B gene (cytb), if necessary to identify uncertain or unassigned samples. Species substitutions were uncovered in 8.7% of analysed samples, principally related to grouper (prevalence of 14.71%). Supermarkets resulted the selling points with a major number of frauds (prevalence of 12.79%). Substituted species were taxonomically related to those declared on the label and no species harmful for consumers were detected. Results obtained can give to National Authorities a detailed frame of trends in fish substitution frauds in Italy, providing also relevant information to put into effect control measures.