Industrial Food System Research Articles

Implementing sustainable food forests: Extracting success factors through a cross-case comparison

Food forests are multistrata ecosystems that pro­vide healthy food, livelihood opportunities, as well as social-cultural and environmental services. With these features, food forests address several prob­lems industrial food systems cause. While the overall number of food forests is continuously increasing worldwide, the rate of uptake is still low. This study reconstructs in detail how different types of food forests (n=7) were realized, mostly in Europe, with a focus on organization and manage­ment. Findings confirm and add to previous studies indicating that the successful implementa­tion of food forests depends on long-term land access, sufficient start-up funds, and adequate farming and entrepreneurial know-how, among other factors. While these are not unique factors compared to other farm and food businesses, sustainable food forests face particular obstacles to secure them. This study offers guidance to food entrepreneurs, public officials, and activists on how to successfully implement food forests to realize their full sustainability potential.

Is “sustainability” still relevant to food systems, or do we need a new term?

I looked forward to reading the Routledge Hand­book of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems because I greatly respect the work of its editors and wanted to know how they would organize such a vast topic. It hardly needs repeating that today’s dominant industrialized food system is destroying biodiversity, degrading soil and water, emitting greenhouse gases, creating products that cause diet-related diseases, erasing traditional farm livelihoods, and destroying farm communities. Despite ample documentation of the problems and wide agreement on their existence, the solu­tions are much more contentious. What are the alternatives to the destructive industrialized food system, and what is the best trajectory from current practices to a better future? I hoped that this book would provide solid answers. . . .

Reflecting on food pedagogies in Canada

The original deadline for submissions for this special issue was March 1, 2020, just days before the destabilizing and disorienting first wave of pandemic-related shutdowns in many parts of Canada. The (r)evolution in food systems pedagogy we were hoping to document and celebrate was promptly preempted by an abrupt transition to virtual learning. In an instant, teachers and learners alike were attending to a pedagogical revolution of another kind altogether. The enduring impacts of this upheaval remain unclear. In the immediate term, though, the shift to online learning presented a crisis (a hasty ‘pivot’ to online teaching and learning) within a crisis (the daily reality of living within the context of a deadly global pandemic). For many critical food systems students and teachers, these new crises layered on top of the already front-of-mind crises propelled by the capital-intensive, industrialized food system. Like peering through translucent nesting dolls, we squinted through layers of pedagogical disruption and pandemic to remain focused on the economic, social and ecological devastation wrought by our dominant food system, and for glimpses of the pluriverse of food systems alternatives that inspire and nourish us.

Campus Food Provision as Radical Pedagogy? Following Students on the Path to Equitable Food Systems

On campuses across North America, students are actively prefiguring alternatives to the fundamental inequities and unsustainability of the capital-intensive, industrialized food system. While rarely recognized as such, these Campus Food System Alternatives (CFSA) are intensely pedagogical spaces, and often—importantly—are student led and directed. We make the case that CFSA are sites for a “pedagogy of radical hope” that (a) centre student agency, (b) through informal and prefigurative learning. So far these spaces have received scant scholarly attention, though inasmuch as they constitute pathways toward more equitable and sustainable food systems, while informing liberatory pedagogical practice, we argue that it is high time for CFSA to be taken seriously.

Centering Justice in a Sustainable Food Systems Master's Program

The new Master of Science in Sustainable Food Systems (MSFS) program at Prescott College was re-envisioned as part of the preferred teach out partnership with Green Mountain College that closed in 2019. In collaboration with faculty from both colleges, the new MSFS program was developed to intentionally center social justice and offer students aFood Justiceconcentration. Food justice is a growing movement that seeks to shift global, industrial food systems toward more equitable, just, and sustainable foodways. Using this definition, students in theFood Justicecore course uncovered how forms of institutional oppression prevent certain communities from accessing healthy and culturally appropriate food. This course was designed and taught from an anti-racist, anti-colonial, and culturally sustaining pedagogical framework. TheFood Justicecourse frames students' investigation of the current food system and how issues of privilege, access, and identity relate to food justice throughout the MSFS program. Through experiential learning, students were asked to develop and implement a project that aligns with social justice values. In this perspective paper, we describe our experiences as sustainable food systems educators in making structural changes to the master's program. We share the values and assumptions that led to the development of theFood Justiceconcentration and course; detail our pedagogical frameworks; and highlight students' projects as a manifestation of the student experience.

Review of "Porkopolis: American animality, standardized life, and the factory farm"

Alex Blanchette's Porkopolis offers a compelling ethnography of pig life and death as part of the industrial food system. Blanchette challenges readers to think about factory farms not only as spaces of domination but also also sites where intimacy and exploitation unfold in complicated ways.

Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology. By Chris Otter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 411 pp. Illustrations, maps, table, glossary, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $49.00.

<i>Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology</i>. By Chris Otter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 411 pp. Illustrations, maps, table, glossary, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $49.00.

Meaning as Motivator to Address Distancing in the Food System

Distancing in the food system prevents people from having full knowledge and making informed choices about what and how they produce, exchange, prepare, and eat food. This becomes problematic when the dominant industrial food system contributes to myriad negative human health, ecological, and social outcomes. This paper reports on findings from a study that aimed to better understand distancing from the perspectives of people engaged in resisting it, focusing on their motivations for action to inform policy approaches to improve food system health. The research, conducted in India and Canada, comprised participant observation with organizations working to connect the production and consumption of food, as well as interviews with activists, consumers, and farmers involved with those organizations. These food system actors were motivated primarily by a conviction that food is important, which was illustrated by meaningful relationships built and maintained through food, by soulful connections with food, and by a sense that everything – including food – is interconnected. The findings identify connection around food as a source of meaning in life. From meaning comes awareness of broader issues, a sense of value and care, and ultimately motivation for action or change. This could have implications for healthy food system governance if frameworks such as determinants of health and healthy food environments are used to inform healthy public policies that cultivate a sense of meaning and awareness of the intrinsic value embedded in food.

Beautifying Struggle: Food Workers, Dehumanization, and Hope

This paper considers the dehumanization of workers in the industrial food system and how their struggles could, from an ethical and aesthetic perspective, be made more beautiful. It begins with an overview of the literature on the nature of dehumanization, the nature of struggle in organizations, and aesthetic knowledge as ethics. It then considers the plight of one category of dehumanized food workers, meatpacking workers, and how they have suffered, particularly during the COVIC-19 pandemic of 2020. It presents a farmworker organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that has succeeded in re-humanizing their struggle with growers and food retailers, improving pay and working conditions, and establishing a Fair Food certification process in the Southeastern U.S. The implications for how struggles in other dehumanizing contexts such as meatpacking might be beautified are explored as are the implications for future research.

Food forests: Their services and sustainability

Industrialized food systems use unsustainable practices leading to climate change, natural resource depletion, economic disparities across the value chain, and detrimental impacts on public health. In contrast, alternative food solutions such as food forests have the potential to provide healthy food, sufficient livelihoods, environmental services, and spaces for recreation, education, and community building. This study compiles evidence from more than 200 food forests worldwide, with detailed insights on 14 exemplary food forests in Europe, North America, and South America, gained through site visits and interviews. We present and illustrate the main services that food forests provide and assess their sustainability. The findings indicate that the majority of food forests perform well on social-cultural and environmental criteria by building capacity, providing food, enhancing biodiversity, and regenerating soil, among others. However, for broader impact, food forests need to go beyond the provision of social-cultural and environmental services and enhance their economic viability. There is a need for specific trainings and other measures targeting this deficit. This study appraises the current state of food forests and provides an orientation for food entrepreneurs, public officials, and activists to better understand food forests’ potential for advancing sustainable food systems.

Framing Good Food: Communicating Value of Community Food Initiatives in the Midst of a Food Crisis

Community-embedded food initiatives exist in market economies, but make more-than-market contributions. They challenge the dominant, industrialized food system, while generating non-monetary benefits in their communities. Yet food policy, regulation, and public spending in much of the world is still framed by the values of market economy. Revenue, yield, and technological advancements remain key formal measurements of the wellbeing of food systems. Community-embedded food initiatives like small local businesses and non-profit organizations, are often committed to advancing social and environmental benefits of non-industrialized food, and they call for clearer recognition of their more-than-market contribution to community wellbeing. The Nourishing Communities network has worked with such initiatives for more than a decade, undertaking community-engaged research with practitioners across sectors. The network has found that these initiatives are impeded by a communication conundrum. On the one hand, they are expected (by funders, governments, and other institutions) to demonstrate their value using market-economy measurements and translating what they do into “social returns on investment.” On the other hand, many of those initiatives need non-market terminology to express the values that they espouse and generate. To balance these needs, Gibson-Graham’s framing of “diverse economies” can potentially offer a pathway to better communication and thus more accurate valuing of the work of such initiatives. Their notion of diverse economies offers endless opportunities to frame community food work as valuable in ways that go beyond market-economy measurements. As such, the diverse economies framing offers new possibilities for alternative food, and for more general discussions of social reform.

Eating issues in a time of crisis: Re-thinking the new food trends and challenges in Spain

BackgroundFood systems have become a privileged sphere for explaining the past and present of peoples, and, analysed in their various dimensions, for thinking about the future. In a world of such extraordinary food disparity, it is necessary to ask what this reveals about current societies and what uncertainties and opportunities it entails. Scope and approachThis commentary examines some paradoxes related to the global food system. When we consider where it is heading, multiple questions arise, for while this is apparently more productive than ever, it far from guarantees an inclusive, healthy and sustainable food supply for all. If, as is widely maintained, current food production is sufficient to feed the entire world population, we need to ask why food insecurity persists and, at the same time, why emerging diseases such as obesity have become a health problem on a global scale. Focusing on these growing trends in Spain, we discuss how they are linked to this system, their complex nature and possible ways of dealing with them. Key findings and conclusionThe findings show how some of the positive trends engendered by the industrial food system, such as the progressive democratisation of food access and the reduction of social differences in food consumption, are now in retreat. The diagnosis we have presented on the increase in food insecurity and obesity alludes to profound changes in environments and lifestyles, but also to the social inequality produced by the impact of austerity policies. The paper postulates the need to transform structural factors in order to reverse these trends.

Hungry, hungry hikers: Fitness, cooking, and gender in American hiking, 1890s–1920s

This article examines the recollections of American mountaineers and hikers written between the 1890s and 1920s to interrogate the evolving relationship hikers had with food consumption and physical fitness on the trail. It centres firstly on the trail accounts of Appalachian Mountain Club (1876) and Sierra Club (1892) members, before moving towards articles that appeared in outdoor recreation magazines such as Outing. Contrasting itself with existing scholarly work that has focused on the ecological impact of industrial food systems within environmental history, this article seeks to explore the unexamined social and cultural power of food on early American outdoorsmen and women. By highlighting the high-altitude discourses surrounding food and physical ability on the mountainside, the article demonstrates how potentially productive debates about food and modernity are complicated by contemporary ideas of gender and propriety. It also further demonstrates how early suspicions about nutritional science and the privileged, often-chauvinistic culture of American mountaineering limited the ability of these wealthy fitness communities to communicate a wider message about the nation’s shifting health fortunes.

The tenth anniversary as a UNESCO world cultural heritage: an unmissable opportunity to get back to the cultural roots of the Mediterranean diet.

In 2010, the Mediterranean diet was awarded the recognition of UNESCO as an Intangible Heritage of Humanity because of its complex interplay between several factors, including skills, knowledge, processing, cooking, and particularly the sharing and consumption of food. Also, the Mediterranean way of eating emphasizes local food, seasonality and biodiversity. Actually, all these aspects are almost completely neglected by the current nutrition research, which rather focuses on amount of food consumed by an individual or a given population but rarely simultaneously considers how foods are matched, whether they are locally-grown or consumed convivially. Basically, nutritional epidemiology usually ends up with classifying populations as highly or poorly adhering to a Mediterranean diet on the basis of the quantity of food consumed with poor or little knowledge on other features of this eating model. As such, this approach is likely to miss important information that could turn out to be as crucial for health as the traditional analysis of food intake. Since a global industrial food system has emerged, traditional diets are facing a global food challenge threating their own survival in the next decades. To transmit the Mediterranean heritage to future generations, it is important to get back to its roots by disentangling the complexity of this diet, which is not merely a healthful model to defeat chronic diseases and improve survival. The Mediterranean diet is a cultural heritage strictly tied to its people and territories. Nutritional epidemiology is now challenged to account for all these aspects in future health research.

Is the ‘obesity crisis’ really the health crisis of the food system?

Multilateral organizations and research institutions are increasingly calling for transformation of the industrial food system due to its negative health impacts, its contribution to climate change and the fact that the system fails to provide adequate food to more than 800 million people. A foremost rationale given for food system change is the so-called obesity crisis. This commentary draws from critical weight studies and ecological public health discourses to argue that it is unnecessary to connect the crises of the food system with a rise in overweight and obesity. This approach contributes to fat stigma and further marginalizes a group of people who already suffer from stigmatization. A more inclusive rationale for food system change can be found in a concept articulated by the Canadian Public Health Association termed the ‘ecological determinants of health.’ These are features of the biosphere such as water, air, food and soil systems that support life on earth and human health. The current industrial food system threatens the ecological determinants of health by contributing substantially to climate change and environmental degradation. A shift in discourse in food policy and practice to focus on the ecological health impacts of the food system is more inclusive and promotes the well-being of all.

Animals: Hierarchies of Life and Death

Animals: Hierarchies of Life and Death

Gendered and Racial Injustices in American Food Systems and Cultures

Multiple factors create food injustices in the United States. They occur in different societal sectors and traverse multiple scales, from the constrained choices of the industrialized food system to legal and corporate structures that replicate entrenched racial and gender inequalities, to cultural expectations around food preparation and consumption. Such injustices further harm already disadvantaged groups, especially women and racial minorities, while also exacerbating environmental deterioration. This article consists of five sections that employ complementary approaches in the humanities, design studies, and science and technology studies. The authors explore cases that represent structural injustices in the current American food system, including: the racialized and gendered effects of food systems and cultures on both men and women; the misguided and de-territorialized global branding of the Mediterranean Diet as a universal ideal; the role of food safety regulations around microbes in reinforcing racialized food injustices; and the benefits of considering the American food system and all of its parts as designed artifacts that can be redesigned. The article concludes by discussing how achieving food justice can simultaneously promote sustainable food production and consumption practices—a process that, like the article itself, invites scholars and practitioners to actively design our food system in ways that empower different stakeholders and emphasize the importance of collaboration and interconnection.

“We are all consumers”: co-consumption and organic food

ABSTRACT The Organic Consumer Association (OCA) in Iceland was established by domestic producers, importers, retailers and consumers. What separated this consumer association from conventional ones was that its founders included both organic producers and “middlemen” (importers, wholesalers and retailers). These same middlemen are often criticized for destroying valuable connections between producers and consumers, but in OCA they worked with producers and consumers toward a common goal. In the article, I deploy the concept of “co-consumption” to analyze how different actors within the contemporary food chain engage with the production and consumption of organic food. “Co-consumption” can be defined as individual and collective efforts to tackle issues within the industrial food system. Such consumption is based on emotional practices that establish relationships between people, products, spaces, and places. So what happens when organic producers and entrepreneurs begin to define themselves as consumers while fighting for increased consumption through the Organic Consumer Association? And what can these encounters between organic producers, middlemen, and consumers tell us about contemporary consumption practices? Drawing on theories of emotion, the article explores the dynamics, frictions, and mutual obligations that drive ethical consumption on a day-to-day basis.

Feminist agroecology: analyzing power relationships in food systems

ABSTRACT Agroecology needs to increasingly integrate feminist contributions to understand and transform power relations in food systems. This study is based on the participation in and analysis of meetings led by women from different territories in Latin America and the Caribbean, in 2018 in Chiapas (Mexico), in which they addressed problems and alternatives related to food and agriculture. Our analysis identifies the matrix of oppressions: heteropatriarchy, capitalism and colonialism, to understand the power relations in the current corporate industrial food system. We sustain that it is necessary to continue exploring practical alternatives to transcend inequalities and allow the territorial expansion of agroecology with socio-environmental justice.

Market Dependency as Prohibitive of Agroecology and Food Sovereignty—A Case Study of the Agrarian Transition in the Scottish Highlands

While there have been calls amongst the more ‘political’ or ‘radical’ agroecology and food sovereignty advocates for a break from capitalist food systems, conceptualisations of capitalism, and thus counter-capitalism, vary widely. The movements have largely presented small-scale producers and peasants as alternatives to industrial food systems, and have focused on reducing input dependency as a path towards autonomy of producers and the realisation of agroecological food systems. An alternative to this approach is presented here through applying Ellen M. Wood’s conceptualisation of capitalism as characterised by ‘market dependency’ to the case of the agrarian transition in the Scottish Highlands. This article demonstrates the specific ways in which market dependency, including for agricultural outputs, not just inputs, leads to a divergence from agroecological food systems. It argues that identifying ‘market dependency’ as a defining characteristic of capitalism could strengthen and refine the focus of agroecology and food sovereignty movements.