Corporate Food System Research Articles

Unveiling quiet activism: Urban community gardens as agents of food sovereignty

AbstractUrban community gardening is emerging as a form of quiet activism challenging the corporate food system. In urban community gardening, quiet activism subtly challenges the dominant corporate food system. However, research tends to overlook its presence and impact in global South cities, where issues of food insecurity and corporatisation are acute. There is a gap in research on urban community gardening activism, with a focus mainly on global North cities. Global South cities and populations face unique challenges in the corporate food system that require attention and exploration in scholarly literature. We draw on qualitative research conducted with urban community gardeners in Cape Town, South Africa. Through interviews and observations, the study investigates how these gardeners engage in quiet activism to challenge the corporate food system. We find that community gardens are subtle but potent platforms for bolstering local food movements and fostering healthier dietary practices by cultivating and sharing produce. Quiet activism through community gardening offers a nuanced approach to challenging the corporate food system. The study highlights the need to recognise and understand varying levels of activism intensity and their implications for reshaping urban food systems. We underscore the need to discern the distinct embodiments necessitated by different modes of activism. Understanding these different modes of activism is crucial for comprehending their varying impacts on challenging and reshaping the corporate food system. This nuanced approach reveals the transformative potential inherent in community gardening practices. Community gardening in Cape Town exemplifies the transformative potential of understated acts in food activism.

Buscando el (buen) sentido en la transformación del sistema alimentario en México a través de las narrativas contrahegemónicas emergentes en las comunidades indígenas y rurales de Oaxaca

Mexico is in the grips of a public health crisis related to its changing food system, characterized by dramatic increases in diet-related illness. Ideas about how to reverse these trends stretch from top-down nutrition education to demands for regulation of the food and beverage industry. Taking a different approach, this paper focuses on the perspectives and practices of rural Oaxacans, drawn from qualitative research conducted in seven communities over six years. We find an emergent critique of the contemporary capitalist food system rooted in embodied engagements with food production, preparation, consumption, and community history. We analyze these findings through the lens of Gramsci’s concept of ‘good sense,’ understood as the critical-thinking basis for revolutionary transformation among subaltern classes. We situate this idea within literature on embodied knowledge and visceral politics, suggesting that such ideas and perceptions have the potential to challenge the growing hegemony of the corporate food system and contribute to broader social movements in defense of land and life.

Re-Imagining Localism and Food Justice: Co-Op Cincy and the Union Cooperative Movement

Co-op Cincy is an incubator of worker- and community-owned cooperatives, including the farm and food hub Our Harvest. The incubator is part of the innovative1worker1vote.orgnetwork of unionized worker cooperatives stemming from a partnership between the Spanish Mondragon Cooperatives and the United States Steelworkers. This Community Case Study examines Co-Op Cincy’s food sector organizing as an example of resistance to the industrial, corporate food system. Their hybrid and experimental approach creatively re-imagines both cooperative ownership and localist food systems. Whereas some local efforts fail to address questions of social justice or drift from social justice missions, this essay describes how Co-Op Cincy and Our Harvest 1) define their social justice goals in pursuit of locally rooted ownership, 2) raise consciousness about the connections among food systems and racial and class disparities as well as the need for sustainability, solidarity, and democratic ownership, and 3) embody these commitments in everyday organizing. Their experimentation lends insights into potential paths to create a more equitable food system and a more just economy.

The rise of Arab Gulf agro-capital: continuity and change in the corporate food regime

ABSTRACT The role of non-Northern capitals within the corporate food system is a matter of increasing debate within food regime literature. This article intervenes on this discussion by proposing that the Arab Gulf states are a new capital within the corporate food system. It argues that the emphasis on the role of the state, which has drawn definitions of mercantilism, has led to the exceptional and reifying treatment of this entrant. As a result, this analytical focus has obfuscated the manner that new capitals such as the Gulf states have acted as a force of continuity, as well as change.

Redressing the Corporate Cultivation of Consumption: Releasing the Weapons of the Structurally Weak.

Corporate control of the global food system has resulted in greater global availability of highly processed, packaged and very palatable unhealthy food and beverages. Environmental harm, including climate change and biodiversity loss, occurs along the supply chains associated with trans-national corporations’ (TNCs’) practices and products. In essence, the corporatization of the global food system has created the conditions that cultivate excess consumption, manufacture disease epidemics and harm the environment. TNCs have used their structural power – their positions in material structures and organizational networks – to establish rules, processes and norms that reinforce and extend the paradigm of the neoliberal corporate food system. As a result, policy and regulatory environments, and societal norms are favourable to TNC’s interests, to the detriment of nutrition, health and environmental outcomes. There is hope, however. Power, of which there is many forms, is held not just by the TNCs but by all actors concerned about and connected to the food system. This paper aims to understand these power dynamics, and identify how structurally weak, public-interest actors can release their agency and work to achieve positive structural change. Such an analysis will help understand how the status quo can be disrupted and healthy and sustainable food systems created. The paper draws from the health governance and social movement literature, examining the Doha Declaration on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement and Public Health, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), and the Divestment movement. These cases demonstrate the many ‘weapons of the weak’ that can, against all odds recalibrate structural inequities. There is no one approach to transforming the corporate food system to become a healthy and sustainable food system. It involves coalition building; articulation of an ambitious shared vision; strategic use of multi-level institutional processes; social mobilization among like-minded and unusual bedfellows, and organized campaigns; political and policy entrepreneurs, and compelling issue framing.

Indigenizing food sovereignty

First paragraph: It has been nearly 25 years since the international peasants’ movement La Via Campesina outlined a “food sovereignty” framework at the 1996 World Food Summit. Since that time, the broader food sovereignty movement continues to accelerate, drawing renewed attention as the escalating climate crisis and global pandemic lay bare the corporate food system’s production of environmental and racial injustices. Despite its institutionalization in a growing number of academic food studies pro­grams, however, food sovereignty’s theorization and praxis continue to be shaped in contexts typically absent of Indigenous voices. This is a starkly ironic reality considering that corporate food systems in settler-colonial societies like Canada and the United States are enabled by the ongoing hoarding of Indigenous ecological resources. . . .

Making sense of food system transformation in Mexico

Mexico is in the grips of a public health crisis related to its changing food system, characterized by dramatic increases in diet-related illness. Ideas on how to reverse these trends stretch from top-down nutrition education to demands for regulation of the food and beverage industry. Taking a different approach, this paper focuses on the perspectives and practices of rural Oaxacans, drawn from qualitative research conducted in seven communities over six years. We find an emergent critique of the contemporary capitalist food system rooted in embodied engagements with food production, preparation, consumption, and community history. We analyze these findings through the lens of Gramsci’s concept of ‘good sense,’ understood as the critical-thinking basis for revolutionary transformation among subaltern classes. We situate this idea within literature on embodied knowledge and visceral politics, suggesting that such ideas and perceptions have the potential to challenge the growing hegemony of the corporate food system in Mexico and contribute to broader social movements in defense of Oaxacan land and life.

Gulf capital and Egypt's corporate food system: a region in the third food regime

ABSTRACT How can we define the emergence of new spaces in the global corporate food system? This article argues that regions in food regime theory have been overlooked, both geographically and socially. As an example of the significance of the regional level, it examines the case of the relationship between Egypt and the Gulf states. In addition to Western capital, Egypt's corporate food system has been determined by regional capital from the Gulf. Gulf investment is one of the largest foreign capitals in Egypt's agribusiness sector and it owns companies that have controlling market shares of corporate food. It will argue that this has been concomitant with the political power of a class hierarchy that extends from Egypt into the Gulf Cooperation Council states.

An ethnographic exploration of food and the city

This article describes an ethnographic exploration of the food system that feeds the majority of the over 4.6 million residents of the fast‐growing city of Dar es Salaam, along with the key findings of this research. Such a study is important in the context of an increasingly unsustainable corporate food system that many in more affluent countries are beginning to assume is essential for feeding the world's growing and urbanizing population. Following key foods from urban eaters back to primary producers reveals a symbiotic food system made up of a multiplicity of small‐scale actors who together deliver on a city‐wide scale.

Values in Motion: The Local Organic Food Co-ops Network in Ontario, Canada

Values-based food chains (VBFCs) are gaining recognition as people seek alternatives to the unsustainable environmental and social outcomes of the corporate food system. One example of a VBFC can be found in the Local Organic Food Co-ops (LOFC) Network, a coalition of cooperatives that specialize in locally and sustainably produced food in Ontario, Canada. In just a few years, the LOFC Network has built a values-based food chain comprised of producer co-ops, worker co-ops, consumer co-ops and multi-stakeholder co-ops. As a VBFC, it combines three complementary sets of values: local, organic and cooperative. Together, they form a tripartite values matrix that clearly differentiates the LOFC Network from conventional food chains, and models an alternative approach to food production, distribution and consumption. This article will present the findings of a pilot study of the LOFC Network and argue that this type of VBFC can contribute to a more sustainable food system.

Exploring the Staple Foodscape of Dar es Salaam

The city region foodscape is a relational space of spatially proximate as well as more distant relations. The current understanding of city region foodscapes will be enhanced by more analyses of what is happening in the African and Asian cities where rapid population growth and urbanization, with all its challenges and opportunities, is predominantly taking place. This paper explores the city foodscape of one such city, the rapidly growing Dar es Salaam with over 4.5 million inhabitants. By following some important foods for eaters in the city, this paper draws a picture of the changing shape and nature of Dar es Salaam’s foodscape and draws out lessons for debates on city region food systems and urban food planning. It is found that key staple foods are coming from the rural hinterland through a food system that is not part of or modeled on the globally dominant corporate food system and as such represents a working alternative. This food system neither fits within administrative boundaries nor relies primarily on local production. We argue that more academic and policy attention needs to be given to understanding and reinforcing such middle-ground, neither local nor global, food systems that are delivering at city feeding scale.

Disappearing nature? Agribusiness, biotechnology and distance in Argentine soybean production

A recent trend identified in the agro-food literature is that financialization in the global food system is further increasing the distance between farm and plate as well as abstracting physical commodities into market derivatives. How does food, a basic material need, become a commodity, a financial asset divorced from its physical form? This contribution explores the growing distance and abstraction of food from farm using Argentina's soy model as a case study. I explore the various drivers of distancing across the soy value chain in Argentina, including industrialization, globalization, corporatization and finance. I argue that the push for technological innovation by large-scale agribusinesses, in articulation with financial sector involvement, are both an example of and are instrumental in the process of distancing and abstraction identified in the agro-food literature. This paper also highlights how, despite agribusiness efforts to ‘displace’ and ‘disappear’ nature, these processes are never fully accomplished. I thus reflect on the socio-ecological contradictions that arise from the processes of distancing and abstraction which accompany the financialization of the corporate food system under neoliberal globalization.

Food Sovereignty: Alternatives to Failed Food and Hunger Policies

Food sovereignty has evolved from a catch-cry opposing trade liberalisation to a concept adopted by broader constituencies - including food justice movements in the Global North - who share the view that the corporate food system is fundamentally undemocratic and destined to fail. Spanning issues including gender inequality, agroecology, land reform, genetic modification, intellectual property, biodiversity, urban agriculture and labour migration, the campaign for food sovereignty has emerged as a political project that talks to power. Recognition of food sovereignty as a condition for the full realisation of the right to food has elevated the concept in international human rights discourse while the mechanisms and institutions with the power to carry out the transformative changes to the corporate food regime that food sovereignty advocates demand are still wanting.

Alternative Food Projects, Localization and Neoliberal Urban Development

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of alternative food movements responding to growing dissatisfaction with the global, industrial, and corporate food system. In particular, scholars and activists have called for a re-localization of food systems as a way to foster health, justice, sustainability and other goals. Although a growing scholarship views food initiatives that shorten supply chains, such as farmers markets and community gardens, as forms of resistance against the capitalist pressures that strain the food system, other researchers provide evidence indicating that these have become increasingly popular among affluent and white urban residents. Such contradiction puts into question the claim that local food will foster democracy and justice. This article builds upon recent geographic research on scale and urban governance to explore the growth of local food practices in urban southern California and their role in resisting, challenging and reproducing neoliberal urban agendas. We focus specifically on farmers’ markets, which have grown exponentially. After investigating their geographic distribution in the County of San Diego, we turn our analytical gaze to three markets that uniquely illustrate the ambivalent relationships between neoliberal urbanism and alternative food systems. Conceptualizing the local scale as a strategy, we pay particular attention to the agenda of institutional actors in supporting alternative food initiatives and their role in reshaping cities along the lines of race and class. The research combines quantitative and qualitative data, including interviews of community stakeholders, to map the changing landscape of alternative food practices and the contradictions local actors face in creating a more just city.

Agroecological Formación in Rural Social Movements

Among the many sectors currently engaged in struggle against the corporate food system, small farmers play a particularly important role—not only do they constitute a legitimate alternative to global agribusiness, but also they are the heirs to long traditions of local knowledge and practice. In defending peasant agriculture, rural social movements defend popular control over seeds and genetic resources, water, land and territory against the onslaught of globalized financial capital. A framework called food sovereignty has been developed by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina (LVC), to encompass the various elements of a food system alternative based on reclaiming popular resource control, defending small-scale agriculture and traditional knowledge, rebuilding local circuits of food and labor, and recovering the ecological processes that can make farming sustainable. Recognizing the need to develop “movement people” capable of integrating many ecological, social, cultural and political criteria into their organizational activities, LVC increasingly has articulated processes of popular education and consciousness-raising as part of the global social movement for agroecology and food sovereignty. Given the enormous diversity of organizations and actors in LVC, an underlying feature known in Spanish as diálogo de saberes (roughly the equivalent of “dialogue between ways of knowing”) has characterized LVC processes of education, training, formation and exchange in agroecology. The diálogo de saberes takes place at the level of training centers and schools of the LVC organizations, as well as the larger scale of agricultural landscapes and peasant territories. The interactions between peasant, family or communal farmers, their organizations, their youth and their agroecology create social processes that assume the form and dynamic of a social movement in several countries of Latin America.

A Famine of Words: Changing the Rules of Expression in the Food Debates

The First Amendment implications of recent debates and legislation involving the politics of food and consumption are examined, with emphasis on the evolving role of the science of nutrition and health and its relationship to free speech. This analysis traces the appropriation of the rhetoric of personal expression and sovereignty by corporate interests to fend off critical views of the corporate food system and regulations aimed at promoting public health. To this end, the paper considers Food Disparagement or “Veggie Libel” Laws, the Oprah Winfrey beef lawsuit and the current litigation involving “pink slime,” and debates over nutritional supplements. In each matter, free speech is a contested site, with scientific expertise either appropriated or undermined by interests in protecting or building profits, while the ideals of speech or science as means for fostering democratic practices among an informed populate are discounted.

The Celebrity of Salatin: Can a Famous Lunatic Farmer Change the Food System?

This essay analyzes Joel Salatin’s celebrity as a sustainable farmer to explore the ways his public persona manages underlying tensions in the alterative food movement. Using his many film appearances as well as ethnographic notes from a full day workshop with Salatin as data, this paper explores how Salatin’s celebrity status obscures many of the challenges facing food activists behind the veneer of the charming, folksy farmer and the rhetoric of freedom (freedom from the corporate food system and corrupt government practices). The tensions between Salatin’s free-market, anti-regulation politics and the mainstream environmental movement, we argue, are managed and contained through nostalgic images of Salatin as the white, male, yeoman farmer and the masculinization of sustainability. By using an appeal to traditional masculinities to market sustainable food to the mainstream, Salatin’s celebrity (like all celebrity identities) works to support consumption and market-driven solutions to current environmental and food justice crises. In the process, these solutions ignore how the market itself is culpable in creating such crises. By obscuring this tautology, Salatin’s celebrity suggests we can consume our way out of the injustices of the current food system.

Considering the Prospects of Immediate Resistance in Food Politics: Reflections on The Garden

In this essay, I offer reflections inspired by The Garden, a compelling film documenting the failed struggle of the South Central Farmers to maintain a lush 14-acre farm within an industrial, impoverished neighborhood of Los Angeles. I concentrate on diverse representations of resistance featured in the film, which range from the traditionally mediated to more immediate or material-rhetorical acts. Taking the lead of the South Central Farmers, I conclude that we (as scholars, teachers, and ethical people) may combat the corporate food system with a multifarious approach to social change.

Serving Social Justice: The Role of the Commons in Sustainable Food Systems

Food is a source of sustenance, a cause for celebration, an inducement to temptation, a vehicle for power, an indicator of well-being, a catalyst for change and, above all, a life good. Along with other life goods such as potable water, clean air, adequate shelter and protective clothing, food is something we cannot live without. The global corporate food system, however, allows 800 million to go hungry, while an even larger number of people grow obese. Based in money-values, this food system promotes accumulation first and foremost, enriching a few while creating economic, social and environmental externalities that are destroying local economies, devastating individuals, families and communities and degrading the planet. What would a food system look like that was based in life-values, centred on the commons and anchored by social justice? This paper will focus on the creation of sustainable food systems, beginning with the crises of the global corporate food system and then moving to the heart of sustainable food systems – the civil commons.