Food Movements

In this article we explore how eco-social movements in Hungary, Czechia, and Poland mobilise care as a political and strategic framework in response to the interconnected crises of climate collapse, democratic erosion, and social inequality. In contrast to single-issue activism, we examine how care enables activists to build cross-movement coalitions, sustain engagement, and challenge depoliticised or technocratic approaches to change. Drawing on Tronto's ethics of care, feminist and ecofeminist theory, and framing theory, we analyse how care functions as a political grammar that connects values, emotions, and practices across diverse struggles. Based on a multi-method collaborative approach, we show how activists adapt the language of care to local postsocialist realities. We argue that care offers an inclusive, relational vocabulary capable of bridging ideological divides, while also acknowledging its gendered limits and vulnerability to co-optation in neoliberal contexts.

This chapter examines the structural causes of food insecurity through critical theoretical frameworks-food justice, the capability approach, and decolonial theoryemphasizing their relevance for social work. It argues that hunger is not merely a logistical failure but the outcome of interconnected systems of oppression, including racism, neoliberalism, and colonialism, which shape unequal access to food. Through an intersectional lens, the analysis explores emblematic cases such as the impact of agribusiness on Indigenous women in Latin America and the prevalence of food apartheids in urban Black communities in the United States. The chapter proposes concrete tools for professional intervention, including food autonomy models (e.g., seed cooperatives), advocacy strategies against extractive policies, and participatory methodologies that connect critical theory with community-based action. It concludes by calling for a rethinking of Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) through anti-racist and decolonial approaches, and by outlining actionable recommendations for social work practice aimed at tackling food insecurity at structural and community levels.

Food insecurity remains one of the most pressing challenges of the twenty-first century, disproportionately affecting women and marginalized communities. In recent years, digital technologies such as biometric identification, electronic vouchers, and online entitlement systems have been promoted as solutions to inefficiency and corruption in welfare distribution. However, these initiatives often reproduce existing inequalities, as women's access to digital platforms is mediated by gendered, cultural, and socioeconomic constraints. While existing scholarship has examined food insecurity, the digital divide, and intersectionality, these fields of study remain largely disconnected, leaving a gap in understanding how digital infrastructures themselves govern hunger. This paper addresses that gap by introducing the concept of the Digital Hunger Regime, a theoretical framework that explains how technological systems, bureaucratic rationalities, and cultural hierarchies interact to determine access to food. The study employs a conceptual methodology grounded in library research, critical discourse analysis, feminist theory, and decolonial critique, synthesizing policy documents, NGO reports, and scholarly literature to build a theoretical argument. The analysis demonstrates that digitalization in welfare is not a neutral tool of modernization, but a governance regime that often intensifies food insecurity while simultaneously creating limited spaces for resistance and alternative forms of solidarity. By reframing hunger in the digital era as a question of power, identity, and cultural justice, the paper contributes to debates in the humanities and social sciences, highlighting the hidden politics of digital welfare and offering a new lens for both academic inquiry and policy innovation.

What does the diversity of social movements and food initiatives tell us about processes of social change? I argue that they offer a productive analytical lens to observe social change because they identify injustices and dynamics of inequalities in the food system and are actively engaged in transforming these. Alternative local food initiatives react to the environmental impacts of globalized food relations; food sovereignty movements highlight class inequalities and power asymmetries in the food system that affect people's rights to culturally appropriate foodways; food justice movements denounce institutional racism; feminist movements fight persistent gender inequalities from food production to consumption; vegan movements defend animal rights. These are often mapped onto different world regions, with food justice movements more present in the US; food sovereignty movements louder in the Global South; feminist food movements more active in Latin America; and local food movements commonly in the Global North. This article brings together diverse strands of activism and research on social inequalities related to food under the conceptual umbrella of food inequalities. In addition to concept building, it contributes to a sociology of food studies by mapping the geopolitics of knowledge about social change behind the growing mobilization around food issues.

Britain is needed to meet biodiversity and climate targets. Britain is needed to meet biodiversity and climate targets. Today's fossil fuel intensive and ecologically simplified farming systems are environmentally and socially unsustainable. To meet Britain's commitments under COP21 to keep global heating below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the country must pivot towards ecologically beneficial ways of farming. Britain is also committed to reversing species decline, much of which is caused by conventional agriculture. This requires a transition towards agroecological systems that combine nature regeneration with food production. Public-common partnerships are a suitable institutional form to build food sovereignty in Britain. form to build food sovereignty in Britain. Public-common partnerships -an organizational form that facilitates democratic control over food systems from farm to fork -offer a way to transition towards agroecological food sovereignty. PCPs insulate food provisioning from the vagaries of private finance, land markets, and expensive off-farm inputs that make good quality food unaffordable for low-income households, and which subject Britain's farmworkers to the undemocratic whims of larger corporations up and downstream from them including manufacturers of many off-farm inputs and supermarkets. England's council farm estate provides an already existing institutional form through which to implement PCPs. Unfortunately, however, many cashstrapped local authorities have taken to selling their council farm holdings to fill budgetary deficits for essential public services. This report argues that this is a political choice and that local authorities can and should instead work with local community groups and growers to reimagine England's council farm estate as incubators for an agroecological transition in Britain. Agroecological food sovereignty, implemented through Agroecological food sovereignty, implemented through PCPs, provides numerous social and ecological benefits. PCPs, provides numerous social and ecological benefits. Governing England's council farms as PCPs, in accordance with the principles of agroecological food sovereignty, delivers several key benefits including: nutritious locally produced food, increased biodiversity, employment and training opportunities, ecological goods that can contribute to the green targets of local authorities, and a deepening of community and democratic control.

For almost two decades, a considerable scholarship has interrogated the rapid expansion and the "alternativeness" of alternative agri-food networks (AAFNs) and movements using multiple disciplinary perspectives. 1 The recently published Alternative Agrifood Movements: Patterns of Convergence and Divergence, edited by Douglas Constance, Marie-Christine Renard, and Marta Rivera-Ferre, offers a strong overview of this scholarship and draws into conversation case studies and examples from countries in the global North and South. The book is the outcome of a mini-conference sponsored by Research Committee 40: Sociology of Agriculture and Food of the International Sociological Association, held in Lisbon, Portugal in 2012, coupled with a series of invited papers. In thirteen chapters, the book examines the ways in which patterns of convergence and divergence are evidenced in AAFNs. The book's strength is that it draws into conversation examples and case studies from both the global North and South, and thus offers a collection of diverse perspectives and examples. However, knitting this diversity together in a cohesive package poses a challenge. The conceptual and theoretical 1

Corn (maize) is a staple crop that has shaped the culinary, artistic, and cultural traditions of both China and Mexico, yet its role in each society reflects profoundly different agricultural philosophies, spiritual meanings, and aesthetic expressions. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of corn-based cuisines, art forms, and cultural symbolism in China and Mexico, examining how historical, geographical, and sociopolitical factors have influenced their respective "corn cultures". While Mexico's maize heritage is deeply tied to Mesoamerican cosmology and national identity, China's consumption of corn has been primarily utilitarian, evolving from famine food to regional specialty. By analyzing culinary techniques, artistic representations, and folk rituals, this study highlights how corn functions as both sustenance and symbol, revealing broader contrasts in food philosophy and cultural memory between the two civilizations.

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Radical geographies scholarship has evolved over the past decades in pursuit of transforming spatial, political-economic, social, and ecological engagements within oppressive structures. Similarly, food systems scholarship demonstrates increasing interest in the scalar, sociopolitical, and ecological dynamics of food systems, often with an applied or action-oriented focus. Building on these connected, yet divergent, traditions of scholarship and action, we propose a radical food geography praxis that is rooted in the intersections of active resistance to structures that (re)produce power inequity and oppression in food systems in specific places and across spaces, and an ongoing process of critical and theoretical reflection about these structures and geographies. The radical food geography praxis we propose consists of three primary and interconnected elements: (1) theoretical engagements with power and structures of oppression both inside and outside the academy; (2) action through academic, social movement, and civil society collaborations; and (3) analysis through a broadly defined geographic lens. Through bringing together radical geographies and food systems scholarship, a radical food geography praxis reveals the interconnectivity between places and movements, relationality between land and people, the flows of people, environmental resources, ideas, and culture, and the diverse approaches to achieving justice-oriented objectives. In order to build more equitable and sustainable food systems, it is essential to engage with these geographic realities in deeply theoretical and action-oriented ways. Keywords food justice, food sovereignty, food systems, praxis, radical food geography, radical geographies las ideas y la cultura, y los diversos enfoques para lograr los objetivos orientados a la justicia. Para construir sistemas alimentarios más equitativos y sostenibles, es esencial comprometerse con estas realidades geográficas de manera profundamente teórica y orientada a la acción.

Radical geography research, teaching, and action have increasingly focused on food systems, examining the scalar, sociopolitical, and ecological dynamics of food production and harvesting, processing, distribution, consumption, and waste. While academics have contributed significantly to these debates, the success and progress of this scholarship cannot be separated from the work of practitioners and activists involved in food justice and food sovereignty movements. This paper draws together the voices of scholars and activists to explore how collaborations can productively build the evolving field of radical food geography and contribute to more equitable and sustainable food systems for all. These perspectives provide important insight but also push the boundaries of what is typically considered scholarship and the potential for impacts at the levels of theory and practice. Reflecting on the intersecting fields of radical geography and food studies scholarship and the contributions from the scholar-activists, the authors share a collective analysis through a discussion of the following three emerging themes of radical food geography: (1) a focus on historical and structural forces along with flows of power; (2) the importance of space and place in work on food justice and food sovereignty; and (3) a call to action for scholars to engage more deeply with radical food systems change within their research and teaching process but also in response to it. Keywords activist-scholarship, food justice, food sovereignty, radical food geography, scholar-activism considera erudición y el potencial de impactos en los niveles de teoría y práctica. Reflexionando sobre los campos que se cruzan de la geografía radical y la erudición de los estudios alimentarios y las contribuciones de los académicos activistas, los autores comparten un análisis colectivo a través de una discusión de los siguientes tres temas emergentes de la geografía alimentaria radical: (1) un enfoque en la historia fuerzas junto con flujos de poder; (2) la importancia del espacio y el lugar en el trabajo sobre justicia alimentaria y soberanía alimentaria; y (3) un llamado a la acción para que los académicos se involucren más profundamente con el cambio radical de los sistemas alimentarios dentro de su proceso de investigación y enseñanza, pero también en respuesta a él.

Over the past decades there has been a notable growth in community-based food systems projects and successes. Despite these advancements, food insecurity, precarious food work, ecological degradation, and corporate conglomeration in the food sector all continue to increase, compounded by the ongoing impacts of white supremacy, patriarchy, and settler colonialism. Recognizing these growing inequities, critical scholars have noted that too many food systems initiatives are overly concerned with influencing individual behaviours and a focus on narrow objectives. Furthermore, many approaches tend to overlook ways that food systems are embedded within political and economic structures that constrain their goals of social and environmental justice. These multiple challenges suggest that food movements are at a crossroads. This paper reflects on this pivotal moment through an analysis of key food movement actors' perspectives on the progress and promises as well as emerging tensions for food movements in Canada. Through a series of interviews with individuals prominent in food movement spaces, we explore key perspectives on the state of food movements and possibilities for future directions. Our findings paint a complex and nuanced portrait of what food movements have accomplished, tease out internal tensions, and identify questions facing their future prospects. The perspectives presented through our findings offer a path to transcend the critiques that position short-term strategic gains in opposition to longer-term systemic change. We suggest that food movements can overcome these challenges by embracing a more radical and expansive vision of social and environmental justice that is deeply embedded within food systems while also looking beyond them.

Food security has emerged as a trending issue in urban areas with the threat of climate change, unhealthy lifestyles, and reduced open space in urbanised environments. It is assumed that this is caused by a number of economic and policy factors, as well as urban planning and transport planning implications and a general lack of knowledge and skills for nutrition and household budgeting. The aim of this paper is to understand whether an integrated approach that incorporates the ideas of planners, urban designers, landscape architects, health professionals and the food industry could improve food security. The City of Charles Sturt is used as a case study. A number of key stakeholders of food security have been interviewed to determine the key challenges and recommendations for food security both at the state and local government level. A food security policy has been identified as the key solution for the City of Charles Sturt to improve food security in the area, but it is understoo...

This research investigates the motivations driving the utilization of urban open spaces for subsistence agriculture and assesses its impact on the livelihoods of residents in Esikhaleni Township. Employing a mixedmethods approach, the study conducts structured interviews with local farmers and in-depth interviews with municipal officials from the uMhlathuze Municipality. The findings highlight food insecurity, the necessity for accessible fresh produce, agricultural passion, and rising food costs as primary drivers compelling Esikhaleni residents towards open space farming. Moreover, the research underscores the significant contribution of open space agriculture to the livelihoods of Esikhaleni residents, including improved access to fresh food, reduced food expenditures, and supplementary income generation through produce sales. The study concludes by recommending the integration of urban agriculture into urban planning efforts to safeguard land for agricultural purposes, thereby enabling residents of Esikhaleni Township to engage in sustainable agricultural practices.

Various disciplinary studies have long approached the Middle East and North Africa as a separate region, characterized by specific dynamics which made it exceptional and different from all other areas and continents around the world. Historically rooted in structures of colonial knowledge production and domination and in Western imperialism in the region, the very definition of the "Middle East" area has limited and directed what can and should be taken into consideration when analyzing it. In recent years, other names for the region have been developed, widening the scope and horizon of contexts and relations included in such definitions, such as MENA, WANA and SWANA.

he two main threats to our people and planet are climate change and corporate control of our economy and polity. 1 These intertwined issues will take a mass movement of epic proportions to shift. Time is of the essence as climate, economic, and political disasters keep occurring, gaining in intensity, impoverishing people while enriching the transnational and national corporations. Agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership could further strip national governments of their rights to protect labor and the environment in favor of protecting corporate profits. The need to build dynamic and effective movements that embody our needs is an imperative for those who believe that only democratic struggles, led by the most oppressed and joined by allies, can create a new world. The Food Justice Movement (FJM) offers an entry into the complicated labyrinth of issues, analyses, and strategies of movements that exist and need to expand and form coalitions.

In this paper I review recent political ecological scholarship on first world agrifood systems and advocate for further development of the field. To do so, I first briefly examine the themes of first world political ecology and argue that first world political ecology of food systems is underdeveloped relative to other themes because of the existence of agrarian political economy, a strongly allied field. This requires interrogating and teasing apart the relationship between political ecology and agrarian political economy. I then turn to review the current "political ecology of first world food systems" literature, which is both in line with established political ecological contoursexamining global-local connections, conservation and degradation, and the utility of ecological metrics-but also recently extending analysis to alternative food networks (AFNs) and to the bodyconsumption nexus. In the conclusion I outline an agenda for political ecological research praxis focused on: increased interdisciplinary work with biophysical and technical scientists; the spatial, social, economic margins; the "invisible middle" of the food industry and the "end" of the food system in human waste and the necessity of mending the metabolic rift; and the need for increased societal engagement by political ecologists.

This study evaluated the relationship between gross farm income and producers' willingness to participate in a food hub. The preliminary findings of the study suggested that farm size based on gross farm income did not significantly affect farmers' willingness and ability to be part of a local food hub. Irrespective of the farm income, connecting to local buyers was the main function of the hub desired by the producers. More than 60% of the producers expected to achieve broader market reach through the food hub.

Food plays a vital role in the lives of human beings. It is not only a physical necessity but also a medium that they retain their social status and cultural identities. Likewise, the plate created by a chef is a form of expression. This expression conceals the chef's distinctive creative language inside. Culinary creativity includes witnessing the imagination of the chef and being able to make different meanings from the same plate. This study attempted to understand the processes of emergence and interpretation of expressions that reveal food in the experiments of chefs who are located in the food movement called Clean Plate. The semi-structured interviews and observations about the relevant restaurant, the words, the Clean Plate manifesto, the relationship between the principles and the creativity of the chefs was analyzed. It is found that good ingredient and waste management principles become both motivators and barrier to trigger creativity. On the other hand, the principle of protecting core values and being innovative come forward as a strong motivator that led chefs to develop new recipes to refine Turkish cuisine. Observations about restaurant designs are also evaluated within the consistency of the data that are collected from interviews.

Amidst the backdrop of attention to populism in general, it is instructive to understand populism through social movements focused on food and agriculture. Agrarian populism is particularly salient in agrifood movements. Agroecology has been widely identified as a domain of populist claims on environmental and social governance surrounding agricultural-ecological and political-economic systems. As authoritarian populist leaders gain power throughout the world at a time of expanding economic globalization and contingent socio-ecological crises, contests over populism in agrifood regimes can highlight current dynamics relevant for formative evaluation of alternative political agroecology strategies, and of populist environmental governance more broadly. Can populism be harnessed by radical political agroecologies to simultaneously contest the hydra-headed nature of capitalism, authoritarianism, and pollution, and implement forms of environmental governance based on repair? We argue that populist agroecology has untapped potential for repair, and that the mechanism of focusing social movements on repair may help address some of the more problematic authoritarian tendencies of populism.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a Florida-based human rights organisation, has significantly improved working conditions for migrant farmworkers on large-scale produce farms in the United States, in part, through its adaptation of applied theatre strategies used in its worker-to-worker popular education programme. The farmworker-devised performances themselves are not the drivers of social change. Yet, these seemingly agitprop skits (teatro) initiate a process of 'collective learning', politicisation, and activism that results in a Worker-driven Social Responsibility model that mobilises direct action and affects social change.

Growing demand for local and organic food sourcing in the EU and the US has inspired inquiry into mid-level food supply chains that can distribute differentiated foods at a regional level in the relational and market space between large-scale commodity markets and direct markets. Values-based food chains (VBFCs) have been identified as a particular type of mid-tier supply chain formed through creating alliances between producers and their supply chain partners to distribute significant volumes of high-quality, differentiated food products while maintaining transparent relationships and fair distribution of revenues. The values associated with VBFCs may be social, cultural, economic, environmental or quality related; they may be linked to the products, the production process, and/ or the characteristics of the relationships among the supply chain participants. This introduction to the Special Issue contextualizes empirical studies from the EU and North America and compares the VBFC framework with other approaches to understanding food system change.

Is radical democracy only for humans? From Pateman's (1970) workplace participation to Habermas' communicative rationality (1984) and Laclau and Mouffe's counter-hegemony (1985), radical democratic thinking has conventionally taken the human as the sole subject of politics. Whether through the formation of coalitions, citizens' assemblies, or social movement protest, it is the human who acts upon the world, and it is 'the human condition' (Arendt, 1958) that provides the possibility for democratic politics. More recently, however, democratic theorists have extended their attention beyond the human (Connolly, 2013). Questions are emerging regarding the political significance and potential agency of animals (Donaldson et al., 2021), natural events (Romero & Dryzek, 2021), rivers

The concept of agroecology in the United States is born out of a dialectical process of co-production of knowledge whereby the science of agroecology has shaped and been shaped by alternative agri-food movements, policy, and local practice. This article examines the relationship between agroecology and alternative agri-food movements and identifies opportunities for greater engagement. The article concludes with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities to scaling up agroecology and sustainable agri-food systems.

In the years following World War II social activists learned to refine rhetorical techniques for gaining the attention of the new global mass media and developed anti-corporate campaigns to convince some of the world’s largest companies to concede to their demands. Despite these developments, rhetorical critics have tended to overlook anti-corporate campaigns as objects of study in their own right. One can account for the remarkable success of anti-corporate campaigns by understanding how activists have practiced prospective narrative disclosure, a calculated rhetorical wager that, through the public circulation of stories and texts disclosing problematic practices and answerable decision makers, activists can influence the policies and practices of prominent corporations. In support of this thesis, I provide case studies of two anti-corporate campaigns: the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union vs. J. P. Stevens (1976 – 1980) and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers vs. Taco...

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has successfully combated modern-day slavery by transforming the ways that over a dozen major brands, including Taco Bell, Subway, and Wal-Mart, manage their supply chains. The CIW’s efforts over more than 20 years have effectively stopped enslavement practices, including abuses such as wage theft and peonage indebtedness. We conducted a field ethnography, interviews, and archival analyses to understand this success. We find that the CIW employs a decentered, egalitarian, and ensemble approach to their multiplicities of alliances by collectively “animating” themselves and their partners through ensemble leadership. This combination of alliances, along with worker-driven monitoring, brings life to the CIW motto “We are all leaders.” Translating this motto into daily practice is how the CIW virtually eradicates enslavement practices in corporate supply chains.

Agri-food globalization is having a serious adverse impact on small- and medium-sized family farms in the province of Málaga (southern Spain), 43% of which have disappeared over the last 10 years. Short food supply chains (SFSCs) are emerging as a potential option for this type of farm, but as a strategy it is apparently not being implemented strongly enough over the region as a whole. The current case study sought to explore the initiatives carried out by local producers to date in implementing SFSCs throughout the province and to examine, from the standpoint of the production sector, the constraints hindering its development and the strategies currently being adopted with a view to addressing them. The analyses carried out under local producers perspective shows us that although SFSCs are interesting for family farms, in terms of prices, economic profit and social recognition, the abilities and capacities these channels require to producers, jointly with technical, flexibility and...

The current global agrifood system is increasingly fragile and despite a plethora of scientific
research, progress in national and global policies setting commendable goals towards more
sustainable agriculture is still sluggish. This paper argues that if the efforts continue to concentrate on
farmers and rest solely on “fixing” modes of production at the farm level, the chances of arriving at
significant changes are meagre. By conjugating Lefebvre’s triad of spaces and geographic explorations
on politics of scale with data harvested over three years of qualitative research in farms, this paper
explores Israeli farmers’ conduct in the field as they face many challenges at various scales. The paper
presents their vulnerability against forces on a multiscalar level which present numerous obstacles
in operating their farms. Addressing these challenges to allow them to integrate more sustainable
modes of operation would require upscaling the debate and the taking of responsibility from all
stakeholders concerned, from the farm level to global players.

The list of the UNESCO World Heritage sites includes several metropolitan rural landscapes. These landscapes – such as the vegetable gardens of Valencia (Spain) or the vineyards of Xuanhua (China) – are recognized as World Heritage being Cultural Landscapes, symbol and evidence of the peculiar co-evolution between city and countryside. Rome always had a strong relationship with agriculture: since the beginning, cultivated landscapes gradually replaced the surrounding pre-existing woods. The hortus and the villa in the ancient Roman era, the medieval terrae sementariciae, the vineyards and the Renaissance villas, the eighteenth-century large estates and the drained agricultural lands in the early twentieth century are the main forms of colonization of the territory by the city: they anticipated the contemporary urban expansion by structuring permanently the territorial development of the region. In Rome, the outcome of the city-countryside co-evolution is threefold. Firstly, the strong urban dispersion often exploits the patterns of agricultural landscapes and absorbs – by isolating them – numerous historical and archaeological remains (in 2018 21.9% of the land was irreversibly consumed); secondly, the metropolitan area is still characterized by an extraordinary historical, landscape and ecological-environmental value (with 144,550 ha of protected natural areas, equal to 21% of the national figure, 34 wetlands, 51,000 ha of archaeological sites and parks, etc.); finally, the local community is increasingly sensitive to the issues of rural-environmental sustainability, and is more and more engaged in promoting a more active, healthy and inclusive rural-urban lifestyle (in 2019 the European Sidig-Med program conferred the title of European capital of urban gardens to Rome). In relation to the aforementioned background, the conservation of large traditional agricultural landscapes is a pivotal condition for protecting the whole urban environment (in Rome 60% of the area of parks and reserves is occupied by agricultural uses, whose surface increased by +12% in the last decade); the most recent experiments of participatory multifunctional agriculture projects have been able of renewing the meaning of preserving the urban agricultural heritage. These are “edible urban landscapes” which, although widespread throughout Europe, are capable of reinterpreting and enhancing the local specificity and differences of metropolitan cities, initiating processes of formal and socioeconomic – and not just ecological-environmental – regeneration of the vast contemporary urban sprawls.

The world is going through the second wave of urbanization. Although cities still occupy a relatively small area, they are the main consumers of natural resources, energy and water. And in general, they depend for their food, on resources from outside. The economic and bioecological crisis such as the economic one, the social one, pandemics, war or clime change, have faced cities with unexpected problems but also with new perspectives. Likewise, the advance of industrial agriculture nearby urban areas generates other types of impacts. The intensive use of agrochemicals and synthetic fertilizers, especially in developing countries but also in developed countries, impacts the socio-environmental health of urbanites. Making visible the invisible and the immeasurable—through tools such as ecological economics–puts under a comprehensive umbrella, a set of ecological, social and economic aspects that urban societies had not perceived until now such as greening of cities, the recovery of e...

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&#3...

'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

What difference does race make in the fields where food is grown, the places it is sold and the manner in which it is eaten? How do we understand farming, eating, and hunger better by paying attention to race? This collection argues there is an unacknowledged racial dimension to the production and consumption of food under globalization. As a contribution to the study of both food and race, it certainly achieves its goal of broadening both fields, bringing an antiracist perspective to food scholarship, and deepening our understanding of how race is constituted in ways which are not always obvious, writes Eona Bell.

Amidst the backdrop of attention to populism in general, it is instructive to understand populism through social movements focused on food and agriculture. Agrarian populism is particularly salient in agrifood movements. Agroecology has been widely identified as a domain of populist claims on environmental and social governance surrounding agricultural-ecological and political-economic systems. As authoritarian populist leaders gain power throughout the world at a time of expanding economic globalization and contingent socio-ecological crises, contests over populism in agrifood regimes can highlight current dynamics relevant for formative evaluation of alternative political agroecology strategies, and of populist environmental governance more broadly. Can populism be harnessed by radical political agroecologies to simultaneously contest the hydra-headed nature of capitalism, authoritarianism, and pollution, and implement forms of environmental governance based on repair? We argue that populist agroecology has untapped potential for repair, and that the mechanism of focusing social movements on repair may help address some of the more problematic authoritarian tendencies of populism.

Is radical democracy only for humans? From Pateman's (1970) workplace participation to Habermas' communicative rationality (1984) and Laclau and Mouffe's counter-hegemony (1985), radical democratic thinking has conventionally taken the human as the sole subject of politics. Whether through the formation of coalitions, citizens' assemblies, or social movement protest, it is the human who acts upon the world, and it is 'the human condition' (Arendt, 1958) that provides the possibility for democratic politics. More recently, however, democratic theorists have extended their attention beyond the human (Connolly, 2013). Questions are emerging regarding the political significance and potential agency of animals (Donaldson et al., 2021), natural events (Romero & Dryzek, 2021), rivers

We are amidst a long-overdue increase of interest in issues related food, cities and inequality within geography. While there has certainly been significant scholarship done on the issue, this area seems to be on the verge of defining many other sub-disciplinary trajectories as opposed to the opposite which has historically been the case. In this short review essay, we hope to signal the utility of the concepts of community food security, food sovereignty and urban agriculture for conceptually linking food, justice, and cities. The Production of Inequality in the Industrial Food System Broadly, food systems can be defined as ''[t]he set of activities and relationships that interact to determine what, how much, by what method and for whom food is produced and distributed'' (Whatmore 1995:35; also see Nestle and McIntosh 2010). The industrial food system that supplies the vast majority of food eaten in North America has come under multi-faceted critique. State subsidies stimulate the overproduction of key agricultural commodities like corn, making them cheaper and more widely available, but glutting the market and pushing prices downward in a global market (Goodman and Watts 1997; Guthman and DuPuis 2006; McMichael 2008, 2009). Driving this overproduction are neoliberal trade regimes and the corporate monopolization of agriculture, which have contributed to the decline GEC3 486

European and global policies are increasingly moving towards new frontiers of sustainability, innovation and social inclusion. Many of the 2030 SDGs promoted by the UN, to which should refer all planning for the future development of cities, focus on urban food systems and waste food loss. Recently, alongside the forms of reaction activated by organized civil society, experiments related to the so-called urban food policies, linked with holistic urban approaches, in which cities are configured as new actors in the food systems, are spreading internationally. The big news compared to this type of approach, of a punctual and sectorial type, is represented by the promotion by cities of real integrated and multi-sectorial food strategies (Urban Food Strategies, UFS), characterized by a holistic approach to supply chains of development through eco-efficient cycles linked with multidimensional agro-food systems and the multidimensionality of food. The article focuses on understanding how ...

In urban South Africa, food initiatives seem to promise diverse benefits including food security, income opportunities, and community solidarity. Many of these groups view the dominant industrialised agri-food system critically. Still, they often operate in niches and struggle to create truly revolutionary alternatives. This chapter was inspired by a community-led urban agriculture initiative in Cape Town. Most of the members are not fully integrated into the labour market and benefit from the solidarity in their community. They share knowledge, seeds, and the literal fruits of their labour. The case illuminates the interplay between hope, as a way of proposing alternatives, and the constant companion of trouble enshrined in the country’s agri-food system and highly unequal society. This contribution engages with the following guiding question: How can alternative food providers truly create hope through resisting the system in place and confront related troubles? It applies a critical reparative approach that is inspired by Eric Olin Wright’s varieties of anti-capitalism. The aim is to analyse diverse strategies for challenging the dominant food system and related inequalities. Whereas different interventions imply various weaknesses, Wright’s considerations help to sketch out new perspectives and to broaden the horizon beyond isolated manoeuvres.

In the August 2013 edition of ACME , Andy Walter offers a geographic analysis of scholarly work on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), describing the movement as a ‘cartographic project’ aimed at ‘up-scaling’ local disputes to national and global attention (Walter 2013). Spatial changes in the CIW’s politics, Walter argues, can be interpreted as “a commitment to a relational sense of space that involved, but went beyond, the jump in scale observed in the academic literature on the CIW” (2013, 399). Contemporary popular accounts of migrant activism also showcase the CIW’s rise to prominence as a ‘bottom-up’ representation of the confluence of economic, cultural, and global concerns that Walter highlights. Yet in both scholarly and popular conceptions, little attention has been given to why the CIW’s example is equally compelling to academics, activists, and political commentators alike. In our paper, we position ourselves as a critical supplement to Walter’s analysis by asking ...

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has successfully combated modern-day slavery by transforming the ways that over a dozen major brands, including Taco Bell, Subway, and Wal-Mart, manage their supply chains. The CIW’s efforts over more than 20 years have effectively stopped enslavement practices, including abuses such as wage theft and peonage indebtedness. We conducted a field ethnography, interviews, and archival analyses to understand this success. We find that the CIW employs a decentered, egalitarian, and ensemble approach to their multiplicities of alliances by collectively “animating” themselves and their partners through ensemble leadership. This combination of alliances, along with worker-driven monitoring, brings life to the CIW motto “We are all leaders.” Translating this motto into daily practice is how the CIW virtually eradicates enslavement practices in corporate supply chains.

Is radical democracy only for humans? Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition.’