scholarly journals Special Issue: Advances in the Economic Analysis of Food System Drivers and Effects

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-364
Author(s):  
Stephan J. Goetz ◽  
Edward C. Jaenicke
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Consumer Preferences ◽  
National Research Council ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Institute Of Medicine ◽  
Social Variables ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Rigorous Analysis ◽  
Food Movement

National interest in the effects of the U.S. food system has risen to such a level that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies was compelled recently to publish A Framework for Assessing Effects of the Food System (IOM/NRC 2015), focusing on health, environmental, and economic and social variables. While providing a useful framework, the volume stopped short of actually carrying out studies to validate or test the assumptions of the framework. In addition to having measurable societal effects, food systems are also being affected by powerful secular forces that range from rising income inequality, consolidation and rationalization in retailing, consumer preferences for local and regional foods, to changes in climate and competition for land associated with urbanization. In parallel, an expanding “food movement” has emerged that, with little formal or rigorous analysis, has become highly critical of the food system and its consequent health, environmental, and economic and social effects.

scholarly journals Promises of meat and milk alternatives: an integrative literature review on emergent research themes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annika Lonkila ◽  
Minna Kaljonen
Keyword(s):  
Food Production ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Consumer Preferences ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Scientific Journal ◽  
Agricultural Practices ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Research Themes ◽  
Social Scientific

AbstractIncreasing concerns for climate change call for radical changes in food systems. There is a need to pay more attention to the entangled changes in technological development, food production, as well as consumption and consumer demand. Consumer and market interest in alternative meat and milk products—such as plant based milk, plant protein products and cultured meat and milk—is increasing. At the same time, statistics do not show a decrease in meat consumption. Yet alternatives have been suggested to have great transitional potential, appealing to different consumer segments, diets, and identities. We review 123 social scientific journal articles on cell-based and plant-based meat and milk alternatives to understand how the positioning of alternatives as both same and different in relation to animal-based products influences their role within the protein transition. We position the existing literature into three themes: (1) promissory narratives and tensions on markets, (2) consumer preferences, attitudes, and behavioral change policies, (3) and the politics and ethics of the alternatives. Based on our analysis of the literature, we suggest that more research is needed to understand the broader ethical impacts of the re-imagination of the food system inherent in meat and milk alternatives. There is also a need to direct more attention to the impacts of meat and milk alternatives to the practices of agricultural practices and food production at the farm-level. A closer examination of these research gaps can contribute to a better understanding of the transformative potential of alternatives on a systemic level.

“Workarounds and Roadblocks”: Risk and Resistance among Food Movement Activists

2020 ◽  
pp. 232949652096562
Author(s):  
Andrew Raridon ◽  
Tamara L. Mix ◽  
Rachel L. Einwohner
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Southern Plains ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Regional Food ◽  
The Social ◽  
Regional Food Systems ◽  
Food Movement

This article examines how activists involved in the food movement use different tactics intended to challenge and subvert the agrifood structures they encounter. We use data from interviews and participant observations with 57 food movement activists operating in less robust alternative food systems throughout the Southern Plains states of Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Our respondents describe how they interpret their regional food systems as deliberately restrictive to the food movement and explain some of the tactical choices they make to maneuver around various constraints they claim hinder their food movement activism. In actively resisting the agricultural status quo, we find that some activists knowingly engage in forms of high-risk activism. We then examine the different framing devices food movement activists use to explain the risks generated by their tactical workarounds. Our findings contribute to the social movements and food system literature by showing how activists interpret and justify the risks generated by their resistance and by emphasizing the contextual nature of tactical choices and risk in social movement activism.

scholarly journals Reflecting on food pedagogies in Canada

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Classens ◽  
Jennifer Sumner
Keyword(s):  
Online Learning ◽  
Online Teaching ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Food System ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Online Teaching And Learning ◽  
Abrupt Transition ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Capital Intensive

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.

scholarly journals What does it mean to do food justice?

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Valentine Cadieux ◽  
Rachel Slocum
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
Local Food Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Food Movement ◽  
The U.S

'Food justice' and 'food sovereignty' have become key words in food movement scholarship and activism. In the case of 'food justice', it seems the word is often substituted for work associated with projects typical of the alternative or local food movement. We argue that it is important for scholars and practitioners to be clear on how food justice differs from other efforts to seek an equitable food system. In the interests of ensuring accountability to socially just research and action, as well as mounting a tenable response to the 'feed the world' paradigm that often sweeps aside concerns with justice as distractions from the 'real' issues, scholars and practitioners need to be more clear on what it means to do food justice. In exploring that question, we identify four nodes around which food justice organizing appears to occur: trauma/inequity, exchange, land, and labor. This article sets the stage for a second one that follows, Notes on the practice of food justice in the U.S., where we discuss attempts to practice food justice. Key words: food justice, food sovereignty, food movement, food security, alternative agri-food systems

scholarly journals From globalism to localism: How structural economic shifts can support the local food movement

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Emily Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chains ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Local Food ◽  
Economic Globalization ◽  
Local Food Systems ◽  
Local Food Movement ◽  
Structural Forces ◽  
Food Movement

Local is Our Future was published shortly before the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet it makes a timely contribution critiquing economic globalization given the experiences of 2020. It emphasizes the need for shorter supply chains and champions local food systems by focusing on the structural forces that currently control the food system.

scholarly journals How does Modernity Taste? Tomatoes in the Societal Change from Modernity to Late Modernity

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Ekelund ◽  
Håkan Jönsson
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Consumer Preferences ◽  
Societal Change ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Food Regulation ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
New Consumer ◽  
Analytical Approaches ◽  
New Situation

The aim of this article is to discuss how changes in tomato food regulation, production and consumption, can be seen as part of a broader societal change from Modernity to Late Modernity. Based on evidence from the Swedish and European food systems we demonstrate how a system, which has been successfully managing development in food production for several decades by stressing rationality, homogeneity and standardization, is being challenged by a system that has adapted to, and also exploited, consumer preferences such as heterogeneity, diversity and authenticity. The article shows how tomato growers develop differentiation strategies, adapting to and cultivating this new consumer interest, and how authorities responsible for regulations of trade and quality struggle to adapt to the new situation. As the products become more diversified, taste becomes an important issue and is associated with a view that traditional and natural are superior to standardized and homogeneous products. The analytical approaches for the discussion come from two study areas: ethnological, and marketing and policy perspective, thus showing a multidimensional picture of a changing food system.

scholarly journals Notes on the practice of food justice in the U.S.: understanding and confronting trauma and inequity

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Slocum ◽  
Kirsten Valentine Cadieux
Keyword(s):  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
Alternative Food ◽  
Alternative Food Networks ◽  
Food Networks ◽  
Food Movement ◽  
The U.S

The lexicon of the U.S. food movement has expanded to include the term 'food justice.' Emerging after approximately two decades of food advocacy, this term frames structural critiques of agri-food systems and calls for radical change. Over those twenty years, practitioners and scholars have argued that the food movement was in danger of creating an 'alternative' food system for the white middle class. Alternative food networks drew on white imaginaries of an idyllic communal past, promoted consumer-oriented, market-driven change, and left yawning silences in the areas of gendered work, migrant labor, and racial inequality. Justice was often beside the point. Now, among practitioners and scholars we see an enthusiastic surge in the use of the term food justice but a vagueness on the particulars. In scholarship and practice, that vagueness manifests in overly general statements about ending oppression, or morphs into outright conflation of the dominant food movement's work with food justice (see What does it mean to do food justice? Cadieux and Slocum (2015), in this Issue). In this article, we focus on one of the four nodes (trauma/inequity, exchange, land and labor) around which food justice organizing appears to occur: acknowledging and confronting historical, collective trauma and persistent race, gender, and class inequality. We apply what we have learned from our research in U.S. and Canadian agri-food systems to suggest working methods that might guide practitioners as they work toward food justice, and scholars as they seek to study it. In the interests of ensuring accountability to socially just research and action, we suggest that scholars and practitioners need to be more clear on what it means to practice food justice. Towards such clarity and accountability, we urge scholars and practitioners to collaboratively document how groups move toward food justice, what thwarts and what enables them.Key words: food justice, trauma, food movement, alternative food networks, antiracism

scholarly journals Governing at Scale: Successful Local Food Initiatives in the World’s Cities

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 7226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Warshawsky ◽  
Robert Vos
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Local Food ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Metropolitan Regions ◽  
Local Initiatives

To introduce the special issue on local food initiatives in the world’s cities, this editorial examines the role of scale and the governance of local food initiatives in cities. The seven papers in this issue focus variously on food system governance at the scales of metropolitan regions, neighborhoods, households, and individual consumers. Although local food initiatives must work to overcome structural challenges operating at global and national scales, as delineated in key literature on food systems, taken together, the seven articles suggest that more sustainable outcomes are possible if local initiatives embrace change across multiple scales.

scholarly journals The Political Economy of Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems: An Introduction to a Special Issue

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip Baker ◽  
Jennifer Lacy-Nichols ◽  
Owain Williams ◽  
Ronald Labonté
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Technical Problem ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Great Promise ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Food Governance

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.

scholarly journals Tackling food systems from a broad spectrum

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Cassandra Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Systems Thinking ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Food Movement

Through an in-depth exploration of food movement actors’ capabilities to transform decision-making from local to international levels, the authors of Civil Society and Social Movements in Food System Governance examine the significance of their involvement, while exploring the intersection­ality of governance, social movements, and systems thinking. The premise of the text sets a tone for the need to fully understand the trajectory of food systems governance, especially since food systems movements are gaining significant momentum at the local, regional, and international levels. The editors note that “these movements seek to rein­force, build on, and scale up innovative, place-based initiatives” (p. 1).

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