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In the last two decades, emergency food provision (e.g., food banks, meal programmes) has become an increasingly institutionalized form of hunger relief. Critiques of the emergency food system, as articulated by Poppendieck’s 1998 book Sweet Charity?, suggest that such programmes are unable to cope with growing hunger in a meaningful, stable, efficient, or culturally appropriate way, and that they may facilitate government retrenchment. Meanwhile, popular attention has increasingly focused on the environmental and social costs of our globalized industrial food system, and efforts to challenge it (e.g., urban fruit gleaning, chicken rearing) are becoming widespread. These efforts have drawn new kinds of organizations into the world of food (in)security. Drawing on organizational documents and key informant interviews, this paper examines how emergency food provision is changing because of the rise of ‘community food security’ discourse and practice in the period since Sweet Charity? Findings suggest that emergency food providers have responded to critiques in partial and incongruent ways. Organizations face structural constraints that curtail their ability to reorganize, while new kinds of organizations are engaging in community food security projects, both challenging and reinforcing the charity food model in ways that have relevance for progressive (food) organizing more generally.

Focus group sessions were held with rural freeway commuters who use Highway 403 from Brantford to Hamilton, Canada, to identify the characteristics of their trip that helped determine their view of the quality of service for the trip. The results from that analysis were then compared with two other types of freeway users who had previously been studied: urban freeway commuters who use Queen Elizabeth Way from Toronto to Hamilton and tractor-trailer drivers. The findings suggest that despite some commonality among the three groups, each group valued a trip characteristic that they did not experience or at least could not be sure of. That characteristic differs across the three groups. Urban commuters were concerned about travel time, rural commuters about maneuverability, and truck drivers about steady traffic flow and physical road conditions. Despite these differences, an argument can be made that density, the service measure for freeways, is a reasonable proxy for most of these concerns. The results also suggest that it is harder to defend by using the same breakpoints on density for different types of freeways or even for different types of drivers. Although operational issues were the primary concern, it may also be appropriate to consider a second rating that addresses the quality of the facility as well as the existing level-of-service method that addresses the quality of operations on it.

Although the concept of level of service for freeways is usually defined in terms of users’ perceptions, very few studies have sought drivers’ or passengers’ views about what is important to them. Such information is particularly important for the evaluation of extended trips on freeways as opposed to trips on a single section or segment. Such information is valuable not only for improving the Highway Capacity Manual but also for establishing appropriate criteria for assessment of intelligent transportation system proposals. The results of focus group sessions are reported in which a group of commuters discussed their views about determinants of the freeway quality of service that they experienced. Total travel time is the most important determinant for them, but a number of other aspects of the trip also matter, including safety, traveler information, and maneuverability (density). The importance of travel time is a reminder that travel is a derived demand, not something that commuters do for the pleasure of the drive.