The wide-ranging literature on food systems provides multiple perspectives and worldviews. Various stakeholders define food and food systems in non-equivalent ways. The perception ofthe performance of food systems is determined by these specific perspectives, and a wide variety ofpolicies responding to different aims are proposed and implemented accordingly. This paper setsout to demonstrate that the pre-analytical adoption of different narratives about the food systemleads to non-equivalent assessments of the performance of food supply chains. In order to do so,we (i) identify a set of relevant narratives on food supply chains in Spanish and Catalan contexts;(ii) identify the pertinent attributes needed to describe and represent food supply chains within thedifferent perspectives or narratives; and (iii) carry out an integrated assessment of three organictomato supply chains from the different perspectives. In doing so, the paper proposes an analysis ofnarratives to enable the analyst to characterize the performance of food supply chains from differentperspectives and to identify the expected trade-offs of integrated assessment, associating them withthe legitimate-but-contrasting views found among the social actors involved.
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