Geography of Food

Geography ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catarina Passidomo ◽  
Jeffrey Miller
Keyword(s):  
Global Economy ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
State Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rural Sociology ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
The Many ◽  
Agricultural Geography

The geography of food is an emergent and growing subfield within human geography. Often distinguished from older literature in agricultural geography, writings in the geography of food tend to be critical (and in some cases, radical) in their political framing, focusing on the many ways in which food systems are connected to, and potentially disruptive of, entrenched systems of oppression and social and economic inequality. In part, this critical framing arose in response to a lack of critical food systems engagement in other disciplines, and to agricultural geography’s focus on spaces of production; geography’s persistent interest in spatial relationships and systems of power that cross spaces and scales made the discipline well-suited to critical interrogation of food and agricultural systems. Geographers who study and write about food demonstrate interest in scales ranging from the body to the global economy, and indeed the ways in which global processes become inscribed on and metabolized by individual bodies in disparate spaces. Literature in this subdiscipline is often theoretically robust, drawing on complex biopolitical formulations, state theory, and multi-scalar analyses of political economic change to link global processes with local places, and to situate alternative food systems within a dominant industrial agro-food system. The geography of food shares many theoretical and empirical interests with other food studies subdisciplines, including rural sociology and the anthropology of food. This article primarily features contributions by geographers, or by scholars who make use of geographic concepts (often emphasizing scale or place in their analysis). There is also a robust literature in agricultural geography (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Agricultural Geography”); this article aims to focus instead on geographies of food “beyond the farm gate.” As such, the article is organized by sections according to scale (global/national/urban/rural/home and body), and then focuses on a variety of food movements and responses to corporate/industrial global food systems.

scholarly journals Alternative Agri-Food Systems Under a Market Agencements Approach: The Case of Multifunctional Farming Activity in a Peri-Urban Area

Environments ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Maria Cecilia Mancini ◽  
Filippo Arfini ◽  
Federico Antonioli ◽  
Marianna Guareschi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Area ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Alternative Food ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Alternative Food Networks ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Design And Implementation ◽  
Trade Offs

(1) Background: A large body of literature is available on the environmental, social, and economic sustainability of alternative food systems, but not much of it is devoted to the dynamics underlying their design and implementation, more specifically the processes that make an alternative food system successful or not in terms of its sustainability aims. This gap seems to be particularly critical in studies concerning alternative food systems in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA). This paper explores how the design and implementation of multifunctional farming activity in a peri-urban area surrounding the city of Reggio Emilia in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy impact the achievement of its sustainability aims. (2) Methods: The environmental, social, and economic components of this project are explored in light of the sociology of market agencements. This method brings up the motivations of the human entities involved in the project, the role played by nonhuman entities, and the technical devices used for the fulfillment of the project’s aims. (3) Results: The alternative food system under study lacked a robust design phase and a shared definition of the project aims among all the stakeholders involved. This ended in a substantial mismatch between project aims and consumer expectations. (4) Conclusions: When a comprehensive design stage is neglected, the threefold aim concerning sustainability might not be achievable. In particular, the design of alternative food systems must take into account the social environment where it is intended to be put in place, especially in UPA, where consumers often live in suburban neighborhoods wherein the sense of community is not strong, thus preventing them from getting involved in a community-based project. In such cases, hybridization can play a role in the sustainability of alternative food networks, provided that some trade-offs occur among the different components of sustainability—some components of sustainability will be fully achieved, while others will not.

scholarly journals Healthy Diets and Reduced Land Pressure: Towards a Double Gain for Future Food Systems in Nigeria

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 835 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuzana Smeets-Kristkova ◽  
Thom Achterbosch ◽  
Marijke Kuiper
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Leverage Points ◽  
Nutrition Security ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Healthy Diets ◽  
The Impact

Nigeria is one of the most dynamic economies in Africa. Strong GDP and population growth coupled with urbanization trends place tremendous pressures on natural resources and the food systems that are dependent on them. Understanding the impact of these “mega trends” is important to identify key leverage points for navigating towards improved nutrition and food security in Nigeria. This paper contributes to the Foresight Project of the Food Systems for Healthier Diets which aims to analyse how the food system in Nigeria is expected to transform in the next decades, and to identify the leverage points for making sure that the transformation contributes to balanced consumer diets. For the food systems foresight, a well-established global economy-wide model, MAGNET, is applied that enables to capture the interlinkages among different food industry players in one consistent framework. By linking MAGNET to the GENUS nutritional database, it is further possible to relate the developments occurring on a macro-level with detailed macro and micronutrient consumption. Model projections suggest that a process of intensification of agriculture in combination with land substitution appears critical for the evolution of food and nutrition security, and for shifts towards healthy diets for the population. Intensification results in greater diversity of the production systems, which in turn cascades into positive effects on the diversity in the food supply and better food security outcomes.

“Workarounds and Roadblocks”: Risk and Resistance among Food Movement Activists

2020 ◽  
pp. 232949652096562
Author(s):  
Andrew Raridon ◽  
Tamara L. Mix ◽  
Rachel L. Einwohner
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Southern Plains ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Regional Food ◽  
The Social ◽  
Regional Food Systems ◽  
Food Movement

This article examines how activists involved in the food movement use different tactics intended to challenge and subvert the agrifood structures they encounter. We use data from interviews and participant observations with 57 food movement activists operating in less robust alternative food systems throughout the Southern Plains states of Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Our respondents describe how they interpret their regional food systems as deliberately restrictive to the food movement and explain some of the tactical choices they make to maneuver around various constraints they claim hinder their food movement activism. In actively resisting the agricultural status quo, we find that some activists knowingly engage in forms of high-risk activism. We then examine the different framing devices food movement activists use to explain the risks generated by their tactical workarounds. Our findings contribute to the social movements and food system literature by showing how activists interpret and justify the risks generated by their resistance and by emphasizing the contextual nature of tactical choices and risk in social movement activism.

scholarly journals Agri-Food Markets towards Sustainable Patterns

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 2193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valeria Borsellino ◽  
Emanuele Schimmenti ◽  
Hamid El Bilali
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
The Body ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Food Markets ◽  
Emerging Issues ◽  
Food Market ◽  
Evolutionary Paths ◽  
Agriculture And Food

In recent decades, the confluence of different global and domestic drivers has led to progressive and unpredictable changes in the functioning and structure of agri-food markets worldwide. Given the unsustainability of the current agri-food production, processing, distribution and consumption patterns, and the inadequate governance of the whole food system, the transition to sustainable agriculture and food systems has become crucial to effectively manage a global agri-food market able in supporting expected population growth and ensuring universal access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food for all. Based on a critical review of the existing international literature, the paper seeks to understand the evolutionary paths of sustainability issues within agri-food markets by analyzing their drivers and trends. An extensive analysis was conducted highlighting the development and importance of the body of knowledge on the most important sustainability transition frameworks, focusing mainly on the relationship between markets, trade, food and nutrition security, and other emerging issues within agri-food markets. Finally, the study makes suggestions to extend the research in order to improve basic knowledge and to identify opportunities to design meaningful actions that can shape agri-food markets and foster their transition to sustainability.

(Re)establishing the Normal

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-59
Author(s):  
Yuson Jung
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Alternative Food ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Food Practices ◽  
The Status ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Alternative Practices

In the dominant American discourse, alternative practices of consuming ethical foods are often positioned against cheap, highly processed, freely traded, and poor-quality industrially produced foods. This article discusses the different forms and meanings of “alternative” food practices and asks whether consuming organically and locally produced, or fairly traded, foods are the only “alternative” food practices that can claim moral authority and assert one’s ethical adherence. By examining the discourses and practices of everyday food provisioning among resource-constrained consumers in postsocialist Bulgaria and postindustrial Detroit, the article explores the meanings of “good” food, and suggests that “alternatives” do not always translate as foods that are exceptionally moral and pure owing to intrinsic superior values. These comparative case studies complicate a familiar, stereotypical dichotomy between a morally compromised global industrialized food system and an ethical alternative to the status quo that presumes moral purity. The meanings of “good” foods vary in different social and economic contexts, and “alternative” foods therefore can be those that have the power, or promise, to (re)establish a sense of “normal” provisioning opportunities. Recognizing these different forms and meanings of “alternatives” will allow us to envision future food production and consumption practices in more nuanced ways so that an industrialized food system and “alternative” food systems are not cast in mutually exclusive terms.

Agri-food scholarship: Past, present and future contributions to Australasian rural sociology

2021 ◽  
pp. 144078332110096
Author(s):  
Kiah Smith ◽  
Geoffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Food System ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Rural Sociology ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Agricultural Technologies ◽  
Food And Agriculture ◽  
The Future

The future of food and agriculture in Australasia will be defined by multiple social, economic, political and environmental tensions – with climate change and social inequalities playing a central role in the re-imagining of food systems in crisis. This article argues that rural sociology will continue to be well-served by the sociological research into the farming and food industries undertaken by antipodean scholars – especially those from Australia and New Zealand where agri-food scholarship has flourished. Analyses of the future dynamics of rural social/economic change, natural resource management (including land, water and minerals), new relations of work, labour and identity, emerging agricultural technologies, Indigenous and post-colonial politics, and food system governance will benefit from agri-food studies’ insights into agrarian transformation and governance, social and environmental sustainability, health and wellbeing, and the growth of resistance and alternatives.

Food Justice and the Challenge to Neoliberalism

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Hope Alkon
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
Local Alternatives ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Food And Agriculture ◽  
Popular Interest ◽  
Voluntary Market ◽  
And Gender

As popular interest in food and agriculture has grown, so have an array of social movements intent on improving the ways we grow, raise, process, sell, and consume our sustenance. While scholars tend to agree with activists’ critical assessments of the failures of the industrial, corporate, chemically intensive food system, they often wonder whether the sustainable, local alternatives that activists recommend are sufficient for broad social transformation. Two scholarly critiques of US alternative food systems revolve around issues of food justice, meaning the ways that race, class, and gender affect who can produce and consume what kinds of foods, and neoliberalism, which refers to activists’ privileging of voluntary, market-centric strategies over those that appeal to the regulatory power of the state. This paper lays out three strategies through which the work of US food justice activists can address both critiques. These include cooperative ownership, organizing labor, and pushing to outlaw risky technologies. However, rather than being at odds with the alternative foods market, each strategy makes use of it as a venue from which to draw targeted support.

scholarly journals Subversive Future Seeks Like-Minded Model: On the Mismatch between Visions of Food Sovereignty Futures and Quantified Scenarios of Global Food Futures

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Yashar Saghai
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Simulation Models ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Many ◽  
Computer Simulation Models ◽  
Global Food

AbstractWill we, by 2050, be able to feed a rapidly growing population with healthy and sustainably grown food in a world threatened by systemic environmental crises? There are too many uncertainties for us to predict the long-term evolution of the global agri-food system, but we can explore a wide range of futures to inform policymaking and public debate on the future of food. This is typically done by creating scenarios (story lines that vividly describe what different futures could look like) and quantifying them with computer simulation models to get numerical estimates of how different aspects of the global agri-food system might evolve under different hypotheses. Among the many scenarios produced over the last twenty years, one would expect to see the future advocated by the food sovereignty movement, which claims to represent roughly two hundred million self-described “peasants” (small farmers) worldwide. This movement defends a vision of the future based on relocalized, sustainable, and just agri-food systems, self-governed through direct and participatory democratic processes. Yet, food sovereignty is conspicuously absent from quantified scenarios of global food futures. As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System,” this essay identifies seven obstacles that undermine the creation of food sovereignty scenarios by examining two attempts at crafting such scenarios.

scholarly journals From Schnitzel to Sustainability: Shifting Values at Vienna’s Urban Farmers Markets

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8327
Author(s):  
Milena Klimek ◽  
Jim Bingen ◽  
Bernhard Freyer ◽  
Rebecca Paxton
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Alternative Food ◽  
Farmers Markets ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
System A ◽  
Urban Rural

This paper presents an empirically grounded investigation of the values and practices of farmers markets (FM) in Vienna, Austria and their linkages to wider alternative food practices of ecological, social and economic sustainability. If the FMs are to play a vibrant role in the Viennese alternative food system, enhancing urban–rural connections and urban resilience, they must re–align their values to this system. A values-based conceptual framework is used to examine the structures and functions of six Viennese FMs and the alignment of values and practices among FM managers, farmers/vendors and consumers. Data from qualitative interviews, participant observation and dot surveys were collected at each FM. Value alignment is discovered as necessary to support and perpetuate alternative values. Governance is found to be significant for aligning values related to FM sustainability. Current structures and functions of Viennese FMs cannot be easily aligned with participant values and practices. As one of the first examinations of Viennese FMs, this work illustrates concrete challenges, priorities and emphasizes the role that governance and social organizing plays in successful markets as contributors towards sustainable urban food systems. Lessons learned can be applied to municipal FMs and other food system actors that face similar challenges.

scholarly journals Community Food

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Leacox
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Food System ◽  
Community Level ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
The Many ◽  
Ecologically Sustainable

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 revealed vulnerabilities in industrial food systems, particularly in relation to food security. In this thesis I explore small-scale, local, and ecologically sustainable forms of agriculture (Small Ag) that are frequently presented as options enabling communities to achieve increased food security. This concept of Small Ag deserves closer investigation. This thesis describes an ethnographic pilot study of Small Ag I conducted in Boise, Idaho during the 2020 pandemic. Using remote digital research methods to conduct surveys and interviews, I investigated the beliefs, motivations, and behaviors of participants in Small Ag. I sought to answer basic questions: What does Small Ag look like as a food production system? How do individuals become involved in Small Ag? Why do they persist? What sustains a vibrant local community of participants? I learned that participants in Small Ag emphasize self-reliance and informality. While these ideals are not inherently bad, they can become barriers limiting the coordination of Small Ag as a more widely applicable food system. Increased coordination is needed to grow Small Ag as a resilient community-level food system. My research suggests that when third-party facilitators help coordinate and organize collaborations between the many aspects of Small Ag, the possibility for broader community-level engagement with local foods increases. Future research should focus on understanding how such facilitation might be strengthened.

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