Why food transitions get stuck – and how we can get them moving again

It sounds so straightforward: we want healthy food, produced within planetary boundaries, fair and affordable for everyone. Different goals, one plate. In practice, it looks more like a plate of spaghetti: as soon as you pull one strand, three others move along with it. No food system anywhere in the world achieves all these goals at the same time, and perhaps it is a utopian idea to think this is even possible. Food systems are historical constructs in which interests, institutions, beliefs and power all play a role. Humans created the system, but it has now boxed itself in.

‘Thirty years ago, the task was simple: produce as much food as possible,’ says Bart de Steenhuijsen Piters, Senior Researcher Food Systems and Food & Nutrition Security at Wageningen Social & Economic Research. ‘Now we expect much more. And everywhere you look, those expectations are not being met.’

But if we want things to be different, why are we unable to change them? That is precisely the question that has occupied De Steenhuijsen Piters for years. He uses the term lock-in to describe the phenomenon. In his words, it is a self-reinforcing mechanism that keeps the status quo stable, even when everyone knows things need to change.

Some lock-ins are economic: companies and farmers are tied to investments, loans and revenue models that depend on the status quo. Others are institutional: rules and policies make some choices obvious and others almost impossible. There are also lock-ins related to mindset and behaviour: stubborn routines and assumptions that linger, even when knowledge changes. De Steenhuijsen Piters cites as an example how deeply the idea of ‘milk, the white engine’ has taken root in the Netherlands. ‘As a result, we all started consuming a lot of milk,’ he says, while dietary advice has since changed. Finally, there are beliefs: values and identities that determine what people consider ‘good’ or ‘normal’.

According to De Steenhuijsen Piters, it is important to understand the underlying mechanism, so that you can better understand where the resistance comes from and take it seriously, without immediately making a moral judgement about it. ‘We often call resistance unwillingness,’ he says. ‘But that is usually not the case. It is more often a matter of not being able to, or not knowing how.’

Together with colleagues from Denmark and France, De Steenhuijsen Piters spoke to thirty leading experts about why Europe’s food transformation is moving so slowly. The essence: we do not lack ideas, but action. We remain stuck in pilots, programmes and intentions, while the overall direction barely shifts. Based on this research, he and his colleagues formulated guidelines, which they shared with the European Parliament as a practical tool for policy choices that do not reinforce lock-ins but break through them.

Part of that slowness comes from framing the problem incorrectly. We like to look at frontrunners: leading innovators, innovative farmers, start-ups and ‘future-proof’ chains. That is comfortable. There is energy there. It provides good stories. But in lock-in terms, that is precisely the biggest pitfall.

‘If you want change,’ says De Steenhuijsen Piters, ‘start by looking at who will be disadvantaged by it. Not because you have to water down change until nobody feels any pain — that is impossible — but because otherwise you are guaranteed to encounter opposition. People do not like losing. And that counterforce is often better funded, better connected and more skilled than the idealists.’

This does not only apply to companies. Consumers can also be ‘stuck’. Take eating habits. If people leave meat substitutes on the shelf, that is quickly interpreted as being ‘against’ them. But behaviour is often context. ‘Put vegetarian options at the top of the menu,’ says De Steenhuijsen Piters, ‘and uptake increases sharply. Change is possible, provided you understand what motivates someone.’

Inequality in society plays an important role here. ‘If sustainable goals, for example, are mainly formulated by the well-paid middle class, you create resistance among people who cannot make the change because, for instance, they cannot afford it.’

According to De Steenhuijsen Piters, this logic is not limited to Europe. He also wants to test lock-in thinking in other contexts, for example around pesticide use in Africa. ‘Which is extremely worrying,’ he says, with vegetables that in many cases are ‘contaminated’ with excessive levels of pesticides. In March, he will travel to Tanzania to discuss with local stakeholders how to remove the most harmful products from the market. ‘We will first map out who benefits from continuing to use those products and who does not — and what their motivations are.’

Lock-ins are persistent, but not permanent. It is possible to loosen some systems. De Steenhuijsen Piters sees Denmark as a good European example: there, it proved possible to take a large part of agricultural land out of production and return it to nature.

What did the Danes do differently? First, they brought all stakeholders to the table early. Second, they were able to work with longer policy horizons than the Dutch four-year cycle. And finally, perhaps most importantly, they took potential resistance seriously. ‘Before resistance increased and acquired political dimensions,’ says De Steenhuijsen Piters, ‘they already had solutions and incentives ready. That is a lesson: if you expect resistance, pay attention to it at an early stage. Before things get stuck.’

In the Netherlands, we often do the opposite. We start with targets and deadlines and only discover later who stands to lose. By then, the conversation is already polarised, positions have become entrenched and every step becomes legal. ‘Then you are simply too late,’ De Steenhuijsen Piters argues.

An additional complication for the Netherlands: the food system is highly international. According to De Steenhuijsen Piters, this is where the Netherlands differs from Denmark. Major players in Denmark are more often still rooted nationally; the Netherlands produces for an international market, in which many multinationals play a dominant role — and they ‘usually do not come to the table’.

That makes national agreements vulnerable. Even when there is public support, economic lock-ins and lobbying structures can restrict the room for policy. Meanwhile, countless small initiatives are emerging from society. For example, a number of municipalities have banned lily cultivation near homes, under pressure from residents concerned about pesticide use. ‘These kinds of bottom-up initiatives are typically Dutch,’ says De Steenhuijsen Piters. ‘But scaling them up nationally is difficult if rules, markets and power continue to favour the existing model.’

An example of government intervention that meets with resistance in the Netherlands is manure policy, which is intended to keep food production within agreed environmental limits. Anne-Charlotte Hoes, Senior Researcher in Responsible Transitions in Agri-Food & Circular Bioeconomy, studied how dairy farmers experience manure policy, in order to better understand that resistance.

The core problem is an old one: the Netherlands has had a manure surplus for decades. ‘The livestock population grew enormously in the past,’ says Hoes. ‘Banks and supply chains played a part in this: farmers received the signal that more animals were needed to remain profitable. Scaling up was the economically logical choice.’

Europe and the Netherlands set limits on total manure production and nitrate leaching. This leads to policy that is rational from the perspective of environmental goals, but that also creates friction. ‘For an individual dairy farmer, it can feel like a bill from the past that suddenly lands on his or her plate,’ says Hoes. She emphasises that not everyone thinks about this in the same way, because there are also schemes funded by tax money to share the burden. But these appear insufficient to remove the sense of unfairness, and that feeling fuels resistance.

According to Hoes, one explanation is that legality is confused with justice. Policymakers focus, for example, on economic compensation, while farmers also experience cultural and social loss. Stopping often means not only the end of a business, but also the end of a way of life and a home, and sometimes even the loss of a community.

In addition, policy has become more erratic in this period. Schemes are announced and then withdrawn again; prospects shift with every cabinet. ‘That makes investing in change almost impossible,’ says Hoes. ‘You cannot ask livestock farmers to make a major shift without long-term frameworks.’

Both Hoes and De Steenhuijsen Piters warn against wrongly framing resistance as unwillingness. Hoes puts it sharply: yes, there are excesses and things have happened that are truly unacceptable, but anyone who only looks at the extremes misses the large silent majority. Precisely because the issue is polarised, you have to keep looking at that group’s concerns.

Resistance, then, is not sabotage, but a signal of where the system is under strain. ‘Sometimes it really is a matter of unwillingness,’ says De Steenhuijsen Piters. And if a voluntary transition does not seem possible, countervailing power is needed. ‘But often there is also a matter of inability. And then we first need to understand what is behind that.’

Are sustainable food systems achievable, then? Both researchers are cautiously optimistic. Not because it will be easy, but because stagnation is ultimately no longer an option either. One thing is certain: lock-ins were created by people. And what people create, people can also unlock — provided we are willing to take resistance seriously and accept that it will always hurt somewhere.