KINGSTON, R.I. – July 14, 2025 – Humans rely on metaphors to guide a shared understanding of our complex world, and in a novel twist, a faculty member in the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Fisheries, Animals and Veterinary Sciences is borrowing a technique from his colleagues in the College of Arts and Sciences to better describe and convey needed change in food sustainability.

Patrick Baur’s research focuses on equitably and sustainably balancing human livelihoods and ecosystems through improving how food is produced, distributed, and eaten. He works at the intersection of environmental science and public policy and co-authored a recent paper in the journal Nature Food.

Not satisfied with existing conceptual models for sustainable food systems, Baur and his colleagues around the country made their own.

While sustainability is a valuable guiding orientation, he says, it is a poor goal and difficult to measure. The paper’s authors liken it to an imaginary horizon, difficult to define and out of reach. Conversations about sustainability typically look at a “triple-bottom line” of environmental, economic, and social factors, but there is more than that, Baur says.

Baur and his peers went back to the drawing board, asking: how do we actually teach our students about sustainable food systems? Now they are sharing a new metaphor to describe a working food system and using the mangrove as a model.

“It’s a truly remarkable plant and also an ecosystem,” Baur says.

Baur says that food systems are commonly thought of as a linear, mechanistic chain connecting food production, distribution, and consumption. While advocates for sustainable food systems have made strides closing the chain to form a cycle—in which food waste is reduced and recycled back into production—there is still a need to account for the context within which food system cycles work.

Baur asserts that it is better to depict that cycle as nestled in the middle of interconnected root systems that nourish food systems. The mangrove offers a good template for modeling sustainability, its trunk representing the food cycle as the living “bark” of the tree, fed by root systems that determine if the tree flourishes or wilts away.

Associated with tenacity, diversity, and conservation, this remarkable plant is highly adaptive to harsh coastal environments in continual flux. Because of its unique adaptations, mangroves survive, even thrive, in highly changeable and challenging conditions.

The plant and its ecosystem are found on continents throughout the world, including along the U.S. Gulf Coast. There is no exact counterpart in New England, but the mangrove is similar to other keystone plants here, such as native marine eelgrasses or terrestrial oaks that form whole ecosystems around them.

“It’s the diversity and tenacity of the mangrove plant and its ecosystem in the face of a dynamic, often harsh tidal environment that we seek to capture with this metaphor,” Baur says. “For that, I don’t think the mangrove has an equal.”

Diversification is a key factor of this new model, to achieve better outcomes while addressing challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, insecure access to resources, and diet-related chronic diseases.

Moving from metaphor to an actionable framework raises challenging yet critical questions for researchers and the public alike. But Baur says this kind of thinking is needed to improve global food systems that find themselves in a time of increasing challenges. Food systems are vulnerable to multiple shocks and stressors, including those resulting from climate change and geopolitics. He notes that food’s role in sustaining culture, identity, economies, nutrition, well-being and the biosphere also presents pathways forward. Food systems draw on “root systems” to produce outcomes that people care about, such as nutrition, good health, well-being, livable environments, equity, economic security, and dignified livelihoods.

“A sustainable food system is one that can keep providing a balance of those outcomes over time, all at once,” Baur says, “instead of focusing on just one, like economic value, at the expense of others, like equity or health. Diversifying our subsystems will boost resilience and adaptive capacity.”

Using the mangrove as a model would be an improvement in envisioning ways to improve existing agricultural systems, he says. He likens the current model—if mixing plant metaphors—to turfgrass or destructive invasive plants like kudzu and hydrilla.

“These plants actively colonize and destroy other ecosystems and their associated ecosystem services,” he says. “This is what we’d like to see our existing agriculture system move away from.”

He is inspired by innovative systems that social movements worldwide are seeking to create, such as food sovereignty, agroecology, slow food, regenerative agriculture, and food policy councils.

“What all these movements have in common,” Baur says, “is that they emerge from the ground up as people try to work together to make sure their food systems actually deliver what people need them to: food that nourishes healthy bodies and healthy ecosystems, that provides good jobs and economic opportunity, that allows for agency and cultural expression, that generates wealth and well-being for the people who participate in them.”

“Resilience means that a system can bounce back from disturbance,” he adds. “A resilient farming system, for example, can survive a hurricane or a drought without too much loss of its core functions. A non-resilient system, on the other hand, is fragile, brittle in the face of adversity. It tends to collapse completely if it receives a shock, often magnifying a relatively limited disaster or problem into a more systemic crisis.”

“We’re interested in adaptive capacity. If resilience is like a boxer being able to take a punch, adaptive capacity is like that boxer learning to read her opponent, to predict when the punches will come and move out of the way before the hit.”