Food System Assessment

Abstract

Food assessments are conducted for different reasons such as creating a more sustainable commercial food production system or to target particular policies. The main focus of this effort was to locate indicators that could be updated regularly so current information would be readily available and so that changes or trends could be monitored. Without knowing the current state of food-related indicators it’s difficult to make informed decisions about which issues and goals are priorities. We start with an overview of the food system model we used. Chapter 2 is a demographic overview of Alaska’s residents. The next five chapters present the indicators for each of the components of the food system. Chapter 8 contains the data we think would be need to develop a better picture of Alaska’s food system. The final section of this report is an index of the indicators: the name of the indicator, where the indicator appears in this report, the years of data included, the source (the agency or organization thatproduced the data), the source title for the data, and the location of the data, usually a Web address.