Search

This lively autobiography details Marion Nestle’s life-long engagement with food, particularly the tumultuous politics that inevitably accompany this central aspect of human life. As the founder of the interdiscipline of food studies, she describes her early life in academia, her work with the federal government and her appointment as a professor at New York University (NYU). Food studies scholars and practitioners will be fascinated by her insider stories of creating the field – from acquiring financial backing and finding qualified faculty to attracting students and bringing food influencers onside. To paraphrase Wendell Barry, eating is a political act, and no-one brings that to life more acutely than Marion Nestle.

In this themed section, we argue that beyond health-related dietary goals for society, food guidance must also reflect the expanding public awareness and uncertainty about the complexities and vulnerabilities of the current food system. Increasingly influential issues include environmental change, agriculture-related pollution, food worker injustice, animal welfare, persistent household food insecurity, food waste, and fish stock depletion. No form of food guidance can address all these complex phenomena, but many people want to be informed and empowered to make change. Accordingly, academic and citizen groups have been devising an assortment of directives, recommendations, principles, and charters to promote alternative food environments and food behaviours that cumulatively support sustainable food systems. These on-going debates and efforts can collectively be termed critical food guidance.

Critical food guidance began as an inspiration, blossomed into a concept and then became a focal point for thinking about food system change. It will continue to evolve as we grapple with the complexities of the industrial food system and work toward alternative approaches. As a step in the evolution of a multi-dimensional approach to food, this themed issue asks three basic questions: critical guidance for what, for whom, and by whom? While engaging with these questions, the authors have put forward critical concepts, proposed mindful decision-making, provided contexts for transformation, and presented innovative applications—all with the purpose of spurring broader thinking about food choices that can benefit both food system sustainability and human health

The original deadline for submissions for this special issue was March 1, 2020, just days before the destabilizing and disorienting first wave of pandemic-related shutdowns in many parts of Canada. The (r)evolution in food systems pedagogy we were hoping to document and celebrate was promptly preempted by an abrupt transition to virtual learning. In an instant, teachers and learners alike were attending to a pedagogical revolution of another kind altogether. The enduring impacts of this upheaval remain unclear. In the immediate term, though, the shift to online learning presented a crisis (a hasty ‘pivot’ to online teaching and learning) within a crisis (the daily reality of living within the context of a deadly global pandemic). For many critical food systems students and teachers, these new crises layered on top of the already front-of-mind crises propelled by the capital-intensive, industrialized food system. Like peering through translucent nesting dolls, we squinted through layers of pedagogical disruption and pandemic to remain focused on the economic, social and ecological devastation wrought by our dominant food system, and for glimpses of the pluriverse of food systems alternatives that inspire and nourish us.

This book fills a gap that is decades old—the problem with institutional food. Long the butt of jokes, complaints, and recriminations, institutional food has often represented the epitome of the worst that food can be: unhealthy, bland, colourless, placeless, and joyless—an afterthought that is underfunded and overcooked. Enter Joshna Maharaj, a chef who is also a TEDx speaker and food activist. Her bona fides are impeccable—she has worked in institutional food settings in Toronto for over 10 years and has revolutionized the way food is served in those settings. In this highly readable volume, she espouses what those of us in Food Studies know well: “Food is never just food” (58).

Local food systems are crucial to sustainability, and one of the most effective ways to develop them is to harness the buying power of large public institutions, such as hospitals and universities. Steering public funds toward local food systems, however, is not as easy as it might appear. Institutions must navigate a maze of regulations that can become significant barriers to effecting change. In Ontario, for example, public institutions are squeezed between two contradictory policies: the Broader Public Sector Directive, which mandates a level playing field and prohibits preferential buying based on geography, and the Local Food Act, which aims to increase the consumption of local food (with a specific focus on procurement in Ontario public institutions) and to foster successful and resilient local food economies and systems. Adding to this tension, global trade treaties are drilling down to the local level, proscribing preferential procurement of local food as “protectionist” and a barrier to trade. Public institutions are caught in the middle, wanting to purchase more local products but unwilling to risk reprisals. This paper investigates these tensions by reporting on a recent study of institutional buyers and government officials in the Toronto area to understand more thoroughly these barriers to operationalizing a local food system, while recognizing that sustainable food systems require a judicious combination of ‘local and green’ and ‘global and fair’ (Morgan 2008).

Book Review.

This path-breaking book situates the thorny issue of diets firmly within what has been called the Anthropocene—the era of human-induced changes to the planet. Since many of these changes are associated with food production and consumption, the authors argue that we need to develop sustainable diets in order to reduce the negative impacts of the current global food system on the environment, as well as to improve public health. To this end, the book is informed by an ecological public health perspective, which “views health as a function of relationships, a web of connections between humans, planet and society.”

Private agri-food standards have emerged in response to the constraints imposed on the role of the state under the influence of neoliberalism. These standards reflect the ongoing ‘value wars’ between the money code of value and the life code of value (McMurtry 2002). While some private agri-food standards operate within the money code of value (e.g., Red Tractor or CanadaGap), others can be more fruitfully situated within the life code of value because they ‘remove the veil’ (Hudson and Hudson 2003) from food commodities to reveal the exploitative social, economic and environmental relations inherent in today’s “feral capitalism” (Harvey 2011). This paper will use these codes of value to interpret three cases – organics, fair trade and Local Food Plus – with the aim of informing discussion regarding the emergence of standards as a form of governance. It will argue that conceptualizing standards as a commons will help us to better analyze the threats and opportunities posed by the rise of private agri-food standards and will open up the possibility that they can provide a form of life-protective governance that benefits what has come to be known as ‘the 99 percent.’