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Decolonizing the Caribbean Diet: Two Perspectives on Possibilities and Challenges
No full textWe wonder if food and agriculture will be an emergent theme in reclaiming the Taíno identity, the Indigenous people of the Caribbean. As we consider the emergent movement to decolonize our diets and utilize food as medicine alongside veganism and vegetarianism trends, we wonder how and if food, foodways, and agriculture are or will be tools to decolonize and reclaim the Taíno identity. In this paper, we will explore two perspectives on the possible opportunities and challenges of such movements and how they will look in the Caribbean and its diaspora.
Note: Updated version published December 3, 2019, to correctly cite sources on second page.
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Growing Ecologies: Growing Communities
No full textFirst paragraphs:
The contemporary community gardening and urban agriculture movements have transformed the fundamental notion of the city, challenging the urban/rural dichotomy and applying an agronomic model to remake urban spaces as productive systems. Recently, another model has emerged, that of the food forest, which is based on the form and function of forest ecosystems for producing food. Much like the early innova-tive efforts of urban agriculture, community supported agriculture operations (CSAs), and other alternative food system projects, the emergence of food forests across the country has been a grassroots effort informed by a few key references and with little coordination across individual efforts.
The Community Food Forest Handbook: How to Plan, Organize, and Nurture Edible Gathering Places provides a very timely and thorough overview of this new type of productive landscape. Of the 30 food forest projects that form the basis of the book, only one has been in existence for more than 10 years. The authors, Catherine Bukowski, a Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech, and John Munsell, professor in the College of Natural Resources and the Environment at Virginia Tech, each with extensive experience in agroforestry, summarize the lessons learned from a systematic analysis of these examples to develop a guide for groups involved with or intending to develop their own community food forest. This handbook effectively documents the state-of-the-art of this emerging practice. . .
Pandemic and Food Security: A download from the Global South
No full textFirst paragraphs:
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
—Antonio Gramsci
Like many modern day viral epidemics (e.g., MERS, SARS), SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the folds of the food system. The dominant narrative puts its earliest appearance in the wet market of the Chinese city of Wuhan, where wild animals are also traded. However, there are indications that SARS-CoV-2, which is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, may have developed in intensive livestock farming systems, possibly pig farming (GRAIN, 2020).
Not only did the virus originate from the food system, but it also penetrated it and exposed its systemic weaknesses. The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are now threatening the food security of billions of people. Indeed, after initial reassurances that COVID-19 posed no concerns to global food security, as the world’s silos were well stocked (Vos, Martin, & Laborde, 2020), the tone has now changed radically. We are now being warned that global hunger could double due to food supply disruptions caused by the pandemic, especially in poor nations and in Africa (De Sousa, 2020). . . .
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Integrating a Food Systems Lens into Discussions of Urban Resilience: A Policy Analysis
No full textAs discussions of urban resilience begin to include food systems thinking explicitly, researchers and practitioners must keep various considerations at the fore. This reflective essay begins by delineating three international agreements (the Sustainable Development Goals, New Urban Agenda, and Milan Urban Food Policy Pact) that provide a broad policy environment within which food systems governance might be situated. It then encourages consideration not only of megacities around the globe, but also of the approximately 2 billion people that live in towns and small- or midsized cities (encompassing about 27% of the world’s population) (Berdegué, Proctor, & Cazzuffi, 2014). It notes that integration of food systems thinking must enhance urban-rural linkages in mutually supportive ways, echoing recent calls from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, 2019) and UN-Habitat (2018). It reflects on ways policies and governance might better articulate across scale and argues that deep adaptation to climate change must frame all work moving forward. Finally, it examines how food systems thinking and social innovation are critical to urban resilience and must be prioritized in policymaking rather than included as an afterthought. We draw illustrative examples from our community-based research projects carried out through the Nourishing Communities: Sustainable Local Food Systems Research Group and the Food: Locally Embedded Globally Engaged (FLEdGE) Partnership
A Five-Point Framework for Reading for Social Justice: A Case Study of Food Policy Discourse in the Context of Brexit Britain
No full textFood justice represents an evolving framework that puts social justice at the center of debates on how to achieve sustainable food systems. Food justice has largely been examined in community-level projects and activism outside the UK. This paper uses food justice as a framework through which to analyze food policy discourse in the UK. Our analysis presents an approach to “reading for social justice” by using the twin pillars of “distributive” (how benefits and risks are shared) and “procedural” justice (who is included) as analytical lenses. We apply critical discourse analysis to 20 policy documents published since the 2016 “Brexit” referendum. Our analysis finds that elements of both distributive and procedural justice are present, but underdeveloped or ignored across the documents. The lack of direct attention to social justice issues in the papers was not for lack of actual social justice issues, which were implicit within the discourse. The post-Brexit discourse reproduced existing power imbalances and despite occurring at a juncture where the potential for change was high, marginalized and vulnerable voices remain underrepresented. In the context of post-Brexit Britain, as well as in any political context, we argue that if food policy-making and governance are to enable a more just and sustainable food system, a more systematic approach to incorporating social justice needs to be developed. To this end, we offer a five-part approach to “reading for social justice” when scrutinizing food and farming policy.
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Balancing Social Values with Economic Realities: Farmer Experience with a Cost-offset CSA
No full textSome farmers are offering subsidized or “cost-offset” community supported agriculture (CO-CSA) shares as a strategy to counter market saturation and improve low-income families’ access to fresh local foods. However, little is known about farmers’ experiences with this model, particularly in regard to the balance between additional resources required for adoption and subsequent contributions to farm revenue. As part of the Farm Fresh Foods for Healthy Kids Study of the impact of a CO-CSA on dietary behaviors in low-income families, we conducted qualitative interviews with 12 farmers across four states after the first and the third years of CO-CSA implementation. We explored these data to understand what accommodations farmers provided to low-income families, the benefits and challenges of implementing the CO-CSA model, and farmers’ perceptions of its impact on cash flow and profitability. We found that farmers selected pick-up locations that met CO-CSA members’ needs, were responsive to members’ food preferences in selecting CSA contents, and allowed for late payments and pickups, though sometimes this placed an additional burden on farmers’ time and resources. Additionally, weekly payment transactions led to increased recordkeeping. Despite its challenges, most farmers said CO-CSA adoption was a worthwhile addition to their business model. Expanding food access through this mechanism may become more sustainable with the additional support of innovative policies like eased land-use restrictions, operational models, and community strategies to fund and operate CO-CSA programs. This is an area ripe for future research, as there is little documentation on both single farm and multifarm CO-CSA operations
Supporting Agricultural Resilience: The Value of Women Farmers' Communication Practices
No full textWhile women in the United States (U.S.) are increasingly entering into or being recognized for their role as farm operators, researchers argue that women farmers have been and continue to be under-recognized and researched. In the face of increasing environmental and financial challenges, as well as a variety of challenges related to domestic life, women farmers remain resilient. Buzzanell’s (2010) resilience communication theory suggests that forming and maintaining communication networks is essential to resilience processes. Drawing on interviews with 35 U.S. women farmers, we argue that communication networking is valuable to food systems; specifically, these practices contributed to and reified the resilience of the individual farmers, their farm business, and the greater sustainable agriculture sector. Implications for women farmers as a community of practice, as well as organizations serving these populations, are discussed
The Impact of Food Supply Chain Disruptions Amidst COVID-19 in Malaysia
No full textOver the last 10 years, the food supply has been secured in Malaysia through a combination of local food production and supply of imported food. The occurrence of COVID-19 has disrupted the food supply chain with the lockdown restriction known as the Movement Control Order (MCO) put in place to break the transmission mode of COVID-19. This article outlines the chronological events that took place in Malaysia after a COVID-19 outbreak due to a religious gathering. The impact of MCO on the food supply chain, particularly to urban residents, is also described, with recommended approaches to mitigate the situation
Leveraging informal community food systems to address food security during COVID-19
No full textFirst paragraph:
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has dramatically reshaped the U.S. food system and how people interact with it—more specifically, how people interact with their community food environment. The food environment is the distribution of food sources within a community, including the number, type, location, and accessibility of retail food outlets (Glanz, Sallis, Saelens, & Frank, 2005). Systemic injustices shape our food system and lead to a lack of access to healthier food and beverages for low-income and communities of color (Baker, Schootman, Barnidge, & Kelly, 2006; Bower, Thorpe, Rohde, & Gaskin, 2014). These neighborhood disparities have concrete effects on health, including increasing people’s risk for obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke (Franco, Diez Roux, Glass, Caballero, & Brancati, 2008; Richardson, Boone-Heinonen, Popkin, & Gordon-Larsen, 2012). COVID-19 exacerbates these long-standing disparities, disproportionately affecting low-income people and communities of color. Brutal structural inequalities have resulted in Black and Latinx Americans being 2.7 and 3.1, respectively, times more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19 (Moore et al., 2020). . .
Iteration, innovation, and collaboration: Supporting farmers markets' response to COVID-19
No full textFirst paragraph:
The value proposition of farmers markets has been altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The festival-like features of markets put on hold, the in-person social interactions reduced, the physical flow of walk-up markets changed. Just as previous crises[1] called upon markets to shift their operations to serve their community, the 2020 story highlights how once again, these low-capacity/high-functioning entities have been forced to reinvent themselves. This time, alternative models involving online pre-orders, drive-thru, and curbside product pick-up scenarios have been rapidly put in place by individual vendors and market operators. Open-air and shed market vendor placements have been redesigned to allow for social distancing among both vendors and customers. Sanitation and public safety measures including gloves, hand sanitizer, and hand-washing facilities are now essential considerations.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxIbm-EyATs&feature=youtu.b