In April 2022, I was fortunate enough to join the newly formed EcoFood Systems team in NUIG. As I began working on some tasks which were related to the working goals of the project, I found myself deeply enthralled by the areas of city region food systems, food system mapping, the nutritional outcomes of food systems and food systems within the Global South.

Following this, we decided to focus on Bahir Dar in Ethiopia, Hanoi in Vietnam and Cali in Colombia. These three cities were chosen due to their contrasting food systems, as a basis to explore the utilisation of food mapping in different contexts, identify knowledge gaps and investigate the use of nutrition-sensitive food mapping.

After identifying the knowledge gaps of previous mapping activities within the three cities, a nutrition-sensitive food mapping analysis was conducted. This was achieved by considering the various stages of a food system akin to the HLPE food systems diagram namely production, processing, distribution, retail, consumer and waste, as well as the actors and factors that influence these systems.

In short, our findings indicate that food mapping approaches can generate new insights into the “status quo” of nutritional outcomes associated with food flows and can facilitate greater integration of healthier foods into food system decision-making at every stage of the food supply chain while considering multiple food system-specific factors and cultural influences.

On a more personal note, I felt very honoured to learn about not just the food systems of Bahir Dar, Hanoi and Cali but also about the people, their cultures, religions, political history, agricultural and climate change-related policies, and obviously their staple food dishes.

If you would like to discuss the paper further, feel free to contact me via email at heidiliddy@gmail.com. Some of the highly relevant papers that formed the foundations of this paper can also be found under the bibliography section of my blog if you wish to know more about the related areas.