Critical Food Studies

Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges associated with the overproduction and consumption of food from animals. Transforming food systems to mitigate climate change and hidden hunger, ensure food security and good health all point to reducing animal-based foods as a key lever. Moving beyond animal-based food systems is a societal grand challenge requiring coordinated international research by the social sciences and humanities. A 'selective openness' to this range of disciplines has been observed within multi-discipline research programmes designed to address societal grand challenges including those concerned with the sustainability of food systems, inhibiting the impact of social sciences and humanities. Further, existing research on animal-based foods within these disciplines is largely dispersed and focused on particular parts of food systems. Inspired by the 'Sutherland Method' this paper discusses the resu...

This paper presents an ethnographic account of the culture of school meal time at Peartree Academy, with a specific focus on notions of social learning. This qualitative study is focused on a collection of interviews, observations, field notes and analyses what happens when the school organises its canteen as a restaurant. The focus moves away from the traditional realms of nutrition and explicitly introduces the notion of social learning in its informal sense through which a conceptual framework of a skills model is applied. The paper argues how the school dining hall known as the restaurant can foster opportunities for a form of social competence which is not necessarily seen but can be experienced in the social reproduction of its actors. The findings highlight tensions of control within the environment, which are said to impinge upon these social learning opportunities from occurring.

In the last decades, the relationship between food and nature has experienced two intertwined processes: the de-naturalization of agri-food industry, that apparently has ‘freed’ food from natural processes and the ri-naturalization, linked to the quality turn, that recently transformed agrifood systems and food consumption. This article focuses on the relationships between food and nature, basing on the analysis of the processes that are recently taking place in Valposchiavo (Switzerland), where local agri-food chains sustainability is the core of local development and territorial marketing strategies. The analysis uses the theoretical and methodological framework of food political ecology,
which helps to unveil and critically analyse the complexity and the political dimension of such processes.

This book examines the ways Cuban families struggle to access food and maintain a decent quality of life as the socialist welfare state continues to falter in post-Soviet Cuba. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Santiago de Cuba, book reveals how Cuban families struggle to acquire food and assemble “a decent meal,” a local social category where families determine whether food quality and cultural-appropriateness meet their standards. The research illuminates the social and emotional dimensions of the practices of food acquisition. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and subsequent the loss of its most significant trade partner, Cuba entered a period of economic hardship known as the “Special Period.” Although new trade agreements have significantly improved the quantity and quality of rationed food, supplies have not returned to Soviet-era levels. Several years after the worst scarcities of the Special Period, many people from Santiago reported that they continued to live with food shortages and economic hardship. This book reveals that one of the most common ways of dealing with food scarcity, was “luchando la vida” (struggling for life): the arduous task of finding ingredients seen as essential to what is considered a “decent” meal. To understand this situation, the book introduces “the politics of adequacy,” which details how people resist and make sense of scarcity or changing availability of basic life necessities, such as food. This work is based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork inside the homes of 22 families in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city. Spanning neighborhood, social class, household income level, and skin color, this book captures previously undocumented details of household dynamics, community interaction, and individual reflections on everyday life in Cuba today.

Book Keywords: Food, Cuba, Socialism, Inequality, Consumption, Adequacy, Caribbean, Distribution, Household, Everyday Life

The growing role of digital technology in everyday food practices offers promising yet questionable food futures. Human-food interaction technologies such as quantified diet trackers and smart kitchenware present opportunities for efficient data-driven food practices but also challenges to socioeconomic frameworks of food production and consumption. Addressing the ambiguities in contemporary food-technology innovation, we designed Food Tarot deck-a speculative design artifact provoking discussions about possible food-tech futures. The deck presents 22 speculative diet tribes such as Monsanta[n]ists, Petri Dishers, and Turing Foodies that reflect existing food-tech trends and controversies and extend them into an extreme form. At the workshop, we will use the deck as a design prop to support a critical food debate and scenarios imagining various versions of a future food-tech apocalypse.

This paper examines the complex relationship between hospitality and organisations. It is argued that a variety of organisational practices can be understood by considering how hospitality is mobilised and experienced by multiple stakeholders. The paper begins by synthesising existing conceptions of hospitality and outlining its different dimensions. It then goes on to examine how hospitality themes and related issues emerge in, and are thus relevant to, the study of organisations and management. The paper firstly considers how hospitality is extended to or oriented towards external stakeholders and thus mobilised as tactical or strategic enchantment. It is argued that hospitality can be used purposefully to establish power relations and invoke obligations both to conform to organisational norms and to reciprocate. Secondly, the paper considers how hospitality emerges within organisational practices and may be deployed by various stakeholders as an instrument of entrenchment to perpetuate existing norms and hierarchies. However, it is also suggested that practices of hospitality can create alternative organisational spaces and networks, and hospitable acts may thus help to reconfigure power relationships and become focal points of resistance. The paper concludes by reflecting upon emerging questions, challenges and potential avenues for further research and intervention.

Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice is a richly political text. As editors Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese highlight in their introduction, "Our food system and the inequities it produces...are the afterlife of slavery;" as such, "food and the fugitive practices Black people employ around food comprise a lens through which we can explore anti-Blackness and Black life" (4). From their standpoint as Black feminist ethnographers, Garth and Reese create a volume that animates food's role in Black communities. Each of the ten chapters highlights Black food's function across metro, small town, coastal, and diasporic communities, allowing them to produce and reclaim their places, histories, ecosystems, and, most critically, futures from historical silences and violence. Although emerging from different geographies and communities, each piece celebrates the ongoing work of reclamation across place and time. As Garth and Reese explain, the authors plant "seedlings of resistance and refusal" (3).

This Monograph collects a variety of articles that take food to analyze social change. By spotting food, they explore transformations at the level of structures and institutions, groups and social movements, and the role of agents, both from elite and the grassroots, explaining complex social dynamics.
Offering a mix of country-specific case studies and engaging with key concepts and discussions, this Monograph covers social change in nutritional transitions over large historical periods; in renewed processes of nation-building and through food cultures; in disputes over food risks and the legitimacy of knowledge in food politics; in the transformation of food and nutrition into medicines; in social movements and social innovations that expand concepts of justice to include food justice; in the raising consciousness of social, cultural, historical, and environmental impacts of everyday culinary practices, which might lead to emergent changes in values and cultures; and in the transformation of food practices as self-care and lifestyle. The collection is purposefully multi-disciplinary, bringing together scholars from sociology, anthropology and multi-disciplinary fields such as gender studies, STS, and collective health.
A collective endeavor towards a global sociology of food is still a major challenge, and this Monograph takes a few steps in this direction, by inviting contributions from, with, and about the Global South, exploring food worldwide and in diverse socio-political contexts.
---> Table of contents: https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showTocPdf?volume=69&issue=3&journalCode=sora

The International Health Division lost its central influence in the Rockefeller Foundation, and that this loss affected the way we understand nutrition and the outcome of the Green Revolution today.
The Green Revolution claimed to offer a solution to the “Problem of Nutrition, ”the name that the League of Nations gave to a number of problems around food, public health, and agriculture in the mid-1930s.The problem was partly forgotten during the war, but, as I contend in this first approach to the period, research on nutrition continued during the war. Moreover, the answer to that problem offered by international postwar agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) can be traced to the Rockefeller Foundation’s early work in one of its main “laboratories”: Mexico.

Food access has become a popular area of concern in both urban planning and public health as both fields are directing increasing attention to the role that uneven neighbourhood food environments play in diet practices and health outcomes. This research investigates two food access expansion projects underway in New York City by looking at how they are implemented in the neighbourhood of Brownsville in the borough of Brooklyn. One, the Brownsville Youthmarket, run by the city-wide nonprofit GrowNYC, is a farmers’ market intervention that increases access to fresh fruit and vegetables by hiring neighbourhood youth to sell regional produce. The second, Shop Healthy, is an initiative run by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (and its District Public Health Offices). It encourages bodega owners to stock healthier items in their stores, including fruits and vegetables. By drawing on concepts of environmental justice and biopower, this research shows how these programs are characterized by competing motivations and strategies. While the stated rationale for these food access programs is to improve food environments by bringing more healthy items into underserved neighbourhoods, they rely upon nutrition education and cooking skills programs that indicate that the underlying problem is a lack of knowledge about what food is healthy and how to prepare it. This gap between motivations and strategies reveals a great distance between city-level actors and the residents of the neighbourhoods that they aim to help. Program designers fail to understand the true barriers to healthy eating in predominantly poor and minority communities and thus intervene with programs that do little to meaningfully change the food environment in ways that address residents’ needs.

Students are at risk of food insecurity. We aimed to determine: the prevalence of food insecurity among students; the variables associated with student food insecurity; and appropriate solutions. Participants: We collected data from 339 students at a large state university in the western United States between December 2016 and February 2017. Methods: We used an anonymous online survey that incorporated the USDA US Six-Item Short Food Security Survey. Results: First, 54% of respondents had been food insecure within the last year. Second, students in receipt of financial aid were significantly more likely to be food insecure. Third, respondents proposed solutions to student food insecurity that included on-campus food assistance programs, education initiatives, and off-campus food assistance programs. Conclusions: Our paper contrib- utes to a growing body of knowledge about the extent and causes of, and solutions to, food inse- curity among college students.

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.

This article seeks to elevate contemporary Jain voices calling for the adoption of a vegan lifestyle as a sign of solidarity with the transnational vegan movement and its animal rights, environmental protection, and health aspirations. Just as important, however, this article also seeks to
present some of the unique features of contemporary Jain veganism, including, most specifically, Jain veganism as an ascetic practice aimed at the embodiment of non-violence (ahiṃsā), the eradication
(nirjarā) of karma, and the liberation (mokṣa) of the Self (jı̄va). These are distinctive features of Jain veganism often overlooked and yet worthy of our attention. We begin the article with a brief discussion of transnational veganism and Jain veganism’s place within this global movement. This is followed by an overview of Jain karma theory as it appears in the Tattvārtha Sūtra, an authoritative diasporic Jain text. Next, we present two case studies of contemporary Jain expressions of veganism: (1) The
UK-based organization known as “Jain Vegans” and (2) The US-based organization known as “Vegan Jains”. Both organizations have found new opportunities in transnational veganism to practice and embody the virtue of ahiṃsā as well as Jain karma theory. As we will show, though both organizations share the animal, human, and environmental protection aspirations found in transnational veganism, Jain Vegans and Vegan Jains simultaneously promote ahiṃsā to varying degrees in service of the Jain
path to liberation. We conclude the article with a brief reconsideration of Marcus Banks’s diasporic “three tendencies” model to demonstrate how contemporary manifestations of Jain veganism compel us to revisit our understanding of diasporic expressions of Jain religious belief and praxis.

Eating is one of the few universal qualities that impacts persons across differences of class, race, gender, ability, size, citizenship status and geographic location. In the contemporary moment of a so-called Obesity Epidemic, it is also a highly contested site of anxiety for many in North America, pressuring us into appropriate performances of eating (and, especially, not eating). But what are these performances of, and what are the historical forces that shape and inform this politically neutralized phenomenon? With an emphasis on Fat Studies, but reading across disciplines of History, Critical Race Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender Studies, students will critically interrogate eating as performance, and exit with a robust understanding of the histories we perform with every meal.

The expansion of the cultural field of gastronomy has fostered the inclusion of new attitudes and values worthy of exposure and social legitimation which, with the help of the media, prompted chefs’ capacities to strategically cross between cooking, science, health, environment, politics, and entertainment. Drawing on recent literature, press reviews, and empirical data, this chapter engages with a critical approach aimed at drawing the limits of “playing politics” from the kitchen: it shows the difficulty of transforming celebrity chefs’ discourses and ideas into reality, as the positive notions they convey are mainly grounded in entrepreneurial agendas which could hardly result in real social change.

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.

Carceral spaces—such as neighborhood zones of police surveillance and plantation prisons that exploit incarcerated labor—reflect and reproduce systems of oppression that are also present in the food system. The state regularly polices poverty instead of addressing how racial capitalism perpetuates the lack of access to basic needs like healthy food. Conversely, the food system relies on carceral practices to secure sdisciplined labor by weaponizing the possibility of deportation and wielding the threat of violence to maintain control over racialized undocumented workers. But there are also seeds of struggle for the abolition of penal logics and institutions by incarcerated people and their allies on the outside. These include efforts to transform eating and food work in prison, reimagine food justice as an anti-carceral social movement, and use resistance tactics like hunger strikes. In this special issue introduction, we address these connections and set the stage for all the articles by asking: What does carcerality offer to theorizing and understanding the food system, food cultures, and food relations? And, what does a critical look at food offer toward understanding—and eventually abolishing—carceral systems? We offer theoretical touch points that connect food justice work to long-standing prison abolition organizing while introducing the major themes and contributions of each article included in the issue. We end with a reflection on our aspirations for the future of food studies.

This volume of critical essays provides a long overdue survey of food culture and politics represented in global literary modernisms. The links among what we eat, the production and representation of food, and the resulting global impacts in culture and society are increasing contemporary issues largely dating back to the early twentieth century. Gastronomy signals many social, cultural, and ecological concerns that emerge in the modernist period because of an enlarging social food culture, with expanding food systems in factories and abattoirs to accommodate such growth. At the same time, food supplies were rationed due to wars and economic depression. The response of modernist writers, playwrights, and poets to modernity and urbanization occurs not only through formalistic literary techniques, but also in the overt themes and settings related to food culture. Modernists famously explored public and domestic spaces where food and drink are prepared and served, such as cafés, restaurants, nightclubs, pubs, brasseries, kitchens, or dining rooms. Gastro-Modernism ultimately shows how global literary modernisms engage with the food culture known as gastronomy to express anxieties about modernity as much as to celebrate the excesses modern lifestyles produce.

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.

This article focuses on the quotidian but profound remaking of the materiality of eating in the science and industry of animal feeding in the United States.  I sketch a big picture: the wholesale remaking of streams of matter and energy between microorganisms, plants, animals and humans in the twentieth century.  In the development the medicated feed industry, existing metabolic relationships within and between animals, plants and microbes cells were sundered, selectively augmented, and reconnected anew. My focus is not on any single case of industrialization within this picture - beef or milk or hormones or chickens, but the industrialization of metabolism itself.  The systematic remaking, rescaling and reordering of matter’s movement through bacteria, plants, and animals, is what makes the history of medicated feed significant.  It constitutes a wholesale rearrangement of relations constituting the metabolic web in which human eating is hung.

This article examines the narratives of lost and discovered foods prominent Peruvian chefs employ to frame their work as chefs and to promote Peruvian food more generally. It argues that many foods framed as recently lost/discovered were not lost but instead unknown, unvalued, or neglected by elite consumers. Tales of lost foods obscure the work of the many people who have produced and consumed these foods, while tales of discovery exalt white, male, elite chefs as protagonists with the vision and expertise to see value in “undervalued” ingredients and dishes. Linking contemporary Peruvian chef’s narratives about their work and Peru as a culinary frontier to heroic tales of Enlightenment thinkers and eighteenth-century travelers, the article shows how the same metaphors of vision, travel, and masculinity that wove their way through early heroic stories of discovery also define contemporary tales of Peruvian chefs seeking out
novel ingredients. It argues that even as Peru’s emerging class of celebrity chefs work to subvert colonial culinary hierarchies that hold up European cuisines as exemplars of gastronomic excellence, they ultimately reproduce colonial relationships of power through their narratives of discovery that frame chefs as the arbiters of “good food” and erase the labor of the actors who actively produced and consumed the foods prior to their discovery.

Este artículo examina las narrativas sobre alimentos “perdidos” y “descubiertos” que algunos destacados chefs peruanos emplean para enmarcar su trabajo y promover la comida peruana en general. Argumenta que muchos de estos alimentos definidos como perdidos/descubiertos nunca
se perdieron realmente, sino que fueron desconocidos, no valorados o descuidados por los
consumidores de élite. Estas narrativas oscurecen el trabajo de muchas personas que han
producido y consumido estos alimentos, mientras exaltan a los chefs de élite, blancos y
masculinos como los protagonistas principales, con la visión y la experiencia para identificar el
valor de los ingredientes y platos "infravalorados". Relacionando las narrativas de estos chefs
sobre su trabajo y al Perú como frontera culinaria con los relatos heroicos de pensadores
ilustrados y viajeros del siglo XVIII, el artículo muestra cómo las metáforas de la visión, los viajes
y la masculinidad, presentes las narrativas tempranas sobre el descubrimiento, también definen
las narrativas sobre chefs peruanos en búsqueda de nuevos ingredientes. A pesar de que los chefs
famosos de Perú trabajan para subvertir las jerarquías culinarias coloniales que sostienen a las
cocinas europeas como ejemplos de excelencia gastronómica, en última instancia, su trabajo
reproduce las relaciones de poder coloniales a través estas narrativas de descubrimiento que
posicionan a los chefs como los árbitros de la “buena comida” y eliminan el trabajo de los actores
que produjeron y consumieron activamente estos alimentos antes de su supuesto
descubrimiento.

In this article we analyse Fair Trade as a form of non-state regulation, building on the literature on the internal politics and governance of Fair Trade International (FTI) certification. We focus on recent developments in the FTI certification system, including the split of Fair Trade USA from FTI and the emergence of the Small Producer’s Symbol (SPP) as an alternative to FTI certification. We highlight the role of the three regional Producer Networks, in particular the Latin American Producer Network, the CLAC, in the politics and governance of the FTI system. In order to analyse these issues we employ an alternative reading of Karl Polanyi’s work in relation to Fair Trade. We problematise the claim made by some in the literature that FTI certification is an example of Polanyi’s concept of re-embedding. Instead, we draw on Polanyi’s concept of oversight to analyse Fair Trade certification. We argue that the emergence of the SPP out of the CLAC shows promise for being a mechanism of oversight more reflective of Polanyian re-embedding than FTI certification. We also emphasise how the growth of the SPP and the pressure from the Producer Networks have prompted governance reform within the FTI system.

This article examines deep and contemporary history through analysis of the Tongan kava origin story, a kava chant, the rise of the kalapu ‘kava club’ in the twentieth century and the growing expansion of contemporary kava. It is argued that a key function of past and present kava practices is a ritual liminality of noa ‘neutralisation of protective restrictions’ that results from mediating mana ‘potency, honour’ and tapu ‘protective restrictions, set apart’. This is supported through ethnohistorical literature, song lyrics and ethnographic data. While the expressions, purpose, material and uses of kava evolve and change throughout time and space, from the titular ceremonies to the social rituals, they are connected through contextually specific mediations that establish noa. The kava origin story indicates a performance of mediations between ancient power relations, while the kava chant describes material culture alongside the establishment of the ritualised chiefly kava ceremony. Kalapu and the expanding contemporary kava practices today maintain connections to past practices while adapting to current circumstances such as global Tongan mobility and cultural diversity.

Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization examines the growing popularity of food and travel television and its implications for how we understand the relationship between food, place, and identity. Attending to programs such as Bizarre Foods, Bizarre Foods America, The Pioneer Woman, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Man v. Food, and No Reservations, Casey Ryan Kelly critically examines the emerging rhetoric of culinary television, attending to how American audiences are invited to understand the cultural and economic significance of global foodways. This book shows how food television exoticizes foreign cultures, erases global poverty, and contributes to myths of American exceptionalism. It takes television seriously as a site for the reproduction of cultural and economic mythology where representations of food and consumption become the commonsense of cultural difference and economic success.

The fields of critical disability studies and critical animal studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavors intersect? Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of more-than-human animals and disabled humans are interconnected. Composed of 13 chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Lori Gruen, the book is divided into four themes: • Intersections of ableism and speciesism • Thinking animality and disability together in political and moral theory • Neurodiversity and critical animal studies • Melancholy, madness, and misfits This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral scholars, interested in animal studies, disability studies, mad studies, philosophy, and literary analysis. It will also appeal to those interested in the relationships between speciesism, ableism, saneism, and racism in animal agriculture, culture, built environments, and ethics.

Food photography on Instagram creates various types of digital communities while largely excluding other groups from lower economic backgrounds. Through examining photography theory, socioeconomic patterns, and the impact and influence of various representations of food on Instagram, this article explores the implications of the social media platform’s growing popularity through a semiotic lens. In analyzing the marketing functions of Instagram and the creation of cravings along with the innate absence of nourishment in virtual food consumption, this article questions some of the class-based social patterns rising from this endless digital photo feed as well as considers some of the possible societal benefits. From the use of hashtags and their power to influence the culinary industry, to the use of filters to replicate unattainable moments, Instagram serves as both a tool for food-lovers to carefully construct curated digital identities, while disseminating cultural messages about their social class and cultural backgrounds. Despite its ability to unify, the platform paradoxically distances users from personally engaging with those very cuisines and communities they consume online, pushing traditional concepts of food towards an abstract digital era.

Researchers committed to food justice often enter communities and nonprofits with a desire to help. They often think there is a scarcity, such as food, that they want to understand and help to increase. At the same time, research obligations may lead to extracting "findings" without advancing food justice. Such actions may unintentionally work against food justice, especially the goal of dismantling structural inequalities and advancing social equity. This commentary chronicles the ongoing and incomplete process by which I have carried out food justice research and worked toward food justice. In short, reciprocal research requires working with, not for, organizations and communities. This entails ongoing acts of solidarity. One way to express this is through flexibility with research goals in order to tailor all or parts of one's project to answer questions that increase understanding of how to challenge structural inequalities and advance social equity. Relatedly, openness to how food justice activists and organizations confront the food movement and society more broadly to address whiteness, privilege, racial inequality, and notions of diversity can enrich critical social science. Of equal importance is sweat equity. Most food justice activists and organizations have few resources and cannot serve the whims of researchers. Therefore, providing labor is an important allied act. This increases the researchers' empathy with activists, organizations, and communities, and creates opportunities to build trust and dissolve social boundaries. To enter into a situation that deepens our knowledge of the food justice movement and advances food justice requires solidarity and sweat equity.

Indigenous peoples often claim that colonial powers, such as settler states, violate Indigenous peoples' collective self-determination over their food systems, or food sovereignty. Violations of food sovereignty are often food injustices. Yet Indigenous peoples claim that one of the solutions to protecting food sovereignty involves the conservation of particular foods, from salmon to wild rice. This essay advances an argument that claims of this kind set forth particular theories of food sovereignty and food injustice that are not actually grounded in a static conception of Indigenous culture; instead, such claims offer important contributions to how settler colonial domination is understood as a form of injustice affecting key relationships that support Indigenous collective self-determination through food sovereignty. The essay describes some of the significant qualities of reciprocal relationships that support food sovereignty, referring widely to the work of Indigenous leaders and scholars and Tribal staff on salmon conservation in North America.

Whyte, K.P. 2018. Food Sovereignty, Justice and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance. Oxford Handbook on Food Ethics. Edited by A. Barnhill, T. Doggett, and A. Egan, 345-366. Oxford University Press.

http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/7672

This research explores the dynamic relationship between place, history
and landscape in an urban food market, Catania, Sicily. This market informs a
mythological image of the island and my main concern is what significance lies underneath this representation. I examine the ways in which this image has been constructed through ideas of history, space, landscape, modernity and tradition. Unpacking these notions in the light of my in-depth ethnography, I address how vendors and buyers frame and define their relationship with space and time. After placing the market in relation to its historical and geo-political context, I argue that the representation of passivity and the lack of agency have contributed to the maintaining of elitist local and national powers. The use of space within the market informs a distinctive cosmology, in which the landscape constitutes the main local organising principle. The landscape is looked at as a cultural process, constantly renegotiated and recontextualised. The principal categories of food classification ‘wild’, ‘local’,and ‘foreign’ are explanatory notions of a specific relationship between people, food and locality. The interaction between vendors and buyers cannot be understood as a
purely economic transaction. Their relationship is articulated through a unique
set of practices, which are analysed throughout this thesis. Senses, social
interactions, culinary knowledge, and conviviality contribute to the ability to
operate within the market. I look at my own ethnographic experience as a practical “apprenticeship”. I also address the local ideas of tradition and modernity, mainly through the analysis of the shared fears of being left behind and of losing control over the process of change. The idea of modernisation as an ongoing process carries with it a sense of loss, of nostalgia for an idealised past.

This is a book which addresses the “what,” “where,” “who,” “how,” and “why” questions about food. What is food and where does it come from? Who grows and makes food, and who eats it? Why do some people have more than enough whilst others go hungry? How is food made and what are its impacts on people and places? Questions about power, injustice, and inequality are always present when we start to map the geographies of food, but so are stories of hope, possibility, and new futures. Whilst we engage with many problems, we also discuss many exciting new possibilities, and try to reflect the politics of hope and optimism which infuse many grassroots movements which are trying to develop new and better ways of “doing food.” We try to examine the problems and possibilities of food in equal measure and we foreground the particular insights that geographical perspectives can yield, by concentrating on the spatial expressions of food’s production, transformation, and consumption.

This article examines the growing entanglements between the
digital and the world of food while suggesting that food is a
particularly generative space through which to understand the
evolving but often hidden role of the digital in our everyday lives.
The article starts by examining food photography on social media
before discussing the role of ordinary people as participants in
online food culture via video-sharing platforms such as YouTube.
Mapping the shift from web 2.0’s dreams of creativity and sharing
to the monetisation of digital food communities, section 3 focuses
on food politics, and ‘the antinomies of connectivity’. The final
section discusses big food players and their use of social media in
an era of dataveillance and big data. It argues that ‘food citizens’
need to have an awareness of the commercial logics that support
the communicative ecologies in which we increasingly engage with
food and lifestyle practices.

En 1940 se publica en España "Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida)" por el que había sido uno de los más prestigiosos cocineros españoles antes de la Guerra Civil, Ignacio Doménech. En él ofrece recetas de guerra, crítica de restaurantes durante la guerra que son crónica social y política de una época, pero sobre todo, entre sus líneas ofrece una dura crítica a la situación de posguerra con un grito desgarrado de frustración.

Recent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA) – the production of food in cities – argues that UA can both undergird and resist capitalist accumulation, albeit often at different spatio-temporal scales. Scholarship that explicitly examines how UA, capitalist development, and racial difference work through one another, however, is less extensive. In this review, I propose that the lens of racial capitalism can elucidate UA's contradictory motivations and outcomes. As an analytical framework, racial capitalism considers how distinct forms of colonization, settler colonialism, and white supremacy function relationally as part of a unified system of capitalist accumulation built on the exploitation of racialized human and spatial difference. By focusing on, UA's contributions to racial Othering, the racialization of space, and dispossession, on the one hand, and on struggles of resistance and self-determination, on the other, this review attempts to sheds new light on the dialectical, " both/and " nature of UA, while also addressing recent calls to consider how settler colonial logics persist in the contemporary North American city.

For details see the publisher's link: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137522283

This volume is a collection of historical and ethnographic accounts of Asia's increasingly globalized cuisines. Using extensive empirical research, the authors describe the increasingly transnational organization of culinary fields, multicultural culinary contact zones, and state-led culinary politics. Chapters include studies of the pathways in which Asian cuisines cross borders and subsequently interact with local culinary systems. Authors also study how cuisines from abroad enter into Asian cities and are modified in transnational urban settings. Multi-sited and cross-border ethnographic fieldwork and comparative qualitative case studies uncover the culinary networks and the cultural politics of these traveling cuisines. This volume shows that cuisines in Asia are less and less produced locally but rather in networks of producers, suppliers, entrepreneurs and patrons moving across borders.

The Introduction, acknowledgements  and foreword, are in open access.

"The act of eating is a basic human need. Yet, in all societies, quotidian choices regarding food and its consumption reveal some of the most deeply-rooted of shared cultural conventions. Food goes beyond issues relating to biological needs and nutrition or production and commerce; it also engages with social and cultural criteria that determine what dishes are prepared on what occasions, and unveils the politics of the table via the rituals appropriate to different meals. This book approaches the history of food in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy through an interdisciplinary prism of sources ranging from epistolary correspondence, literature (both high and low), medical and dietary treatises, cosmographic theory and iconographic evidence. Using a variety of analytical methods and theoretical approaches, it moves food firmly into the arena of Late Medieval and Renaissance history, providing an essential key to deciphering the material and metaphorical complexity of this period in Italian and European history.