Building relationships back into the food system: addressing food insecurity and food well-being

IntroductionFailures of the current food system sit at the core of the multitude of crises by being the root framework for both consumption choices and food production. Low-income households are disproportionately affected by these failures, impacting their food security and access to healthy and sustainable foods. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a bottom-up response towards an agri-food system transformation by providing an alternative food system based on agroecologically grown food that is sold locally and rooted in social values. Alongside other food citizenship movements and alternative food networks (AFN), CSAs are driven by the vision to develop a democratic, socially and economically just, and environmentally sustainable food system. Yet, low-income households are underrepresented in the CSA community.MethodOur paper presents findings from a co-produced intervention between the research team, four CSA farms based in Wales, United Kingdom and two food aid partners that sought to identify ways to improve the accessibility of CSA memberships for food-insecure households. Thirty-eight households received a weekly veg bag for a period of 2–4 months. We interviewed 16 household members at the project start and end of the harvest season. Building on the food well-being framework, we investigate impacts of a CSA membership on food-insecure households.ResultsWe found that CSA membership holistically improves food well-being, through strengthening producer-consumer relationships, increasing availability of healthy foods, helping people to care for their own and their families well-being, and building place-based food capability and literacy.DiscussionThis paper supports wider narratives that call for systematically prioritizing interventions that promote overall food well-being, which can lead to sustainable and just food systems with positive outcomes for financially excluded, food insecure households in localized AFNs

Exploring the contribution of alternative food networks to food security. A comparative analysis

[EN] Food (in)security has become a challenge not only for developing economies but also for High Income Countries. In parallel, food scholars have actively investigated the contribution of alternative food networks (AFNs) to the development of more sustainable and just food systems, paying attention to drivers, initiatives and policies supporting the development of alternatives to the dominant industrialised food system and its detrimental environmental and socio-economic impacts. However, few studies have directly addressed the contribution of AFNs to food security in the Global North. This paper aims to establish new linkages between food security debates and critical AFNs literature. For that purpose, we conduct a place-based approach to food security in a comparative analysis of initiatives of three different European contexts: Cardiff city-region (UK), the Flemish Region (Belgium) and the peri-urban area of the city of Valencia (Spain). The results unfold: i) how AFNs weave a more localised socio-economic fabric that creates new relationships between food security outcomes and specific territories, ii) hybridization processes within alternative but also conventional systems and iii) the role of advocacy and collective action at different levels. The analysis allows identification of key elements on which food security debates hinge and provides new insights to ground conceptual discussions on territorial and place-based food security approaches.This research is part of the project "Assessment of the impact of global drivers of change on Europe's food security" (TRANSMANGO), granted by the EU under 7th Framework Programme; theme KBBE.2013.2.5-01; Grant agreement no: 613532. Dr. Ana Moragues-Faus also acknowledges the funding of the European Commission and the Welsh Government that currently supports her Ser Cymru fellowship. 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Cooking, caring, campaigning: making space for lived experience in food governance

There is a growing interest amongst UK policymakers, practitioners and scholars in more meaningfully incorporating lived experiences into decision-making. Lack of people's participation is often framed as a participatory injustice, where people cannot express their agency and participate in decisions that affect them. As a result, decisions (a policy, a programme or a service) made without people’s expertise may fail to meet their needs. Recently, similar calls have been made to democratise food governance, especially local food partnerships. These are networks of organisations that come together locally to tackle food system issues, for example food insecurity. However, theoretically and empirically, their participatory dynamics are not well understood, with impacts of participation often being asserted rather than evidenced. This thesis documents the activities of the Food Power programme that supported over 80 food poverty alliances across the UK to tackle food poverty locally, encouraging them to involve people with lived experience of food insecurity, or so-called ‘experts by experience’, in their governance. I drew on participatory and feminist ethnographic approach to understand how lived experience has been mobilized and to what extent underlying mechanisms contribute to participatory justice, I combined documentary analysis with facilitating workshops and conducting 38 conversations with Food Power and the network’s staff and activists with lived experience. This thesis makes two key conceptual and empirical contributions. Firstly, to explore how participation happens on the ground and with what effects, I develop an innovative conceptual framework of ‘care-full participatory justice’, combining participatory justice with ethics of care. This framework encompasses broad, structural considerations—addressing the 'who, what, and so what' aspects of distribution, recognition, and representation in participatory justice and a more relational perspective of ethics of care emphasising contextuality and heterogeneity Whilst existing food scholarship primarily focuses on the promising aspects of ethics of care, I deploy the “double-sidedness of care”, which foregrounds both ambivalence and challenges of democratising food governance and hopeful possibilities of more equitable participation. Most importantly, the framework also gives visibility to the essential participatory labour and care, which has been so far theoretically and empirically overlooked, despite the current interest in lived experience. Secondly, this is the first empirical exploration of how lived experience is mobilised in local food governance. The findings show that achieving participatory justice is shaped by the interaction of several factors, including degree of organisational resources, gendered and class-based organisational structures, and participants' skills and values. The thesis also illuminates the subjectivisation inherent in food democracy, which has been overlooked so far by food scholars. Food governance spaces are shown to prioritise white middle-class professional needs. People experiencing food insecurity are invited to become ‘experts by experience’ to fit into these spaces without much authority over how they are organised. Nevertheless, the findings also reveal hopeful experimentations where care, creativity and professional flexibility form a potential for more just participatory practices

Building Diverse, Distributive, and Territorialized Agrifood Economies to Deliver Sustainability and Food Security

This paper seeks to understand how agri-food economies can address current sustainability and food security challenges in the context of increasing economic and health inequalities. For that purpose, we cross-fertilize economic geography and food studies literature to develop an innovative conceptual framework that builds upon three currently fragmented bodies of work: the diverse economies literature, the distributed economies framework, and territorial and place-based approaches to food security. The proposed diverse, distributive and territorial framework further develops existing relational, performative and spatial approaches to explore changing economic geographies of agri-food systems. The application of this framework to investigate fruit and vegetable provision in the city of Cardiff (UK) reveals the key role of connective, fluid and multi-functional infrastructures to reconfigure foodscapes. Specifically, our analysis shows how food infrastructures have the potential to act as bridging conceptual, material and socio-political devices. The proposed framework ultimately serves as a capacity building tool to re-assess and rebuild territorialized agri-food economies which champion diversity and redistribution of value with the aim of delivering wide societal and material benefits, enhance democracy and increase the socio-ecological resilience of food systems