Food access is key to understanding the elderly's shopping environment. Usually, food access is simply calculated based on the distance between an elderly person's home and his/her nearest fresh food store. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has used this approach to make food access maps throughout Japan. However, these maps do not account for the different food products that are available at different stores.
The purpose of this study was to develop new food access maps using food availability rates for healthy eating indicator shopping basket (HEISB). First, we developed three types of HEISB: fresh food (with 33 items), processed food (with 49 items), and ready to eat meals (with three items). The types of food retailers we examined were supermarkets, convenience stores, drug stores, discount stores, and mobile sales wagons, each of which was located in our study area. Second, we developed three new types of food access maps using the availability of food in these store types to supply the three types of HEISB.
Food availability for the three HEISB types differed dramatically by store type. For fresh foods, all supermarkets and mobile sales wagons showed high availability, some convenience stores had middle levels of availability, and the availability at other store types was quite low. However, with respect to processed foods, many stores showed high degrees of availability, including supermarkets, convenience stores, and drug stores. For ready to eat meals, most stores showed more than 80% availability of the required food items.
Recently, elderly Japanese citizens have greatly increased their consumption of processed foods and ready to eat meals. Thus, these new food access maps will give us a more accurate representation of the elderly's food shopping environment.

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Japan's “Food with Function Claims” labeling system has been established since April 2015. The purpose of this paper is to clarify purchase intention and price acceptability of “Vegetables with Function Claims” from consumer consciousness. Ordered probit analysis was applied to data from a questionnaire survey administered to 1000 women ranging in age from 20 to 69 years old and living in the Tokyo metropolitan area. This analysis found health consciousness, information sensitivity, and anti-convenience consciousness to be the main factors that affect purchase desire for “Vegetables with Function Claims.” Furthermore, an analysis of the acceptable price of “Vegetables with Function Claims”, performed using a price sensitivity measurement (PSM) approach, confirmed that intensity of desire to purchase “Vegetables with Function Claims” and health consciousness may positively affect the acceptable price of “Vegetables with Function Claims.” However, it has also been shown that grade and intensity of information sensitivity and anti-convenience consciousness may not affect the acceptable price of “Vegetables with Function Claims.”

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Owing to population aging and a declining number of grocery stores, senior citizens face the challenge of inconvenient and laborious shopping for food. Recently, considerable efforts have been made to address such difficulties in food shopping. Although the measures undertaken are public in nature and highly appreciated by the local society, they are fraught with economic difficulties and the fear of unsustainability. Based on four presentations, this symposium discusses the approaches to address such a food accessibility problem from the viewpoint of satisfying the need for both economic efficiency and public good.
The first presentation is titled “Current Food Accessibility Problems in Japan: Using a Food Accessibility Map Based on the 2015 Population Census” ; (Katsuya TAKAHASHI); second is “The Development of New Food Access Maps That Shows the Availability of Food for Healthy Eating Indicator Shopping Baskets” ; (Nobuyuki IWAMA); third is “Actual Situation and Sustainability of Community Supermarkets” ; (Ryouta MURAKAMI); the last is “Food Policy Council and Urban Food Policy in North America” ; (Masashi TACHIKAWA). Paper covering the third presentation has been submitted to an academic journal; as such, this paper is not included in the current issue.

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In this paper, I clarify the current situation regarding food accessibility problems in Japan, based on a new food accessibility map that I created. In addition, I discuss the changes and factors that affected them compared to 10 years ago. I use the new food accessibility map to review the estimation method and define “food access difficulties” as elderly over 65 years who live 500m or more away from stores, and who cannot use private cars. I used the 500m grid square statistics of the “2015 Population Census” by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the “2014 Census of Commerce” by the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. Estimation results reveal that there are 8,246,000 food access difficulties across Japan, among them 3,776,000 in urban areas and 4,470,000 in rural ones. In particular, 5,355,000 people are over 75 years old, denoting almost 65% of all food access difficulties. These difficulties have been increasing constantly especially in urban areas from 2005 to 2015 but have been decreasing in rural areas.

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In North America, we can find various attempts to change local food systems by considering the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders. In particular, the concepts of food policy (Tim Lang) and citizen's engagement are key. In this paper, I will describe how these ideas have been discussed in North America by referring to various practical attempts to solve issues of local food systems, such as food policy councils, urban food policy, food charters, and so on. After describing the details of these activities and implications to food access issues, I argue that we need to consider the multi-functionality of food in urban society, and that this idea encourages us to develop a more coordinated relationship between food systems and urban planning in local contexts. Understanding the multi-functionality of food leads us to reconsider the nature of food from the viewpoint of “food as commons” rather than food as commodity.

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In this panel talk, the three panelists, Ms. Yutaka Arai, Mr. Norio Yamaguchi, and Mr. Yasuhiro Nakajima, talked about the Japanese food system and related policies at that time of the publication of Volume 7 of the association's book series of “Food System” and the changes since that time. In addition, they covered two topics; food safety and offensive food system. The followings points are a few of the highlights from the discussion. When Volume 7 was published, food safety was a major problem but later, as the administrative changes put in place to deal with the problem started to take effect, concern about food safety decreased. On the other hand, the problem of shrinking domestic demand caused by an aging population and declining birth rate led to focus on creating an offensive food system for a globalized world and need to promote food exports. The discussion of this problem drew attention to the importance of food safety certification for food exports. The panel discussed several innovations that will needed in the future, such as using artificial intelligence(AI), cyclical formation for further sustainability, and the standardization of new values of food. Furthermore, in this discussion it was confirmed that an offensive food system means properly contributing to the development of a humane food system and food system policies have important roles to play in these issues.

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