Bringing good food to others: investigating the subjects of alternative food practice

Under the banner of food justice, the last few years has seen a profusion of projects focused on selling, donating, bringing or growing fresh fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods inhabited by African Americans — often at below market prices — or educating them to the quality of locally grown, seasonal, and organic food. The focus of this article is the subjects of such projects — those who enroll in such projects `to bring good food to others,' in this case undergraduate majors in Community Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz who do six-month field studies with such organizations. Drawing on formal and informal communications with me, I show that they are hailed by a set of discourses that reflect whitened cultural histories, such as the value of putting one's hands in the soil. I show their disappointments when they find these projects lack resonance in the communities in which they are located. I then show how many come to see that current activism reflects white desires more than those of the communities they putatively serve. In this way, the article provides insight into the production and reproduction of whiteness in the alternative food movement, and how it might be disrupted. I conclude that more attention to the cultural politics of alternative food might enable whites to be more effective allies in anti-racist struggles

Hungry for change: the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance

The Sydney Food Fairness Alliance is one of a growing number of nascent food movements in Australia to have emerged out of concern for the country’s food future, as well as the deleterious effect the present food system is having on its citizens’ health and the continent’s fragile environment. The Alliance’s structure and activities clearly position it as a new social movement (NSM) engaged in collective action on a specific issue, in this instance, food security/justice, and operating outside the political sphere while aiming to influence and affect societal change. Food security as a human right lies at the heart of the Alliance’s philosophy, and equitable, sustainable food policies for New South Wales are a core focus of its advocacy work. The authors argue that the Alliance is a distinctive food movement in that it positions itself as an \u27umbrella\u27 organization representing a wide range of stakeholders in the food system. This chapter reflects on the values, achievements, issues of concern, strengths and weaknesses, and future of the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance. This resource is Chapter 8 in \u27Food Security in Australia: Challenges and Prospects for the Future\u27 published by Springer in 2013

Doing Biopolitics Differently? Radical Potential in the Post-2015 MDG and SDG Debates

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Opportunities and challenges in developing a whole-of-government national food and nutrition policy: lessons from Australia's National Food Plan

OBJECTIVE: The present article tracks the development of the Australian National Food Plan as a 'whole of government' food policy that aimed to integrate elements of nutrition and sustainability alongside economic objectives. DESIGN: The article uses policy analysis to explore the processes of consultation and stakeholder involvement in the development of the National Food Plan, focusing on actors from the sectors of industry, civil society and government. Existing documentation and submissions to the Plan were used as data sources. Models of health policy analysis and policy streams were employed to analyse policy development processes. SETTING: Australia. SUBJECTS: Australian food policy stakeholders. RESULTS: The development of the Plan was influenced by powerful industry groups and stakeholder engagement by the lead ministry favoured the involvement of actors representing the food and agriculture industries. Public health nutrition and civil society relied on traditional methods of policy influence, and the public health nutrition movement failed to develop a unified cross-sector alliance, while the private sector engaged in different ways and presented a united front. The National Food Plan failed to deliver an integrated food policy for Australia. Nutrition and sustainability were effectively sidelined due to the focus on global food production and positioning Australia as a food 'superpower' that could take advantage of the anticipated 'dining boom' as incomes rose in the Asia-Pacific region. CONCLUSIONS: New forms of industry influence are emerging in the food policy arena and public health nutrition will need to adopt new approaches to influencing public policy

Speculating on collapse: Unrealized socioecological fixes of agri-food tech

Circa 2023, after receiving much hype and investment, two agri-food technologies touted for their world-changing potential, bioengineered animal protein substitutes and vertical (indoor) farms, began to falter economically. Tech sector observers attributed the fall to typical hype cycle dynamics; this paper provides a deeper read. Based on research involving over ninety interviews with agri-food tech sector actors and observation at nearly 100 industry events, we show an unrealized socioecological fix as first conceptualized by Ekers and Prudham. As attempts at preemption, these technologies were able to attract excess capital to an area believed to be in need of fixing, and their backers anticipated and in some cases tried to promote the devaluation of legacy production systems. But the technologies on offer failed to become cost competitive in a timely way since legacy production systems continued to be productive and profitable. It was these new companies that became uncompetitive and overvalued, which in turn turned investments in them into bad ones. Ironically, the agri-food tech sector has eschewed a path which might have made their products competitive, which is social regulation of legacy production systems. Instead they effectively speculated that such systems would implode under their own contradictions

Governments, grassroots, and the struggle for local food systems:Containing, coopting, contesting and collaborating

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the 'politics of possibility'. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems

Eating Christmas Cookies, Whole-wheat Bread and Frozen Chicken in the Kindergarten: Doing Pedagogy by Other Means

The study presented here explores eating as a pedagogical practice by paying attention to arrangements of things such as Christmas cookies, whole-wheat and white bread, frozen chicken, plates, chairs, tables, and freezers. Through a series of ethnographic research examples from German and Brazilian preschools, it investigates how eating in the kindergarten can be a sensual pleasure, a health risk, an ethnic custom, or a civil right within different local histories. Through specific arrangements of foods and other things, young children are educated to eat with moderation, to change their ethnic dietary habits, or to be "modern citizens". Pedagogy can thus consist of doing public health, doing ethnic identity, or doing citizenship. Eating is an important way of doing pedagogy in early childhood education and care settings. © 2013 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

Radical, Reformist, and Garden-Variety Neoliberal: Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture’s Contradictions

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the rolling back of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and fieldwork in Oakland, CA, I explain how urban agriculture arises from a protective counter-movement, while at the same time entrenching the neoliberal organisation of contemporary urban political economies through its entanglement with multiple processes of neoliberalisation. By focusing on one function or the other, however, rather than understanding such contradictions as internal and inherent, we risk undermining urban agriculture\u27s transformative potential. Coming to terms with its internal contradictions can help activists, policy-makers and practitioners better position urban agriculture within coordinated efforts for structural change, one of many means to an end rather than an end unto itself

What I am 'tis hard to know: Primitive Baptists, the Protestant self, and the American religious imagination

Though forged in the fires of the early nineteenth-century evangelical revivals, Primitive Baptists became the most significant opponents of the burgeoning antebellum evangelical movement. As Calvinists who despised missionaries, Sunday schools, Bible tract societies, and the other accouterments of evangelical Protestantism, the Primitives expressed none of the evangelicals' certainty of salvation. To understand why the Primitives fought evangelicalism, why they secured victory in parts of the South, and why they ultimately lost out, we need to come to grips with the deeply personal nature of their struggle. Theirs was a fight over many things -- doctrine, the influence of money in the church, ministerial authority, local autonomy, and sundry other matters -- all of which registered firstly and most dramatically on the personal level. This dissertation demonstrates that an approach centered on the relationship between Primitive Baptist faith and selfhood offers the most compelling explanation of how the Primitives' personal spiritual crises animated wide-ranging battles over religious doctrine, cultural authority, and social class in a changing American South

Urban Agriculture in the food-disabling city:(Re)defining urban food justice, reimagining a politics of empowerment

Recent literature has pointed to the role of urban agriculture in self-empowerment and learning, and in constituting ways to achieve food justice. Building on this work the paper looks at the potential and constraints for overcoming the residual and contingent status of urban agriculture. The first part of the paper aims to expand traditional class/race/ethnicity discussions and to reflect on global, cultural, procedural, capability, distributional and socio-environmental forms of injustice that unfold in the different stages of urban food production. The second part reflects on how to bring forward food justice and build a politics of engagement, capability and empowerment. Three interlinked strategies for action are presented: i) enhancing the reflexivity and cohesion of the urban food movement by articulating a challenge to neoliberal urbanism; ii) converging urban and agrarian food justice struggles by shaping urban agroecology and iii) regaining control over social reproduction by engaging with food commoning.Publisher Statement: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Tornaghi, C 2016, 'Urban Agriculture in the food-disabling city: (Re)defining urban food justice, reimagining a politics of empowerment' Antipode, vol 49, no. 3, pp. 781-801, which has been published in final form at https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/anti.12291 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving