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Pandemonium and City Food Security

April 8, 2016

Pandemonium and City Food Security

I supervised a university-level food studies class last week that, partly by design and partly by sheer accident, gave me some new insights into the challenges of city-oriented food security policy.

A team of students responsible for teaching a segment on urban food policy tried to stimulate direct engagements with their classmates by getting them to play a version of the software game called Pandemonium – by applying the rules of that game to an imaginary “real life” experience of food policy making.

As it goes with Pandemonium (the game and in real life), something out of the blue happens every two minutes that upsets the whole gameplan of the policy makers. Word of drought came one minute into the class exercize, upsetting the best-laid plans of a work team. News of an epidemic broke two minutes later, upsetting even more best-laid plans.

Just as the students were coping with these upsets, a real life security guard opened the door, apologized for interrupting the class, and calmly told us everyone had to leave the building immediately.

As they say in the pandemonium-watching business, it’s never a question of if pandemonium will break out; it’s a question of when.

My class of ten stood around outside the building with several hundred others who had been in the building. Police pushed people calmly and politely back, as far away from the building as possible.

The police knew nothing, or said nothing, about what was going on. In today’s world, that just meant that everyone got out their mobile phones, and within minutes learned that an unattended package had been found in the building, and authorities were worried that it might contain a bomb.

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