Authors:Marit Rosol, Eric Holt-Giménez, Lauren Kepkiewicz, Elizabeth Vibert Pages: 1 - 30 Abstract: The call for Just Food Futures reflects a desire to address social inequities, health disparities, and environmental disasters created by overlapping systems of oppression including capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. While many food movement actors share a desire to meaningfully tackle these issues, the richness and broadness of the food movement does not come without problems. The challenge of engaging with the intersectional nature of food-based inequities is apparent in the tensions between distinctive food organizations and movements and their sometimes conflicting goals, approaches, tactics, and strategies. This Themed Section brings together some of the contributions to and reflections from a virtual three-day workshop held in May 2021 in which we aimed at better understanding the differing approaches, the spaces in which they work, and where we explored collaborative possibilities within, between, and beyond food movements. In this Introduction we share reflections from the guest editors. To explore how food movements can collaborate in solidarity while not negating differences, we first identify key frictions within and between food-related movements and why they persist. Second, we suggest three strategic orientations that may help to explore collaborative possibilities within, between, and beyond food movements: Learning from other movements, fostering political literacy, and engaging with tensions productively. Finally, we consider the role and responsibility of academics within these conversations. We close with a call for (re)politization across difference and relate this back to strategies for broader social transformations. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.598 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Elaine Power, Aric McBay Pages: 31 - 37 Abstract: In food systems scholarship, the case for basic income to reduce food insecurity is well-established. Less well-appreciated is the potential for basic income to support young farmers, improve rural vitality, promote gender equality and racial justice in agriculture, and assist farmers in building resilience in the face of climate chaos and other overlapping crises. In and of itself, basic income cannot transform the food system. However, by guaranteeing an income floor and thus freedom from necessity, it could be a potent tool in radical, democratic struggles against systems of oppression and towards justice—in the food system and beyond. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.533 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Anelyse Margaret Weiler, Evelyn Encalada Grez Pages: 38 - 52 Abstract: In early stages of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian farming industry expressed panic that travel restrictions could disrupt the arrival of migrant farmworkers from the Majority World. In this Perspective essay, we consider how farm industry lobbying successfully framed delays to hiring migrant farmworkers as a threat to national food security. After demonstrating how migrant workers have long been situated in spaces of legal exceptionalism, we argue that framing migrant farmworkers as essential for the national public good of domestic food production conceals how they are also essential for private capital accumulation in agribusiness. In the haste to hire migrant workers quickly, Canadian federal and provincial governments largely failed to prevent farmworker COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths predicted by researchers and activists. We conclude by underscoring the need to fundamentally transform temporary labour migration programs in ways that uphold migrant dignity beyond exceptionalism. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.521 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Janet Elizabeth Poppendieck Pages: 53 - 63 Abstract: Scholars of food regimes and food movements have argued that the capacity of the contemporary food movement to achieve significant change is dependent upon the nature of the alliances formed by the progressive, food justice component of the broader array of food change organizations. They have urged alliances primarily with the more radical food sovereignty branch of the food movement. I argue that in the United States, which provides far more assistance to poor people as food assistance than as cash welfare, alliances with reformist food security organizations, and specifically the anti-hunger organizations focused on protecting and expanding federal food assistance, must be an essential part of any significant food justice agenda. These programs are essential to the survival of millions of Americans in the present while we are trying to build a better world for the future. Mobilized and informed public policy advocacy has an impressive track record of successful defense and incremental improvement of food programs. Several of these programs are entitlements that actually create justiciable rights. The collective procurement associated with school food and other public meal programs creates levers for fundamental food system change. And the network of federal, state and local anti-hunger organizations is potentially a portal through which people can enter the movement for a just food future. Food justice activists should include anti-hunger advocates among their allies and partners. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.534 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Syma Habib Pages: 64 - 74 Abstract: COVID-19 has revealed deep inequities in our food system. As goodwill and charity from this crisis disappears, and emergency supports begin to dwindle, we can anticipate increased food insecurity amongst Canadians. Rising food prices and unemployment will drive a lack of access to fresh nutritious foods for already stressed and vulnerable individuals. As a community organizer who has advocated for poverty reduction and food justice over my lifetime, I understand the short-lived nature of change that occurs without public will and engagement - policy wins end up being removed in the next election cycle. My experience with party-dependent advocacy projects has led me to ask the question: how do we build the kind of public will that demands access to healthy and nutritious food as not an individual responsibility but a public duty, much like universal healthcare' In writing this paper I intend to draw upon my experiences in organizing to explore the deeper cultural and internal shifts that may need to occur to inspire public will and create change that lasts beyond a single election cycle, and the opportunity that COVID-19 presents as Canadians grapple with questions about food security and poverty in an unprecedented time. I will connect with three community members I advocated with in my time doing placebased community organizing, all with different experiences of food insecurity, and use a storytelling approach to imagine a more effective way of advocating for just food futures. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.538 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Ricardo Barbosa Jr, Estevan Coca Pages: 75 - 100 Abstract: The state is an important, if sometimes overlooked, terrain of struggle for food activists. To explore the ways and extent to which just food futures can be enacted through the state, we present the experience of Brazil. We argue that activists should seek to advance food policies that have broad social appeal to weather political changes in administrations. Our argument is informed by an extensive review of scholarship on the state, corporate influence, and the possibility of promoting progressive agri-food change through the state, as well as the contradictions of doing so. Drawing on (agrarian) political economy we analyse institutional procurement as exemplifying the state’s role not only in ‘stabilizing’ and ‘growing’ the economy but also in enacting ‘redistribution’. Through our research in Brazil, we compare how the Food Acquisition Program (PAA) and the National School Meal Program (PNAE) have been impacted by the far-right’s rise to power since 2016. When mobilizing the power of institutions to change food systems by leveraging the purchasing power of the state, beyond institutionalization, food policies must be participatory and framed as collective gains for society more broadly, rather than for specific social groups. This would keep such policies from becoming the target of competing administrations, as evidenced by the Brazil case. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.540 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Amanda Wilson, Charles Z Levkoe Pages: 101 - 124 Abstract: Over the past decades there has been a notable growth in community-based food systems projects and successes. Despite these advancements, food insecurity, precarious food work, ecological degradation, and corporate conglomeration in the food sector all continue to increase, compounded by the ongoing impacts of white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism. Recognizing these growing inequities, critical scholars have noted that too many food systems initiatives are overly concerned with influencing individual behaviours and a focus on narrow objectives. Furthermore, many approaches tend to overlook ways that food systems are embedded within political and economic structures that constrain their goals of social and environmental justice. These multiple challenges suggest that food movements are at a crossroads. This paper reflects on this pivotal moment through an analysis of key food movement actor’s perspectives on the progress and promises as well as emerging tensions for food movements in Canada. Through a series of interviews with individuals most prominent in food movement spaces, we explore key perspectives on the state of food movements and possibilities for future directions. Our findings paint a complex and nuanced portrait of what food movements have accomplished, tease out internal tensions, and identify questions facing their future prospects. The perspectives presented through our findings offer a path to transcend the critiques that position short-term strategic gains in opposition to longer-term systemic change. We suggest that food movements can overcome these challenges by embracing a more radical and expansive vision of social and environmental justice that is deeply embedded within food systems while also looking beyond them. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.524 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Carrie Seay Fleming Pages: 125 - 146 Abstract: Until 2019, Guatemala upheld a de-facto moratorium on GMOs. The ban has been attributed to broad-based social resistance and the unlikely alliances galvanized by the issue. Recent legislation, however, has been met with little resistance. In this paper, I show how the tensions between anti-GM actors and their interactions on the ground help to explain this turn of events in Guatemala, and—more broadly— contributes to our understanding of how biotechnology advances despite significant resistance. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observation, I demonstrate how urban, professional class Ladinos who oppose GMOs draw on scientific and technical arguments divorced from broader political-economic critiques. Meanwhile, campesino and indigenous activists center their resistance within broader structures of oppression such as colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Specifically, I show how ‘biotechnologizing’ is employed in problematic ways, not only by pro-GMO coalitions—as other scholarship suggests—but also by anti-GM allies. This case contributes to our understanding of how anti-GMO movement frames get constructed in local contexts, and the tensions that arise between anti-GM groups, revealing significant impediments to creating a more just food future in Guatemala. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.528 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Susanna Klassen, Fuerza Migrante, Hannah Wittman Pages: 147 - 179 Abstract: Despite the organic movement’s early connections to labour advocacy and commitment to the principle of “Fairness”, the evolution of the organic sector has generated questions about the strength of its links to food justice in certified organic farming. Scholar-activists have, in particular, highlighted the problematic nature of labour relations on many organic farms. This article reports on a growing relationship between an organic farming association (the Certified Organic Associations of British Columbia) and a migrant workers justice collective (Fuerza Migrante) with aspirations of alliance building. Drawing from qualitative interviews and participant observation, we examine the extent to which efforts by the organic community towards fairness in labour relations may signal an opening whereby the organic movement may take up the more radical struggle for rights, status and justice for racialized migrant workers. We draw on theoretical work on post-capitalist relations and emancipatory social transformations to provide scaffolding to our assessment, and illuminate the importance of complementary efforts. While the primary demands raised by migrant workers and their allies (e.g. structural changes to temporary foreign worker programs) are not yet mirrored by the organic community’s advocacy, this paper documents preliminary efforts towards centering of migrant worker struggles for justice that may open up spaces for social emancipation for workers in organic farming systems. We also provide recommendations for how the organic community could act in solidarity with migrants and advance migrant justice priorities. En sus inicios, el movimiento orgánico estaba fuertemente vinculado con la defensa de los derechos de los trabajadores y comprometido con el principio de “justicia”. Con el paso del tiempo, la evolución del sector orgánico ha generado cuestionamientos sobre la fuerza de estos vínculos y su relación con la justicia alimentaria en la agricultura orgánica certificada. Académicos-activistas, en particular, han destacado la intrínseca problemática de muchas granjas orgánicas. El presente artículo reporta la creciente relación y aspiración de construir alianzas entre una asociación de agricultura orgánica (Organic BC) y un colectivo de justicia para trabajadores migrantes (Fuerza Migrante). Examinamos hasta qué punto los esfuerzos por parte de la comunidad orgánica hacia la justicia en relaciones laborales puede representar una oportunidad para el movimiento orgánico de asumir una postura más radical por los derechos, estatus y la justicia de los trabajadores migrantes racializados. El análisis se basa en el trabajo teórico sobre relaciones post-capitalistas y las transformaciones sociales emancipatorias que iluminan la importancia de los esfuerzos complementarios. Si bien las principales demandas planteadas por los trabajadores migrantes y sus aliados (por ejemplo, cambios estructurales en los programas de trabajadores extranjeros temporales) aún no se reflejan en la lucha de la comunidad orgánica, vemos esfuerzos preliminares enfocados en la lucha de los trabajadores migrantes por la justicia, los cuales pueden abrir espacios para la emancipación social en sistemas de agricultura orgánica. Concluimos con recomendaciones sobre cómo la comunidad orgánica en Canadá podría actuar en solidaridad con los migrantes y promover prioridades de justicia para migrantes. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.536 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Teresa Lloro, Frecia González Pages: 180 - 204 Abstract: A growing and significant research literature utilizes feminist frameworks to study relationships with food from a variety of vantage points. In this article, we are especially interested in feminist food sovereignty, feminist political ecology, and feminist theories of care, both because caring labor has been historically undervalued in food systems and because neoliberal modes of commodification and marketization have interpellated activists, scholar-activists, and activist-scholars into new ways of self-care and caring for others. To begin, we provide a brief overview of the places where we work, including the city of Pomona, the Pomona Valley Certified Farmers Market, and the Pomona Community Farmer Alliance (PCFA), a community organization and local activist collective. We then draw on nearly three years of participatory ethnographic work in this community to explore and theorize care work in local food systems activism. Our conceptual framework, framed by feminist food studies and theories of care, illuminates how PCFA members conceive of their own caring work in practice, as well as how they negotiate the complexities of caring for others and self, while being left by the state to do this work. We also explore how activists’ care practices sometimes lay bare structural inequalities and the failure of the state, while also reinforcing and challenging neoliberal ideologies embedded in volunteerism. To conclude, we discuss the gendered implications of our work for food systems research, specifically considering the complementarity of Progressive and Radical approaches to food systems transformation. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.537 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Roseann Lydia Kerr, Erin Richan, Coral Sproule, Ayla Fenton Pages: 205 - 225 Abstract: As diverse actors work through disparate food movements seeking to tackle the causes and effects of the global food crisis, Holt-Giménez and Shattuck (2011) call for strategic alliances between progressive and radical trends in the food movement to transform our current food system. This paper focuses on the process of alliance formation by exploring the subjectivities of three of the authors who identify as women farmers and have had opportunities to learn from and engage with peasant movements through their participation in courses, encounters and organizing spaces of La Via Campesina (LVC). These farmers’ goal of striving toward a peasant identity reveals the influence of peasant-to-peasant processes (PtPP) on their conceptions of possible futures, and simultaneously exposes tensions and struggles in agroecology transition within the Canadian context, where capitalist industrial agriculture is the norm. Using the lens of post-structural feminism, we explore the potential for radical peasant movements to influence and inspire the restructuring of our ways of relating with the earth and each other in the global North. Based on this analysis we deepen our understanding of how PtPP can foster South-North alliances which have the potential to engender food system transformation. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.535 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Elizabeth Vibert, Bikrum Singh Gill, Matt Murphy, Astrid Pérez Piñán, Claudia Puera Silva Pages: 226 - 248 Abstract: This article presents conversations across difference that took place among community partners and researchers at a week-long workshop in T’Sou-ke First Nation territory in 2019. The workshop launched the Four Stories About Food Sovereignty research network and project, which brings together food producers, activists, and researchers representing T’Sou-ke Nation in British Columbia, Wayuu Indigenous communities in Colombia, refugee communities in Jordan, and small-scale farmers in South Africa. We focus here on conversations that highlight global-local tensions in food justice work, the pressures of extractive economy, and pressures arising from climate crisis – challenges that some participants framed at the level of global extractivism and colonial-capitalism, others at the level of the soil. As the conversations reveal, there was more common ground than conflict in shared histories of dispossession, shared predicaments of extractive capital and its government allies, and shared concern to renew and reinvigorate ancestral practices of care for territory. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.531 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Audrey Tung, Reuben Rose-Redwood, Denise Cloutier Pages: 249 - 275 Abstract: Long before the exacerbating effects of COVID-19, household food insecurity (HFI) has been a persistent yet hidden problem in wealthy nations such as Canada, where it has been perpetuated in part through dominant discourses and practices. In this critique of HFI-related frameworks, we suggest that discourses organized around the production and (re)distribution of food, rather than income inequality, have misdirected household food insecurity reduction activities away from the central issue of poverty, even inadvertently enabling the ongoing neoliberal “rollback” of safety net functions. Unlike most scholarship that focuses on the politics of food systems, or health research that insufficiently politicizes poverty, this analysis emphasizes the role of politics in income discourses. In spite of their contradictions, food-provisioning- and income-based discourses are potentially complementary in their shared recognition of the right to food. Operating from the perspective of political economic theory, we conceive of the right to food as a claim not only to a resource but also to membership within political communities that envision alternatives to neoliberalism as manifested in our labour, welfare, and food systems. In this sense, the right to food offers a unifying framework that links civil society with senior governments, collective action with legal instruments, and food and income concerns. HFI reduction activities organized around the right to food may thus aim to rectify cross-cutting imbalances in political and economic power. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.530 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Jennifer L Black, Rachel Mazac, Amber Heckelman , Sinikka Elliott Pages: 276 - 298 Abstract: Students are important stakeholders in school food programs. Yet children’s daily experiences and voices are often overlooked in advocacy around school food. In Canada, where the federal government recently expressed interest in creating a National School Food Program, nearly no research has documented the first-hand experiences of children during lunch. This ethnographic study draws on data collected during 36 lunchtimes in three Canadian schools during a transitional period in a school district’s lunch program. The findings unwrap the powerful role of students’ perceptions of and relationships to food in shaping their social interactions, and their sense of care, connection, and identity. Classroom observations coupled with photos of school lunches demonstrate the wide diversity of foods eaten at school and the nuanced, complex, and sometimes divergent meanings children give to food, school lunch and the people involved in preparing, serving, supervising, and sharing lunchtime experiences. Students demonstrated in-depth knowledge of the food choices and attitudes of their peers and actively marked out their identities vis-à-vis food. Students frequently talked about food as a site of care and support, and both the social relationships and care work that played out were a major part of school lunch experiences. Understanding the intricacies of children’s school lunch experiences, including the relationships, meanings, and values that shape school lunch, will be critical for creating robust school food programs and policies in Canada that better serve the needs of children and reduce rather than reproduce existing health and social inequalities. PubDate: 2022-07-15 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Regan Zink Pages: 299 - 301 Abstract: Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches our Tables, by Glen C. Filson and Bamidele Adekunle, addresses the demand, availability, and production of ethnocultural vegetables in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The book is centered around the three largest ethnic groups in the GTHA (Chinese, South Asian, Afro-Caribbean) and considers histories of immigration, acculturation, and the availability of ethnocultural food. Taken as a whole, this book provides an overview and justification for the local production of ethnocultural vegetables. While this book is primarily based in the Southern Ontario context, there is some discussion of ethnocultural vegetable value chains in other parts of Canada and the USA. Further, Filson and Adekunle distinguish between the corporate food regime, characterized by longer value chains, and local and community level food sovereignty which are primarily discussed through farmers’ markets, community shared agriculture, and gardening. The authors cite numerous benefits of producing ethnocultural vegetables in Southern Ontario, including economic, health, social, and environmental benefits. Ethnocultural vegetables are not only fresher and more nutritious when produced locally, but there is also increased opportunity for producer-consumer contact and less food miles associated with local production. PubDate: 2022-07-15 DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.590 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2022)
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