Eye on the Triangle

Evie Dallmann chats with College of Design PhD student, Erin White, about his research and practice in integrated food systems and policy design in North Carolina. He emphasizes the importance of working at a regional level across multiple counties in North Carolina to connect urban and rural food production and consumption
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Creators and Guests

Host
Shradha Bhatia
Public Affairs Director (2025-2026)
Producer
Evie Dallmann
Content Creator

What is Eye on the Triangle?

Eye on the Triangle is WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1/HD-2’s weekly public affairs programming with news, interviews, opinion, weather, sports, arts, music, events and issues that matter to NC State, Raleigh and the Triangle.

00:02
Shradha Bhatia
You are listening to Eye of the Triangle, WKNC's weekly public affairs program from the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Any views and opinions expressed during Eye of the Triangle do not represent NC State or student media. Hi, this is Shradha Bhatia. I'm the Public Affairs Director here at wknc. Today's episode is hosted by Evie Dallman, who speaks with Erin White, a PhD student in the College of Design, about integrated food systems and regional policy design across North Carolina. The conversation explores how connecting urban and rural communities can strengthen sustainability, economic development and public health across the state.

00:45
Evie Dallmann
This is Evie with WKNC.

00:47
Evie Dallmann
I got to talk to Erin White about his research poster on integrated policy in regards to food systems. I was first captivated by his graphics that demonstrated the circularity and wet like nature of food systems. So this was really exciting to explore how North Carolina can be a cradle for specialized policy and community driven engagement and representation. So I hope you enjoy and the next time you eat something, this can spur a little thought.

01:18
Erin White
My name is Erin White. I'm currently a PhD candidate at NC State in the College of Design. My background is pretty diverse. I've worked on farms. I worked for a while in public health. I was a cook and a chef for about five years. And then I got into carpentry and construction, which led me to architecture, which led me to NC State. So I got my master's in architecture at NC State in 2011. And for about 10 years I ran my own small business doing food systems design and planning work. So working mostly for nonprofits and municipalities, local governments, on sustainable food systems projects. So farmers markets or urban food plans, food hub work, community gardens, all kinds of projects like that.

02:13
Erin White
Started to think more about how change at the regional level is actually going to be really important in building sustainable food systems for the future. And in 2022, I shifted gears. I was becoming more interested in teaching and more interested in sort of generating my own questions about the food system. Coming back to NC State for a PhD was a way for me to refocus on, I think, deeper questions about how our food system works, how our food system could work. Design could be part of change for the better. I think the first interest area of mine with this was really connecting design thinking to food systems. I believe that our food systems today are facing a number of really urgent challenges and they're the sort of wicked global challenges that design is well suited for helping to solve.

03:20
Erin White
When I look at North Carolina, there are, I think, a lot of opportunities there's lots of really strong farming communities, there's lots of agricultural opportunity. There's a real need to both feed people as well as develop healthier rural economies. And so I think there's a real opportunity to start connecting sustainable, more functional long term food system with the needs of North Carolina. And so I think this research project has grown out of that. Both a desire to make change in North Carolina and a desire to learn more about how to effectively connect design to food systems challenges. It's really about asking a question about how communities and large like policy directions can be negotiated, can start to sync together, can start to inform one another.

04:33
Erin White
And so I think often we think of policy is this big top down mechanism that affects our lives, but we don't have much agency in affecting. And I think community organizing, community engagement can be a really effective tool for understanding what the people of a community want or need. I think it can be a really effective tool to drive political change mostly at local levels. I think larger organizing can certainly make change at higher governmental levels. And so I think that the kind of the mechanism for change that I'm really interested in is one that bridges those that recognizes that the best public policy will actually be informed by community and community engagement. The way that I'm kind of positioning this research is at a regional level. So thinking about sort of a multi county level within North Carolina.

05:48
Erin White
And there's a few important reasons for that. I think one is so that it does have the opportunity to be both sort of bottom up and top down sort of at the same time thinking about how a larger area of decision making could create some guiding policy, some sort of top down policy, but also really relying on the shared voice and perspective and experiences of communities in order to inform what those larger policy directions might be. And so in terms of a policy and kind of governance positioning, I think a regional level, sort of smaller than the state level, allows the decision making to sort of act at a regional level and be broader than most local governments typically operate within and yet still close enough to communities so that you could have community voice in those processes.

07:00
Erin White
The regional scale also is really important in the food system because the way that the food system works I think is often thought of as an either or proposition. Either your food system is hyper local and we're shopping at farmers markets, we're trying to source our foods within 50 or 100 miles. The farmers in a particular county are really serving the consumers and customers in that county, or it's not local food, it's more kind of into the global food market, national food markets, big commodity markets where things are grown at really large scale, where food processing is an industrial question, and where food is moved by really large corporations through the food supply chain, through corporate owned grocery stores. And that's really divorced from a local identity.

08:08
Erin White
But the idea of a regional food system is one where farmers could have the opportunity to scale up without losing their sense of place. And the infrastructure in a supply chain could be focused on regional networks, not even as large as state networks, but focused on regional networks and begin to take advantage of slightly larger markets than you would have in a single county. And so if you imagine sort of the triangle and a surrounding rural area as a region, you could imagine that wake county itself doesn't actually have enough farms to support feeding the people of wake county. Right.

09:00
Erin White
Wake county is mostly urban county, but when you start building a region that includes urban areas and rural areas, you can start to connect larger rural production with larger urban populations and start to not fully replace the diet of people in that region, but really change the proportion of food that they would eat from the place that they're from. The regional direction in food systems planning would try to, in the same way that bridging policy governance would, I think, benefit from a top down and bottom up approach Using the regional scale for food systems development. Food systems planning would allow a sense of place, would allow sort of community knowledge and community experience to inform regional decisions.

09:56
Erin White
But at the same time, you would also be working at a large enough scale to build new economic opportunities for the farmers and the food businesses in the region. The research starts with this understanding that the food system is complex. The food system is kind of this multi layered, multiscale and multi sector set of problems. So probably if you go to the diagram that's a little bit below where you are now, right in the middle with the food system at the top, and then these sort of oval shapes that go down onto sort of a regional map, I guess. So if we think about the food system as this kind of structure that exists to feed people, right?

10:54
Erin White
It relies on farms and food production, it relies on distribution, relies on processing and cooking food, packaging food, and then getting that food to people that need it. And then there's all. Certainly there's a food waste is a big part of the food system, and figuring out smarter ways to handle waste as part of that system also. But essentially the food system exists to feed people. The impact of the food system on the planet is pretty significant. The food system generates a Lot of carbon into the atmosphere. The food system extracts lots of resources from our planet. And the food system relies on lots of human labor that's not always fairly treated or compensated. So the food system itself can be. Can bring a number of negative impacts to people and the planet. But it's really the parts of the food system.

12:06
Erin White
Farms, distribution systems, processing plants, retail. The parts of the food system can work together in ways that. And so to try to think about the food system as a complex structure that is able to be designed, I think, starts to invite questions about how the food system works, who manages the food system, who owns different parts of the food system, and where are the opportunities to bring a collective desire to change that and how to mobilize sort of change in the food system in ways that lead to better practices throughout the system. You know, things like organic farming sort of might be an example of that. Shorter supply chains that we associate with local food systems could be an example of that. Trying to.

13:04
Erin White
Trying to decrease the amount of meat in a typical American diet might be a way to try to minimize the harm of the food system and create a more sustainable structure. And so when we look at the food system, it's complex just on its face. But when you think about it from a scale standpoint, the food system operates different ways at different scales. So the food system operates one way. If we're thinking about a community scale, where food might be sort of moved around a town, people might engage with food in a certain way. At a county or regional level, food might be moving in larger volumes, might be more sort of economic questions asked at that scale. And then at the state and the federal level, the food system works in different ways.

13:59
Erin White
Both food is moving in different ways, but also the kinds of policy and regulatory impact on the food system start to be important facets. So the food system is complex and how food moves. And the food system then also becomes complex when we look at multiple scales. And then when you think about the different impacts that the food system has, you think about the different interests that different sectors have in the food system, it gets even more complicated. So the health sector is interested in the food system because food and health are so closely connected. And so we know that a poor diet leads to poor health outcomes, we know that hunger leads to poor health outcomes. And so the health sector is interested in. In the performance of the food system.

14:52
Erin White
People doing economic development work are interested in the food system as a way to grow economic activity, as a way to sort of steer economic activity. People working in Education are interested in the food system as a way to both sort of educate people in agriculture, educate people in food businesses, but also educate consumers on how to make decisions around food. People interested in the climate, environment clearly have interest in the food system. And so you can see that multiple sectors are interested in how the food system works. And the food system also works different ways at different scales. And so in order to make effective policy in this really complicated area, I think takes a particular approach that I'm exploring. So this research project explores one way of trying to make change in how a food system operates.

16:06
Erin White
So this research really is saying food systems are super complex. And in order to make good policy for a food system, we need to have an integrated approach to policy where multiple interests can come together and talk about problems, where the problem itself can actually be named something. So it's sometimes helpful, and this might be a different thread altogether, it's sometimes helpful to use the analogy of a watershed when imagining a food system. So if you think of a watershed, we all have an interest in clean water. It could be commercial fishermen, could be recreational boaters, could be municipal water supplies, could be sort of environmental groups. They have an interest in the clean water. The clean water can be impacted by different land uses.

17:17
Erin White
The water can be impacted by different kinds of uses on the water, can be impacted by development, agriculture, golf courses. But a watershed cuts across lots of governmental, lots of political boundaries. Watershed certainly would cut across municipal or county boundaries, sometimes across state boundaries. And in order to make effective policy for the whole watershed, there would have to be a way for multiple jurisdictions across multiple scales and multiple sectors, public and private interests, to make policy together. Right. It's not an easy thing, if you can imagine trying to bring all those different groups together. And the food system is the same way. Right. The food system cuts across geographies. The food system brings all these different public and private interests together, whether they're really acknowledging it or not.

18:20
Erin White
But until all those entities, all those different scales, have a way to build a conversation about better policy, then the policy that is created will be limited. It might be limited probably to the silo that's sort of sitting around the table. So the policy might just be about farm production of commodity crops. The policy might be associated just with fast food. Right. And sort of health outcomes. But without being able to have those like cross silo conversations, the policy won't be effective for the whole system. And so what I'm exploring through this is a theory of policy integration that provides a framework for how you Would make effective policy in a complex system. But this theory of policy integration hasn't been applied to food systems development work yet.

19:29
Erin White
So food systems scholars have used policy integration theory to assess current food systems like are the policy landscapes effective or not? Right. And they've used it to sort of assess and measure existing food systems, but they haven't used it as an applied tool for change. And so if you believe that a complex system like food systems needs an integrated policy framework, then the question would be how do you use that to make change for more sustainable food systems? So this research asks whether a policy integration framework is a useful tool for change making in food systems. And so it also, then the research is really set up to ask that through one particular case in the Sandhills in North Carolina.

20:30
Erin White
So seven counties in North Carolina that have not been involved together in regional food planning, but have a shared identity around the geography and the history of the Sandhills region. It's a mostly rural area, it's mostly low income area, lots of agriculture, agricultural history and land in the area. And so I sort of selected this because I knew some food systems change makers in the region already, so I could start to build a conversation. And I was interested in sort of testing out my questions about policy integration in a grounded community setting and so pulling together community stakeholders to work on food systems change, using policy integration as a tool to drive those conversations with the goal of moving conversations in this region in the directions that the community stakeholders wanted to go. So I see this research as having two key outcomes.

21:59
Erin White
One is my own research is policy integration an effective applied tool for food systems change making. And the second outcome of the research is tangible action in the community around change about, around transforming the food system. So through this research, you know, working with a group of community stakeholders over four months, we've been really thinking about values and vision for what change might look like. We've been thinking about possible actions and cross cutting problems and starting to build a structure that could look like sort of an action plan or strategic plan for the region. And as my work with the community wraps up, I'll be developing probably a sort of a vision statement and sort of an action plan that the regional stakeholders can then use to move forward into next steps of organizing.

23:12
Erin White
So one of the key questions, so there's a number of key questions that are coming out of this, such as involving more community members, building a wider representation across the region. How do you start to expand this sort of movement for policy and movement for change in the region. And those will be important next steps. What I see my research doing is beginning to catalyze those next steps. So having an initial conversation about what might be possible with a group of. A diverse group of stakeholders and setting the frame for next steps of change in the regional food system.

24:00
Erin White
And so, you know, through the end of this, I'm hoping to have both an academic process that I can share with other food systems stakeholders and practitioners so that they have a sense of whether policy integration is worth using as an applied tool or not, and also sharing with food system scholars. And then in addition to the academic sort of outcome, having a tangible community outcome that hopefully is beneficial on some level to the San Jose region. For me, it's very important that my work and my research has community value as well as scholarly value. And whether this is a template or not, you know, I think remains to be seen.

24:56
Erin White
But I do hope that it's in their tradition of community design, of design extension of the kind of the tradition of designers intentionally and reflectively building community value through their skill set as designers. I think the design community too often is driven by sort of, I think, corporate interests or interest questions of profitability. And I think that the value of design goes much further than that. I think that the value of design, especially design in an academic setting, needs to consider the common good.

26:05
Erin White
I think that the value of design is in imagining alternative futures based on what people and communities need and desire, and helping then not only imagine and begin developing paths towards alternative futures and preferred futures, but also helping communicate what those futures are, how we begin to reach towards them collectively, so that the diverse decision makers in any community can start to have a shared kind of collective vision of what's possible. And so I'm really, so far, I'm really happy with how this research is turning out in that it does seem to be having positive reception in the community. And the people that I'm working with have been very excited so far about the possibility of next steps. And I think the simple fact of them having been brought together for a series of conversations.

27:29
Erin White
And so I feel as though, at least in some small way, this research has been able to focus both on the common good and on the academic intentions behind it.

27:46
Evie Dallmann
This has been Evie with WKNC editing and producing by me and music by Samuel Shepard. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

27:54
Shradha Bhatia
Well, that was Evie talking to Erin White discussing the integrated food systems and regional collaboration across North Carolina. This has been Eye on the Triangle from WKNC 88.1 FM HD1 Raleigh. Our theme song is Krakatoa by Noah Stark, licensed under Creative Commons. To re listen to this or any other episode, visit wknc.org/podcast or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening.