The Bottleneck Analogy

The image of a bottleneck is highly effective to illustrate the journey of a food product through the food system and where power throughout the system concentrates. Want to describe this to a friend? Have a pen and paper handy? Draw it out and describe how the bottlenecks are points within the system where often only a handful of gatekeepers determine what foods do or don’t pass through. The presence of consumer-owned retail food co-ops increases the diversity of options within one of the tightest bottlenecks in the system.

Source: Greenpeace 2015