Calculating Mexico City’s Food Supply: Methodological Insights for Regionalizing Food Data at the Urban Scale

Abstract

Abstract Tackling the environmental impacts of food systems can play a crucial role in achieving urban sustainability. Robust accounts of urban food supply must inform policymaking. Current research on urban food supply often relies on extrapolating national data sets to the urban scale, obscuring the diversity of food consumption patterns across regions and across the urban–rural divide within countries. One illustration of this is the case of Mexico, where biocultural diversity has shaped diverse diets across the country. In this article, we present a method to estimate urban food supply in the data-scarce context of Mexico City. We combine national data on food supply with food consumption data from a spatially explicit food questionnaire to estimate urban food supply. We estimate the food supply for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, breaking it down by food group, and present key differences with national-scale data. In particular, consumption of animal products (meat and milk) is higher than the national average, and corn consumption is lower. We conclude that it is crucial to produce precise accounts of urban diets to enable robust analyses of the environmental impacts of urban food supply, and reflect on the limitations and opportunities of our method.