Kitchens and Pantries—Helping or Hindering? The Perspectives of Emergency Food Users in Victoria, Australia

In high-income countries, people affected by food insecurity may seek out free/subsidized food from charities. Their perceptions of the food programs provided and preferences for alternative strategies are underresearched. The aim of this study was to develop an understanding of the users’ experiences of food insecurity and gain evidence for effective responses in the future. Twelve semistructured interviews with a sample of users, who were also charity volunteers, were conducted in Victoria, Australia. A thematic analysis of the interview transcripts was undertaken. The results show that users have complex needs. Charities have both the capacity to hinder and help people maintain dignity, social inclusion, and health. Alternative community and policy food security strategies were proposed by interviewees. In the future, perspectives of affected community members must inform strategies that seek to improve people’s access to safe, nutritious, and affordable food. A human right to food framework is discussed as a mechanism to help realize food security in Australia

Distant agricultural landscapes

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0278-0This paper examines the relationship between the development of the dominant industrial food system and its associated global economic drivers and the environmental sustainability of agricultural landscapes. It makes the case that the growth of the global industrial food system has encouraged increasingly complex forms of “distance” that separate food both geographically and mentally from the landscapes on which it was produced. This separation between food and its originating landscape poses challenges for the ability of more localized agricultural sustainability initiatives to address some of the broader problems in the global food system. In particular, distance enables certain powerful actors to externalize ecological and social costs, which in turn makes it difficult to link specific global actors to particular biophysical and social impacts felt on local agricultural landscapes. Feedback mechanisms that normally would provide pressure for improved agricultural sustainability are weak because there is a lack of clarity regarding responsibility for outcomes. The paper provides a brief illustration of these dynamics with a closer look at increased financialization in the food system. It shows that new forms of distancing are encouraged by the growing significance of financial markets in global agrifood value chains. This dynamic has a substantial impact on food system outcomes and ultimately complicates efforts to scale up small-scale local agricultural models that are more sustainable.The Trudeau Foundation || Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Introduction—Food Security and Food Waste Reduction: A Social Innovation Approach to Current Social, Environmental, and Political Concerns

This chapter presents the research rationale underpinning the book. It addresses the intertwining challenges of food security and surplus food management, discussing recent data and literature. It also presents how social innovation is conceptualized in the book as the theoretical framework to analyse partnerships between business and non-profit organisations in managing food surplus. The methodology of the research is also detailed, along with the book structure

Community Service-Learning in Graduate Planning Education

Community service-learning (CSL) has gained popularity over the past decades in universities across North America. Although planning programs tend to involve more graduate-level community-engaged learning than other professional disciplines, learning outcomes have not been sufficiently examined. Based on a review of existing literature and analysis from four years of a CSL course at the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography and Planning, this article describes the implications of CSL for graduate planning education. We argue that CSL in graduate planning programs has a series of unique characteristics and thus requires distinctive pedagogical approaches

Broadening the knowledge base of small-scale fisheries through a food systems framework: A case study of the Lake Superior region

Lake Superior is the largest and northernmost of the Great Lakes of North America. It supports a diversity of wildlife and fish species, along with commercial, recreational, and Indigenous fisheries that make vital contributions to nutrition, livelihoods, cultures, and food systems. However, this diversity of social and cultural values is not fully reflected in management practices that tend towards a ‘resourcist’ approach. This chapter seeks to ‘broaden the scope’, proposing a food systems framework as a way of grappling with the wicked problem of Lake Superior fisheries governance. Using a food systems framework, we look at the different values associated with fisheries, including the objective, subjective, and relational contributions they make to Lake Superior food systems. We explore these food-related values attached to fisheries by presenting three illustrative examples: The fisheries of Batchewana First Nation; Eat the Fish, a small business marketing local fish through alternative food networks in Northwestern Ontario; and Bodin’s Fisheries in Wisconsin, a regional fish processor and retail outlet. We conclude by identifying ways of strengthening fisheries contributions to regional food systems and offer a set of transdisciplinary questions on fishery-food system linkages that may assist others in ‘broadening the scope’ of fisheries governance

Learning, food, and sustainability in community-campus engagement: Teaching and research partnerships that strengthen the food sovereignty movement

In this chapter, we consider how movements for food sovereignty and community-campus engagement (CCE) can work together, both in theory and practice. We argue that CCE can, and in many cases already does, strengthen the food sovereignty movement, especially when CCE challenges traditional assumptions about the role of academics. This is particularly important given that academic institutions have a history of exploitative research relationships and often reinforce hierarchical assumptions about whose knowledge “counts” and how knowledge is produced