Abstract
This article reviews and synthesizes critical literature in the areas of food, leisure, sustainability and community economic development to answer the question of whether we can eat our way to sustainability. It begins with the work of John Loxley and his approach to community economic development, by emphasizing linkages, leakages and leveraging. It then turns to the imprecise concept of sustainability and gives it a more precise meaning, linking it with McMurtry’s idea of the civil commons. The article goes on to apply this new meaning to three important terms: sustainable leisure, sustainable communities and sustainable community economic development. With these understandings in place, it then examines four examples of using leisure activities in the realm of food to support sustainable community economic development: community gardens, community-supported agriculture, gleaning and community kitchens. The article concludes that we can indeed eat our way to sustainability if we choose food-related leisure activities that enable others to eat as well.
Highlights
IntroductionLeisure and sustainability are both deeply complex concepts that are widely discussed and hotly contested
Vastly different, leisure and sustainability are both deeply complex concepts that are widely discussed and hotly contested
This paper cannot address all the permutations involved in bringing together leisure, sustainability, community economic development and food, but it does outline some of the parameters to consider when doing so
Summary
Leisure and sustainability are both deeply complex concepts that are widely discussed and hotly contested. Sustainability ranges from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index to Deep Ecology, and has often been co-opted by large corporations as window-dressing for their ongoing unsustainable activities Bringing these two concepts together multiplies their complexities exponentially: leisure activities can either compromise or contribute to sustainability—or both—while sustainability considerations can reconfigure leisure as well as eliminate it. Adding community economic development (CED) to this complexity raises the stakes, given the divisions within the CED literature itself and the unfolding ramifications of relating it to issues of leisure and sustainability. This paper cannot address all the permutations involved in bringing together leisure, sustainability, community economic development and food, but it does outline some of the parameters to consider when doing so It will look at community economic development through food-related leisure activities with a focus on sustainability. This paper will provide a template for better understanding and organizing the dynamic mix of leisure, sustainability, community economic development and food, and consider whether we can eat our way to sustainability
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