Where Food Policy Meets the Doughnut

Written by Ilektra Kouloumpi, Sectors Lead at Doughnut Economics Action Lab

How might we build a food system that feeds everyone without breaking the planet that grows it? That question sat at the centre of the workshop that took place in Rome in June 2026, where fifty people — food policy councils, academics, policymakers, city council representatives, researchers, multilateral organisations, NGOs and community groups — spent two days moving from diagnosis to direction.

This gathering, hosted by DEAL and the American University of Rome on 11 and 12 June, was the culmination of a longer journey. Since late 2025, an international group of food experts had been meeting online to co-create a "Food Doughnut" — adapting Kate Raworth's framework of social foundation and ecological ceiling specifically to food systems. Rome was where that work came down to earth: two days to test it, question it, and start turning it into policy direction.

Day one: getting the big picture right

The first day unfolded at METROPOLITANO Urban Center Roma, an open-access civic hub in Rome — a fitting setting for a conversation about opening up a food system that too often feels closed off. It was about building common ground before building solutions. Many participants were meeting in person for the first time after months of collaborating online, so the morning made space for that — introductions, an overview of Doughnut Economics, and a shared look at the co-creation work done so far. Kate Raworth then joined the group live for a conversation on food systems and power. At one point she offered a line from statistician George Box — "All models are wrong, some are useful" — to frame what the Doughnut itself can and can't do: not a perfect answer to every question, but a tool worth using for as long as it helps simplify a complex system and point toward a vision of thriving in balance.

In the afternoon, a facilitated World Café turned that grounding into reflection: what would it actually mean to apply the seven ways of thinking like a 21st-century economist to food? Groups worked through prompts like "What does it mean to create a distributive food system?" and "How could the food system challenge growth?" — carrying the Doughnut's principles out of theory and into the specifics of what people in the room actually work on. The day closed with an evening performance at MaTeMù, a great social and educational initiative for youth.

Day two: from diagnosis to direction

Day two moved the group to Cooperativa Agricola Coraggio, a food cooperative just outside the city — a fitting place to design policy for the kind of food system many in the room are already building in practice. This was the deep-dive day: participants split into groups, each taking on one of the systemic barriers the community had defined together — concentrated corporate power, disconnected global supply chains, land ownership, the flow of subsidies and public money, among others. Each group worked through the same arc: naming a "How Might We" question, imagining what a meal on the other side of that change might actually look like in 2046, mapping the actors and alliances needed to get there, and finally — the moment that grounds all of it — each person committing to one concrete thing they'd start tomorrow.

What stayed with people

Ask anyone who was there and a few things come up again and again: the energy of the connecting moments and games woven between the working sessions; a lunch of locally grown, organic food prepared onsite; and simply being on a working cooperative farm — meeting the people who grow the food, not just discussing the system that fails them. More than one participant described leaving not just with new ideas, but with a community: a network of people, scattered across cities and countries, who now understand the deep work in the same language.

What emerged

A few directions cut across nearly every group's work:

• Procurement as the most immediate lever. Reforming public and institutional purchasing — by setting sourcing criteria that favour local, indigenous, and artisan producers, and embedding human rights in procurement decisions — emerged across groups as the single most actionable entry point into systemic change.
• Redirecting public money toward social and ecological value. Subsidies and public funding should be conditioned on measurable social and ecological contribution, not production volume — including climate-linked conditions, active disincentives for harmful practices, and shared metrics for what "added value" means in food systems terms.
• Building the connective roles that are currently missing. Food Hub Coordinators, Network Weavers, and Bridge Builders were independently named across groups as a structural gap — not peripheral figures, but the missing architecture that makes territorial food systems function.
• From ownership to stewardship models. CSAs, Community Land Trusts, cooperative processing and sales, and distributed networks emerged as the structural alternative to concentrated ownership, with social capital treated as an output, not a byproduct.
• Nature as an actor with rights. Some groups explicitly reframed nature not as a resource to be managed but as a stakeholder with rights and bridge-building capacity — a shift from extraction toward relational stewardship.
• Protecting and recognising indigenous and small-scale producers. Concrete proposals included geographical certifications, policy-triggering concentration thresholds, and global coalition infrastructure — giving small producers collective power within systems currently designed against them.
• The personal and relational as part of the system. Cooking together, baking bread, eating with family and friends were placed inside systemic proposals, not outside them. The future food journey is not only institutional; it runs through everyday life and relationships.

Where it goes next

The "Start Tomorrow" commitments participants wrote for themselves on Day 2 are already becoming real: people following up with colleagues back home, exploring new partnerships, asking for introductions to case studies and to cities and regions already further along the Food Doughnut path. That same appetite is now shaping the next piece of shared work — a report co-created from everything the process has built so far, across the online sessions and the two days in Rome. It will document the process itself, share the workshop's tools and methods, and gather case studies from across the network, offering inspiration to anyone working to bring Doughnut Economics into food systems — or into any other sector. 

What's clearest, though, is less about any single output and more about what the two days built: a working community of people who've moved from talking about food system transformation to designing it together — and who now know each other well enough to keep going.

*Many thanks to Professor Laura Prota and the American University of Rome for hosting the workshop and supporting the participants with the travel costs.