Critical Perspectives in Food Studies. Edited by Mustafa Koc

This roundtable will follow up from the Workshop on Planetary Healthy Diets for All and explore practical solutions to tie increased sustainability of food systems to reductions in food insecurity in Europe. There is a disconnect between the level of scientific evidence supporting the need for action on food and agricultural systems and the willingness to uptake it at the national and local level. Countries' reluctance to implement evidence-based policy options often results from the perception that the data and solutions do not reflect their national realities. At the same time, there is a rising trend in food insecurity in Europe. Part of it is driven by the food system itself and part of it by social determinants that exacerbate the effects of elements such as food prices or the availability of affordable healthy foods. In terms of the current response to food insecurity in Europe, there is enough evidence that it is inadequate. The most notable example of inadequacy are food banks: they are unsustainable and perpetuate deficiencies of the foods system, such as waste. At the same time, food banks contribute to widening health inequities because they are stigmatizing, and the quality and reliability of the food they offer exacerbates health problems. They also mask failures of social protection and of food policy to protect those at the bottom. Yet, they are proliferating all around Europe. The WHO European Regional Office for Europe will share practical steps that it is taking to assist policy makers at national level to bridge evidence and action. WHO will present a novel on-line, readily accessible tool that public health officials from Member States can use to guide policy decisions. This tool uses a food systems model considering food consumption, food production, environmental impacts and health impacts to identify practical solutions for countries to create food systems that both have a lower impact on the climate and promote healthier diets. The roundtable will also highlight the transformative example of Copenhagen's public food procurement strategy, which, starting from a target on organic food in public canteens, has evolved into a comprehensive approach to achieve tasty, healthy, sustainable meals with social added value and without increasing procurement costs. In sum, against the backdrop of both nutritional and environmental challenges to food systems in Europe, participants at the roundtable will share barriers and opportunities to the uptake of evidence-based solutions to transform food systems and tackle food insecurity at the national and local levels, including in the context of the ongoing reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the new 'Farm to Fork' Strategy for sustainable food. This discussion will allow participants to share their insights and enrich each other's understanding of the issues at stake and the tools and opportunities on offer to support, in an action-oriented way, a sustainable food systems transition that overcomes food insecurity. Key messages Global reference diets need application on a national and subnational level. Food insecurity, can be major barrier to the uptake of healthy diets and must be tackled as such. The new data platform and training materials will empower policymakers within countries to develop and introduce national level initiatives, such as sustainable and healthy public procurement.

The future of environmental sustainability labelling on food products

Welcome to Global Smart Food Systems (GSFS), a pioneering gold open access journal born out of urgency and aspiration urgency in addressing the accelerating challenges facing global food systems and aspiration to catalyze innovation, equity and sustainability through rigorous and transdisciplinary research. The story of food is no longer simply about agriculture or nutrition; it is a system story, a social justice story and increasingly a story of survival in the face of ecological, geopolitical and climate instability.The architecture of global food systems today is a paradox tested like never before. While scientific and technological advances have made it possible to produce more food, we remain entangled in crises of food insecurity, ecological degradation and socio-economic inequality. From climate change and geopolitical instability to corporate consolidation and inequitable access to innovation, the pressures on food systems are not only numerous but also deeply interconnected. Certainly, at the heart of this high-tech era, we stand at a pivotal moment: will our food systems in the global north and/or the global south be vehicles of resilience and equity, or instruments of extraction and exclusion shaped by powerful socioeconomic forces and corporate profit-driven motives?At GSFS, we understand that food is never just about food. It is about culture, power, economics, health, governance and the planet itself. That's why our journal spans a wide array of thematic areas, which makes GSFS unique is its comprehensive distinctive contemporary food systems approach. We are committed to advancing knowledge and solutions that reimagine the entire food systems ecosystem: from the plate to the consumer to the planet. Our scope spans every node and nuance of the food chain: from precision agriculture, robotics and AI-driven supply chains to culturally responsive nutrition practices and technologies, circular food economies, marketing, food governance and justice and regenerative food policy among others. We welcome contributions that bridge the local and the global and that address both hard science and the often-invisible power dynamics shaping who eats what, how and at what cost.This journal is a timely and much-needed scientific platform for interdisciplinary engagement and transdisciplinary dialog. We invite contributions from academics, policymakers, entrepreneurs, advocates and practitioners. It is for anyone who recognizes that food systems are at the heart of some of the world's most urgent challenges and that the solutions require integration, intelligence and imagination. By bringing together diverse voices, GSFS aims to surface innovations that are not only smart but also impartial technologies and models that are rooted in communities and driven by sustainability, equity, ethics and inclusive governance.Our editorial lens is grounded in systems thinking. We recognize that true progress in food systems requires an understanding of the complex interplay between technological advancement, socio-political structures, environmental boundaries and human rights. We are especially interested in work that interrogates power, dismantles inequities and uplifts historically marginalized perspectives by using modern approaches and broad-based methodologies that transcend the boundaries of conventional food systems approaches such as integration of digital mapping platforms, Google Earth, participatory sketch mapping and audiovisual storytelling into food systems research and policy advocacy. These innovative tools serve as a democratizing force, reclaiming food systems from ivory towers and embedding them in the geographies of real lives. As we map this terrain together, let us not just analyze but redraw the new real food systems cartography!In alignment with the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs), Global Smart Food Systems is committed to accelerating the transition to food systems that nourish both people and planet-systems that are resilient, climate-smart and economically inclusive. Our goal is not just to document change but to drive it by fostering knowledge exchange, spotlighting innovation and elevating underrepresented voices in food systems research and practice.We launched this journal with the conviction that food is more than sustenance. It is culture, identity, economy, environment and justice. And it is time to design a smarter, fairer and more sustainable food world. Together, with a clear eye, ethical compass and innovative tools, we aim to shift paradigms from siloed “farm-to-fork” thinking to a holistic “plate-to-consumer-to-planet” vision, where innovation meets justice, and technology serves humanity and the Earth.We welcome you to join us on this journey. Contribute. Collaborate. Challenge. And most importantly, help us build better a future for our food, for our health, for our planet.Onward,Prof. Sima A. HamadehEditor-in-ChiefGlobal Smart Food Systems (GSFS)

Today’s food systems are contributing to multiple intersecting health and ecological crises. Many are now calling for transformative, or even radical, food systems change. Our starting assumption in this Special Issue is the broad claim that the transformative changes being called for in a global food system in crisis cannot – and ultimately will not – be achieved without intense scrutiny of and changes in the underlying political economies that drive today’s food systems. The aim is to draw from diverse disciplinary perspectives to critically evaluate the political economy of food systems, understand key challenges, and inform new thinking and action. We received 19 contributions covering a diversity of country contexts and perspectives, and revealing inter-connected challenges and opportunities for realising the transformation agenda. We find that a number of important changes in food governance and power relations have occurred in recent decades, with a displacement of power in four directions. First, upwards as globalization has given rise to more complex and globally integrated food systems governed increasingly by transnational food corporations (TFCs) and international financial actors. Second, downwards as urbanization and decentralization of authority in many countries gives cities and sub-national actors more prominence in food governance. Third, outwards with a greater role for corporate and civil society actors facilitated by an expansion of food industry power, and increasing preferences for market-orientated and multi-stakeholder forms of governance. Finally, power has also shifted inwards as markets have become increasingly concentrated through corporate strategies to gain market power within and across food supply chain segments. The transformation of food systems will ultimately require greater scrutiny of these challenges. Technical ‘problem-solving’ and overly-circumscribed policy approaches that depoliticise food systems challenges, are insufficient to generate the change we need, within the narrow time-frame we have. While there will be many paths to transformation, rights-based and commoning approaches hold great promise, based on principles of participation, accountability and non-discrimination, alongside coalition building and social mobilization, including social movements grounded in food sovereignty and agroecology.

Background:Since its first case of COVID-19 on March 13, 2020, Ethiopia has exerted efforts to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) without imposing a nationwide lockdown. Globally, COVID-19 related disruptions and mitigation measures have impacted livelihoods and food systems, nutrition, as well as access and use of health services.Objective:To develop a comprehensive understanding of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food systems, health services, and maternal and child nutrition and to synthesize lessons from policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Ethiopia.Methods:We conducted a review of literature and 8 key informant interviews across government agencies, donors, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to map the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food and health systems in Ethiopia. We summarized policy responses and identified recommendations for future actions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and other future emergencies.Results:The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic were felt across the food system and include limited agriculture inputs due to travel restrictions and closed borders restricting trade, reduced in-person support by agriculture extension workers, income losses, increases in food prices, and the reduction in food security and dietary diversity. Maternal and child health services were disrupted due to fear of contacting COVID-19, diversion of resources, and lack of personal protective equipment. Disruptions eased over time due to the expansion of social protection through the Productive Safety Net Program, and the increased outreach and home service provision by the health extension workers.Conclusion:Ethiopia experienced disruptions to food systems and maternal and child nutrition services due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, by expanding existing social protection programs and public health infrastructure and leveraging partnerships with non-state actors, the extent of the impact of the pandemic was largely minimized. Nevertheless, vulnerabilities and gaps remain and there is a need for a long-term strategy that considers the potential for future pandemics and other shocks.

The United Nations Millennium Declaration involved member nations in seeking to reduce extreme hunger and poverty measured against targets set for 2015. There may have been some success to date, 1 with the estimated total number of undernourished people falling by 17 per cent since 1990 -1992 (FAO 2013)). But there remained around one in eight people in the world who suffered from chronic hunger in 2011-2013. While the measured progress shows marked regional differences, sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with the highest prevalence of undernourishment. Progress has been slow in South Asia although the experience appears more positive in East and South-East Asia and Latin America.

This paper introduces an innovative, interdisciplinary food systems programme based on an open source pedagogical model that facilitates learning through the use of technology developed at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). We begin by explaining the structure and goals of the UOC and briefly introduce the UOC’s e/ learning model. We then consider the development of the Department of Food Systems, Culture and Society and explain our rational for focussing on food governance. We focus primarily on a set of mandatory introductory courses for the Master’s Diploma in Food, Society and International Food Governance. These courses, which make up a certificate in Food Systems Analysis, lay out the fundamentals of our approach to the study of food systems. Finally, we consider an analytical framework used to examine the socio political context of contemporary food systems. Here, food systems are approached as an arrangement of activities clustered around trade liberalization, neoliberalized social formations, and a condensed state, which produce complex forms of food governance.

Consumer trust in the Australian food system – The everyday erosive impact of food labelling

Bridging gaps in food labelling.

This chapter analyzes Children of the Corn (1984) as a critical response to the US Farm Crisis, a dark period in the history of agriculture. Constituted by compounding political, economic, and environmental shocks the Farm Crisis devastated the Midwestern corn belt and ushered in significant shifts in the US food system. Extending tropes common to the rural slasher and plant horror genres, Children of the Corn re-presents the trauma of the Farm Crisis, exposing the most damaging impacts of neoliberal agripolitics. Through its depictions of a deserted farm town and villainous food crop, I argue, the film articulates not only the hegemony of surplus cultivation but also an industrialized food system centered around corn.

While Bangladesh is reported as doing well in food production, there is increasing concern that this essentially deltaic and highly climate-vulnerable country will face steep challenges in food governance and productivity. Anthropogenic drivers shaped by narrow economic goals and sectoral policies have deeply altered Bangladesh’s food systems since the early 1960s and partly led to adverse outcomes. By combining policy and institutional analysis and primary research in Shyamnagar Upazila in Satkhira district in the southern coastal deltas, we revisit two key transitions, poldering and commercial shrimp farming, to reveal how diverse economic, social, and political factors have reshaped the efficiency, inclusivity, and sustainability of agri-food systems. These complex interactions between agrifood systems, the broader ecology, and heterogeneity in poverty, gender, and other social identities are poorly understood and accounted for in policies and program interventions. This has resulted in unequal conflicts and contestations around critical resources, which impact most marginalized groups, also because policy incoherence encourages collusions between local elites and local decision-makers (all men) for resource appropriation and control. Conceptually, a social-ecological systems (SES) framework would identify these complexities. However, SES approaches tend to be technocratic and overlook the overtly economic framing of natural resources governance, diversity amongst local communities, and the politics of resource appropriation. This gap can be remedied by merging SES thinking with a critical political ecology lens to trace the historical, scalar, and deeply intersectional nature of socio-ecological relations.

IntroductionThe governance of global food and agriculture is beingtransformed as the food system has become more global-ized and as corporate control of that system has becomemore concentrated. Traditionally the domain of govern-mental and intergovernmental actors, the governance offood and agriculture is increasingly becoming not justinfluenced, but also ‘‘created’’ by corporate actors viaprivate governance mechanisms. These mechanismsinclude industry-set quality and safety standards, privatecodes of conduct, and corporate social responsibility (CSR)initiatives. While the literature has paid considerableattention to the globalization of the agrifood system morebroadly (Bonanno et al. 1994) and has begun to look at therole of corporations in the system (Clapp and Fuchs 2009),empirical research on private governance mechanisms inglobal food and agriculture governance is only just startingto emerge. We still require considerably more insight onthe nature of the private governance mechanisms and theirimpact on fundamental values and core objectives of foodgovernance.The rise of private governance mechanisms in theagrifood system poses challenges for several fundamentalvalues and core objectives of food governance. In partic-ular, the privatization of key aspects of the agrifood gov-ernance system raises questions about their ability touphold democratic legitimacy and to promote sustainabil-ity. How do democratic ideals fit with private actors gen-erating rules and regulations that transcend nationalborders moving to spaces previously occupied by states(Schaller 2007)?

The current global food system is under threat due to significant global changes such as rapid urbanization, climate change, COVID-19 outbreak, etc. The importance of food system sustainability as a key element of sustainable cities has been gradually recognized in recent years; however, the tools for estimating food system sustainability in cities (i.e., urban food system sustainability) holistically are still scarce. Thus, this study represents a comprehensive investigation into food system studies and their impacts on achieving a sustainable community or city. This study is a subset of larger studies that aim to develop an urban food system framework, which utilizes modern approaches in framework development such as sustainability food indicators and a participatory approach. However, to achieve this, trends, gaps, and challenges of the current approach to food system studies need to be reviewed and discussed. A systematic analysis utilizing the protocol of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach was conducted, and network analysis of publications was performed via VOS viewer. The results suggest applying circular principles and merging smartness and resilience thinking in developing strategies for food system sustainability. This study finds that key drivers to mitigate food crisis among countries vary. Furthermore, a context-specific framework with a more comprehensive definition of urban food systems covering the institutional processes, and food governance are also needed to achieve urban food system sustainability.

The sustainability of food systems is a central issue in academic and political debate at a national and global level. Involving the various actors in food systems through a multi-actor platform approach is increasingly recognized as a way to promote sustainability because it is a strategy capable of ensuring resilience and an effective mechanism to guarantee the co-creation of knowledge and the definition and implementation of innovation. In order to ensure that the actors / stakeholders involved are an authentic reflection of the food system, understood as a socio-ecological system i.e. the result of interactions between the socio-economic and ecological components, it is essential to use analytical tools that allow a multidisciplinary approach and that can act as devices for knowledge co-creation and promoting of collaborative approaches. This paper uses a modified version of the SES framework, designed to allow the integration of a range of collaboration behavioural factors for sustainable agri-food chains. The objective is to strengthen the analysis of the structural aspects of SES with assessment of the behavioural factors that can significantly influence the path of sustainable transformation that the SES could undertake. The study, which was carried out as part the BIOlogic Wine INNovative Environment (BIOWINE) Project involving wine producing areas in the regions of Veneto, Campania and Basilicata, analyses the implementation of a good practice multi-actor collaboration and gives an ex ante evaluation of the adaptive mechanisms needed to activate an effective transfer, considering: - the structural characteristics of the agri-food socio-ecological systems involved in the “re-use of good practice”; - the quality and density of behavioural factors present in the socio-ecological systems involved in the “re-use of good practice”. The “re-using” socio-ecological systems are all quite different, which makes the challenge of adapting the innovation more complicated. The wine producing systems involved show different levels of aggregation and capacity for adding value. There is a high risk that the costs of implementing the innovation will fall principally to the farmers, while the increase in value generated will not. For this reason, it is important to guarantee, through the initial design and subsequent implementation of the multi-actor platform, that the platform can express, recognize, and address these kinds of challenges.

The nutrition transition literature has generally drawn on epidemiologic and demographic changes to make its argument, because in many cases broader data are not available on the drivers of nutrition change. Going further, this paper draws on wider food systems literature, and includes food price and expenditure data, to join the dots from macroeconomic and food system change to food sources, production, and price; to household-level expenditures; to changing diets and nutrition and health outcomes, illustrated through the case of Zambia. Many of the economic and demographic drivers of the nutrition transition are present in Zambia, including rising GDP, high urbanization and increasing supermarket penetration. Food supply data show a reduction in calories available per capita over several decades, and low levels of nutrient-rich plant and animal source foods which make up a diverse, nutritious diet. National food price data show that while the cost of food has reduced overall, nutrient-rich foods are more expensive relative to staple foods over time. Expenditure on staple foods has reduced in the past two decades while spending on fruits and vegetables, animal source foods, fats and sugars, and processed foods has increased, with these change greater in rural areas in recent years, but already more advanced in urban areas. Finally, while undernutrition is reducing slowly from very high levels and hunger persists, overweight and obesity and non-communicable chronic diseases are increasing; and data are strikingly lacking on modern Zambian diets. The Zambia case study is placed within regional and global trends to illustrate nutrition transition changes that are now happening in rapidly changing lower-middle income countries. Policy responses include promoting the availability of diverse nutrient-dense foods, and concurrent attention to preventing under- and over-nutrition in surveillance and policy. This paper also sheds light on the gaps in information that would greatly improve our understanding of the food system drivers of the nutrition transition, and hence our ability to create relevant policy.