Critical Food Geographies

Famine’s sensational headline potential can get in the way of thinking about the more general issues of malnutrition and food insecurity. Recent research on famine sees it as the extension of structural, long-term vulnerabilities in society rather than as the result of unpredictable ‘acts of God’.

This paper sets out to understand the Monga vulnerability in Rangpur region of northwest Bangladesh from the perspective
of affected households. The local term ‘Monga’ means a famine-like situation and it has caught public interest recently.
Based on empirical evidence from five villages in the Rangpur region using different qualitative methods, the findings
highlight that the Monga predisposes the households to multi-sphere experiences of hunger and poverty. It is not just one
consequence of income poverty; rather, the social and livelihood mechanisms of poor households are dysfunctional,
multiply rooted in their entitlements, capabilities, their ways of living, and the negotiations they have with the complex
network of institutions that affect households both singly and synergistically.

Who can deny the significance of food? It has a central role in our health and pleasure as well as in our economy, politics and culture. Food in Society provides a social science perspective on food systems and demonstrates the rich variety of disciplinary and theoretical contexts of food studies. While hunger and malnutrition remain a reality in many countries, for some food has become an experience rather than a sustenance. This book addresses the different worldwide understandings of food through thematic chapters and a wide range of material including: description of the political economy of the food chain, from production to the point of sale; analysis of global issues of supply and demand; critical debate of environmental and health aspects of food, including GM food, the role of habits, taboos, age and gender in food consumption. Each chapter contains a guide to further reading and to websites of relevance to food. Extensively illustrated, this book is essential reading for students of food studies in the social sciences and humanities.

original title: "Ernährungssicherung durch Urban Gardening? – Erfahrungen aus Toronto"
Angesichts des Aufschwungs urbaner Gartenformen in der Bundesrepublik, die sich explizit dem Nahrungsmittelanbau widmen, stellt sich die Frage nach ihrem Beitrag zur städtischen Ernährungssicherung. Dazu werden in vorliegendem Aufsatz Erfahrungen aus Toronto vorgestellt und der Zusammenhang von Gemeinschaftsgärten, Ernährungssicherung und Ernährungsgerechtigkeit diskutiert.

On 4 June 2017, Qatar was suddenly put under an embargo by its regional neighbors-an effort spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who cut off most of its existing land, sea, and air traffic routes. With no domestic agriculture to speak of, Qatar's external logistics networks are essential for maintaining its food supply. The country's 2.6 million residents, many of whom flooded the grocery stores, were understandably concerned about their ability to secure food when news about the embargo broke. Eventually, new food supply chains were established, primarily with the assistance of partners in Iran and Turkey. The ongoing rift between Qatar and its neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula, manifested only in part by this effort to undermine the country's material supply networks raises a number of questions about an old idea: that of food as a 'weapon'. This article puts this concept in historical and regional perspective in the Arabian Peninsula through the lens of critical geopolitics, tracing the securitizing discourses about food security and their intertwining with narratives about territorial sovereignty, nationalism, and essentialist understandings of geography to explain the causes and effects of the food embargo in the ongoing Qatar-Gulf rift.

As I write, Black Lives Matter protests continue throughout the United States and around the world. All Black Lives Matter and Black Trans Lives Matter protests are drawing thousands amid news of more violence against Black trans people. At least two incidents that incited protest – the murder of George Floyd and the assault on Iyanna Dior – have involved corner stores, and corner stores figure prominently in geographies of surveillance in the United States.[1] My reflection comes from this moment and from grappling, again, with how to write about Black death (Jones 2019a). Katherine McKittrick (2014: 20) writes that the “task is … to write blackness by ethically honoring but not repeating anti-black violences”, and that one way to do this is “through reading the mathematics of these violences as possibilities that are iterations of black life that cannot be contained by black death”. Below, I practice writing blackness ethically partly by embedding {Pauses}, invitations to stop, reflect, and give reverence.

A farmer on a small scale organic farm in rural India uploads images of his latest produce to consumers and retailers via an open source online food hub; a " conscious consumer " in Charlottesville, Virginia uses an app while supermarket shopping to look up the ethical credentials of food producers and product ingredients; a business woman on a work trip to Rio de Janiero is " informed " by a travel and food app on her smartphone where and what she might like to eat for breakfast based on GPS technology and her previous preferences. These three diverse examples speak to the changing nature of our engagements with food today in an increasingly digital world. From home cookery to restaurant going, from farming to food politics, the world of food is being quietly colonised by an array of electronic devices, online content and information and communication technologies. Meanwhile the realm of the digital has been invaded by all things food related, from endless food snapshots on Facebook and Instagram to the rise of YouTube cooking and food channels, the fastest-growing genre on the video-sharing service. This digital " turn " in the lives of many people on the planet has unsurprisingly inspired a huge amount of commentary and reflection, some of it celebrating the capacity of technology to connect and empower us, while other accounts offer a more dystopian vision of data control and surveillance, that is, a kind of " drone culture. " Numerous studies have sought to engage with the emergent role of the digital in shaping our everyday domestic lives, interpersonal relations and consumer practices.

‘More then Just Food’ is an important book for those interested in community organisation, community food networks, food justice and community-based collaborative research methodologies. A key strength is Broad’s story-telling approach, which is derived from his immersive research experiences. This enriches both the book’s readability and the depth of knowledge offered. Important themes are returned to over the chapters as our understandings of CSU and related organisations are layered up within different contexts. Some readers may find this approach results in some chapters not being clearly defined from others. However, the book not only contains a wealth of information about community food movements in South Los Angeles, it also tells the story of contemporary food economic and policy atmospheres generating the need for community based work. Whilst this gives much useful detail, a greater focus on decision making processes and examples where internal conflict is dealt with within CSU, would have been valuable for others working in this field.

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Introduction to Urban Agriculture in the Neoliberal City: Critical European Perspectives Ségolène Darly, Nathan Mcclintock

Cookbooks are not just about cooking. As scholars from various disciplines have long argued, cookbooks are emotive texts that play an active role in shaping norms about belonging, gender, class, race, and sexuality. This article suggests that although cookbooks are widely analyzed as vibrant sites of social, cultural, and geopolitical production, they are overlooked as a valuable method for doing engaged research. Grounded in practice, this article explores how cookbooks might be mobilized as an arts-based, collaborative academic research tool. By way of demonstration, this article shares how we (a collective of activists, academics, artists, and temporary foreign workers) used a cookbook to gather testimony, build solidarity, and politicize Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. By sharing our cookbook we hope to contribute to a growing area of research that stretches beyond traditional modes of dissemination and takes creative, lively form in ways that affirm the political lives of migrant communities.

Mass incarceration entrenches racial and class inequality and segregation. Before, during, and after low-income people of color enter prison, they experience a range of barriers and biases that make it difficult to break out of the prison pipeline. This article investigates food justice and restorative justice activists in Oakland, California who are intervening at the point of reentry. I argue for the significance of teasing out the connections between food and carceral politics as a way to expand the practice and understanding of food justice. Specifically, I show how the incarcerated geographies of former prisoners, that is, perspectives and experiences that result due to the prison pipeline, motivate the formation of a restorative food justice. The associated healing and mutual aid practices increase social equity by creating spaces to overcome the historical trauma of mass incarceration, produce living wage jobs, rearticulate relationships to food and land, and achieve policy reforms.

North American food scholars, activists and policymakers often consider how to make a community food project more inclusive to ‘vulnerable populations’ to increase participation in local food efforts. Drawing from qualitative research conducted with two community food organizations in Seattle, Washington, I argue that inclusive efforts are not addressing the power asymmetries present in organizations and within communities. Engaging with black geographies literature, I reveal how a black food justice organization grapples with violent histories of slavery and dispossession rooted in a black farming imaginary, and works to re-envision this imaginary to one of power and transformation. The spatial imaginaries and spaces of each food organization acknowledge racial histories differentially, informing their activism. Black geographies possess knowledge and spatial politics that can revitalize community food movements, and I consider how white food activists might reframe their work so that their efforts are not fueling the displacement of residents of color.

Young people who navigate intersecting racial, ethnic, economic, and/or geographic oppressions are often the objects of food pedagogy. Citing childhood obesity and anthropogenic environmental change, food pedagogies in the United States especially target Black/African-American youth, among other youth of color. Meanwhile, teaching and learning about food is on the rise in myriad settings, often in ways that reproduce binaries between “healthy” and “unhealthy” and “good” and “bad” foods. Grounded in hegemonic nutrition and bolstered by healthism, predominant food pedagogies perpetuate racialized assumptions about food and health. In the context of the Anthropocene as discourse and epoch, food pedagogy is likely to intensify, while climate change holds concerning implications for Black Americans. Critical and embodied approaches to food pedagogy are necessary, I argue, to address power relations and to cultivate community-led resilience. Building on Black geographies, critical food studies, and food pedagogies, I explore the possibilities of a critical and embodied pedagogy with Black American youth. I reflect on a “Favorite Meals” workshop carried out as part of an urban farm youth program in Austin, Texas, USA. Both the practice of the workshop and youth responses counter food binaries while highlighting pleasure, play, and knowledge—all of which remain underconsidered in food-related studies and pedagogy with young people. Given concerns about childhood obesity and the global scope of the Anthropocene, this article is relevant to food pedagogy with historically marginalized youth across national contexts.

A history of the twentieth century is a history of hunger. Although modernity brought with it improved technical and logistical means of eliminating famine, nevertheless the century saw the greatest number of famine deaths in history. Famine-related mortality—not all from starvation—has been variously estimated, but a total of seventy-five million seems very likely. There has been some improvement. As Devereux points out, famines have now been absent from Europe for sixty years, from East Asia for fifty years (discounting the unique circumstances of North Korea), and from South East Asia in the thirty years since the horrors of Pol Pot’s
regime in Cambodia.3It is Africa where the problem has continued to be most troublesome in a post-colonial era of conflict and poor governance. Yet at the time of writing, among the fabulous wealth that has been created worldwide, there are still 857 million people chronically hungry—about one in seven, and rising.

The alternative food movement encounters many structural conditions as it strives toward more environmentally sustainable and socially just agrifood systems. One of the greatest challenges the movement faces is not turning its back on migrant farmworkers at the same time it creates and experiments with alternative agricultural models. This article explains why there is a gap between an expressed concern with the inequalities faced by migrant farmworkers and the actual advocacy practices necessary to overcome them. To help tease apart the drivers maintaining this gap, I call attention to the social and symbolic boundaries reproduced by a group of people farming organically in San Diego along the United States/Mexico border. I find that in the course of farming in the context of border politics, food activists internalize a number of structural and ideological conditions producing a racialized agricultural political economy, neoliberalism, and the security state. These include the hegemony of certain stereotypes of migrant farmworkers and inherent notions of difference, the hegemony of militarized borders and monitored immigrant bodies, and race and class privilege that manifests through idealizing nature and farming. At the same time, I find that these boundary maintenance practices are open to change, and call attention to the ambiguity expressed by well-meaning organic farming activists as well as more resistant socioecological imaginaries.

The food justice movement is a budding social movement premised on ideologies that critique the structural oppression responsible for many injustices throughout the agrifood system. Tensions often arise however when a radical ideology in various versions from multiple previous movements is woven into mobilization efforts by organizations seeking to build the activist base needed to transform the agrifood system.

The study of foodscapes has spread throughout geography at the same time as food scholarship has spearheaded post-disciplinary research. This report argues that geographers have taken to post-disciplinarity to explore the ways that food is ‘more-than-food’ through analyses of the visceral nature of eating and politics and the vital (re)materialisations of food’s cultural geographies. Visceral food geographies illuminate what I call the ‘contingent relationalities’ of food in the critical evaluation of the indeterminate, situated politics of ‘feeling food’ and those of the embodied collectivities of obesity. Questions remain, however, about how a visceral framework might be deployed for broader critiques within foodscapes and the study of human geography. The study of food’s vital materialisms opens up investigation into the practices of the ‘makings’ of meat, food waste and eating networks. Analysis of affect, embodiment and cultural practices are central to these theorisations and suggest consideration of the multiple materialisms of food, space and eating. There is, I contend, in the more radical, ‘post-relational’ approaches to food, the need for a note of caution: Exuberant claims for the ontological, vital agency of food should be tempered by, or at least run parallel to, critical questions of the real politik of political and practical agency in light of recent struggles over austerity, food poverty and food justice.

This paper argues that the time has come for a new approach
to food exchange. Using the literatures of geography and sociology,
it points out that the social constructionism that is being
used increasingly in food studies is inadequate. Its privileging
of human agency has led to an underestimation of the important
of the materiality of foodstuffs. Three dimensions are
proposed for a dematerialisation of research on food exchange
histories.

There has never been a greater level of interest in the geography of food than at present. Although food represents a declining part of the monetary value of our household budgets in the Netherlands and other western countries, we are nevertheless giving it greater attention for reasons of health, cultural signifi cance and pure enjoyment. There is endless scope here for the geographer and
I will take the opportunity of this short article to touch on four of the areas that I am presently researching. I will then develop one of them.

In India, the status of bovines is determined by the material relationships in which humans engage with them, and by the political agenda to control their slaughter. Cattle and buffalo keeping practices are specialized towards milk production. At the same time, Hindu nationalist movements try to ban the killing of cows. For long, cattle (Bos taurus ssp. and Bos indicus ssp.) has been esteemed and often sacralised in India while buffalo (Bubalus bubalis sp.) has been seen as an unauspicious animal fit for sacrifce. Nevertheless, these two species have provided milk and working force to the agrarian economy, and well as a cheap meat to the marginalised groups in charge of flaying or slaughtering these animals. Thus, beef consumption (whatever its origin) is a marker of an inferior social and moral status. Over the last few decades, the ban on cattle slaughter has gone stricter, epitomizing a nationalist will to define India as a purely Hindu country. In this context, the milk sector has opted for buffalo keeping: these animals can be killed more easily and their carcasses are favored in the global meat market. Thus, India has recently become the first exporter of bovine meat worldwide. In this article, I argue that the multiple and highly contentious statuses of bovines in India are not entirely underpinned by cultural factors. Notably, the political and economic spheres, as well as the affective entanglements with cattle, participate in the negotiation and conflicts over the different signifcations endowed to the animals and to their meats.

‘Food is fundamental to life’ (Sbicca 2012: 456) and this shared need establishes food as a site of potential for connective and convivial practices and relations.  Yet, when we realise that more than one billion people are undernourished worldwide (Food Ethics Council 2010), despite the fact that the world produces enough food to feed billions more than the current global population of 7 billion (Holt-Gimenez, Shattuck et al. 2012), the social, political, economic and environmental challenges posed by contemporary food systems start to become apparent.  Given current global production levels – whether we agree with the social and environmental implications of these or not – it is clear that malnutrition rates worldwide are not simply an indicator of agricultural praxis but demonstrate the continued, broader social and structural issues of access, equity and justice.  Recognising that many feel increasingly disenfranchised from formal political representation, marginalised by a hegemonic neoliberal capitalism or disconnected from ‘healthy’ social or environmental relations, food offers an opportunity to re-engage individuals and society with critical questions and practices of justice because, as Allen (2008: 159) notes, ‘no other public issue is as accessible to people in their daily lives as that of food justice.  Everyone – regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or social class – eats.  We are all involved and we are all implicated’.  The multiplicity of ways in which we can engage with food – including growing, buying, eating, cooking, writing, processing, marketing, selling and watching – enacts its radical potential as a set of dynamic socio-material relations (Alkon 2013, Alkon, Block et al. 2013) that can both conform to and subvert existing practices and understandings, enabling food to ‘speak’ to many different people in a range of different contexts.  Although this multiplicity has its dangers (Heynen, Kurtz et al. 2012), it also means that food matters and matters in complex and diverse ways: ‘It rallies people and it often induces unexpected changes in society’ (Van der Ploeg 2013: 999).

There is a growing commitment by different parts of the alternative food movement (AFM) to improve labor conditions for conventional food chain workers, and to develop economically fair alternatives, albeit under a range of conditions that structure mobilization. This has direct implications for the process of intra-movement building and therefore the degree to which the movement ameliorates economic inequality at the point of food labor. This article asks what accounts for the variation in AFM labor commitments across different contexts. It then appraises a range of activist perspectives, practices, and organizational approaches. The answer emerges through a comparative analysis of three California social movement organizations enmeshed in the particularities of local contentious food politics. The cases include a labor union representing grocery store and meatpacking/food processing workers, a food justice organization working to create green jobs and independent funding models, and an organic urban farming and educational organization. Commitment to fair labor standards varies due to differences in organizational capacity, the degree of dedication to ending economic inequality in local activist culture, and the openness of local political and economic institutions to working class struggles. The article concludes with a discussion of how these findings inform our understanding of the process of cooperation and division in the AFM, particularly regarding the complexities and contradictions of using food labor to combat economic inequality. Movement building in the midst of varying institutional, organizational, and cultural contexts reinforces the value of a reflexive approach to this imperfect politics of process.

We should be grateful to Bowler and Ilbery (1987) for their timely reassessment of agricultural geography, which has recently seemed becalmed in a Sargasso Sea of production functions and tedious typologies. They rightly profess a progressive and more coherent view of the sub-discipline which emphasises the links between agriculture and the wider society and economy. Just how radical is their redefinition, however? Their revised agenda can be seen as state-of-the-artism rather than a true demolition and reconstruction job.

This paper examines the promising practices in promoting health and well-being that emerged from an innovative project, entitled 'Feasting for Change.' Taking place on Coast Salish territories, British Columbia, Canada, Feasting for Change aimed to empower Indigenous communities in revitalizing traditional knowledge about the healing power of foods. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature that illuminates how solidarities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities might be fostered to support meaningful decolonization of mainstream health practices and discourses. In particular, it provides a hopeful model for how community-based projects can take inspiration and continual leadership from Indigenous Peoples. This paper offers experiential and holistic methods that enhance the capacity for intergenerational, land-based, and hands-on learning about the value of traditional food and cultural practices. It also demonstrates how resources (digital stories, plant knowledge cards, celebration cookbooks, and language videos) can be successfully developed with and used by community to ensure the ongoing process of healthful revitalization.

This article interrogates how social media can provide a platform for contesting dominant discourses. It does so through the lens of competitive eating, demonstrating that amateur competitive eaters use social media sites to challenge and subvert mass media representations of their sport while concomitantly upholding normative notions of healthy eating and bodies. Competitors consider themselves to be skilful athletes that discipline and train their bodies to eat. They regard their eating practices, which are often depicted in the mass media as uncontrolled and gluttonous, as controlled ingestion, and present an alternative perspective of their ‘sport’ – a perspective that stresses health, physical expertise and a fit, trained body over voracity and insatiability. Social media acts as a ‘precipitating agency’ for the creation of these alternative definitions of disciplined eating, as well as the construction of new digital eating identities. Instead of focusing on the food being ingested and the ‘Carnivalesque’ practice of competitive eating, we draw attention to the performers’ voices and the ways they attend to the mechanics of gurgitation, including methods of chewing, swallowing and stomach stretching, and their ability to manage, regulate and operate ingestivity. As hegemonic discourses align the notion of ‘good eating’ to discipline, order and restraint, competitive eating is thus revealed to be a practice that mirrors and appropriates, yet also ultimately reproduces, conventional narratives. Social media is, in turn, shown to be a political tool for counter-discursive practices that are produced in dialogue with, and concomitantly uphold and contest, normative discourses of mass media.

Within the context of the growing interest in alternative economic spaces, this introductory paper conceptualizes alternative food networks (AFN) as alternative economic networks that seek to transform production-consumption-relations in a more environmentally and/or socially responsible way. The development of the debate as well as controversial aspects of AFN will be presented. Finally, economic geography inspired research questions and perspectives for advancing geographical research on alternative food are derived.

This presentation is on behalf of a team of researchers working on a Newton British Academy-funded project with Newcastle University, Durham University, and the University of Cape Town on Food, Ethics, and Identity in the South African city.