Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment – Serie

This highly original work examines the rise of the urban food planning movement in the Global North and provides insights into the new relationship between cities and food which has started developing over the past decade. It sheds light on cities as new spaces for food system innovation and on food as a tool for sustainable urban development. Drawing insights from the literature on socio-technical transitions, the book presents examples of pioneering urban food planning endeavours from North America and Western Europe (especially the Netherlands and the UK). These are integrated into a single mosaic helping to uncover the conceptual, analytical, design, and organizational innovations emerging at the interface of food and urban policy and planning. The author shows how promising "seeds of transition" to a shared urban food planning agenda are in the making, though the urban food planning niche as a whole still lacks the necessary maturity to lastingly influence mainstream planning practices and the dominant agri-food system regime. Some of the strategic levers to cope with the current instability and limitations of urban food planning and effectively transition it from a marginal novelty to a normalized domain of policy, research, and practice are systematically examined to this end. The conclusions and recommendations put forward have major implications for scholars, activists, and public officials seeking to radically transform the co-evolution of food, cities, and the environment.

Food consumption patterns and practices are rapidly changing in Asia and the Pacific, and nowhere are these changes more striking than in urban areas. This book brings together scholars from anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, tourism, architecture and development studies to provide a comprehensive examination of food consumption trends in the cities of Asia and the Pacific, including household food consumption, eating out and food waste.The chapters cover different scales of analysis, from household research to national data, and combine different methodologies and approaches, from quantifiable data that show how much people consume to qualitative findings that reveal how and why consumption takes place in urban settings. Detailed case studies are included from China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam, as well as Hawai'i and Australia. The book makes a timely contribution to current debates on the challenges and opportunities for socially just and environmentally sound food consumption in urbanizing Asia and the Pacific.Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

There is enormous current interest in urban food systems, with a wide array of policies and initiatives intended to increase food security, decrease ecological impacts and improve public health. This volume is a cross-disciplinary and applied approach to urban food system sustainability, health, and equity. The contributions are from researchers working on social, economic, political and ethical issues associated with food systems. The book's focus is on the analysis of and lessons obtained from specific experiences relevant to local food systems, such as tapping urban farmers markets to address issues of food access and public health, and use of zoning to restrict the density of fast food restaurants with the aim of reducing obesity rates. Other topics considered include building a local food business to address the twin problems of economic and nutritional distress, developing ways to reduce food waste and improve food access in poor urban neighborhoods, and asking whether the many, and diverse, hopes for urban agriculture are justified. The chapters show that it is critical to conduct research on existing efforts to determine what works and to develop best practices in pursuit of sustainable and socially just urban food systems. The main examples discussed are from the United States, but the issues are applicable internationally.

Due to its centrality in human activities, food is a meaningful object that necessarily participates in any cultural, social and ideological construction and its qualification as 'traditional' is a politically laden value. This book demonstrates that traditionality as attributed to foods goes beyond the notions of heritage and authenticity under which it is commonly formulated. Through a series of case studies from a global range of cultural and geographical areas, the book explores a variety of contexts to reveal the complexity behind the attribution of the term 'traditional' to food. In particular, the volume demonstrates that the definitions put forward by programmes such as TRUEFOOD and EuroFIR (and subsequently adopted by organisations including FAO), which have analysed the perception of traditional foods by individuals, do not adequately reflect this complexity. The concept of tradition being deeply ingrained culturally, socially, politically and ideologically, traditional foods resist any single definition. Chapters analyse the processes of valorisation, instrumentalisation and reinvention at stake in the construction and representation of a food as traditional. Overall the book offers fresh perspectives on topics including definition and regulation, nationalism and identity, and health and nutrition, and will be of interest to students and researchers of many disciplines including anthropology, sociology, politics and cultural studies.

As urban populations rise rapidly and concerns about food security increase, interest in urban agriculture has been renewed in both developed and developing countries. This book focuses on the sustainable development of urban agriculture and its relationship to food planning in cities. It brings together the best revised and updated papers from the Sixth Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) conference on Sustainable Food Planning. The main emphasis is on the latest research and thinking on spatial planning and design, showing how urban agriculture provides opportunities to develop and enhance the spatial quality of urban environments. Chapters address various topics such as a new theoretical model for understanding urban agriculture, how urban agriculture contributes to restoring our connections to nature, and the limitations of the garden city concept to food security. Case studies are included from several European countries, including Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Turkey and the UK, as well as Australia, Canada, Cameroon, Ethiopia and the United States (New York and Los Angeles).

Drawing on studies from Africa, Asia and South America, this book provides empirical evidence and conceptual explorations of the gendered dimensions of food security. It investigates how food security and gender inequity are conceptualized within interventions, assesses the impacts and outcomes of gender-responsive programs on food security and gender equity and addresses diverse approaches to gender research and practice that range from descriptive and analytical to strategic and transformative. The chapters draw on diverse theoretical perspectives, including transformative learning, feminist theory, deliberative democracy and technology adoption. As a result, they add important conceptual and empirical material to a growing literature on the challenges of gender equity in agricultural production. A unique feature of this book is the integration of both analytic and transformative approaches to understanding gender and food security. The analytic material shows how food security interventions enable women and men to meet the long-term nutritional needs of their households, and to enhance their economic position. The transformative chapters also document efforts to build durable and equitable relationships between men and women, addressing underlying social, cultural and economic causes of gender inequality. Taken together, these combined approaches enable women and men to reflect on gendered divisions of labor and resources related to food, and to reshape these divisions in ways which benefit families and communities.Co-published with the International Development Research Centre.

It is now more than a decade since the Right to Food Guidelines were negotiated, agreed and adopted internationally by states. This book provides a review of its objectives and the extent of success of its implementation. The focus is on the first key guideline – "Democracy, good governance, human rights and the rule of law" – with an emphasis on civil society participation in global food governance. The five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are presented as case studies: representing major emerging economies, they blur the line between the Global North and South, and exhibit different levels of human rights realisation.The book first provides an overview of the right to adequate food, accountability and democracy, and an introduction to the history of the development of the right to adequate food and the Right to Food Guidelines. It presents a historical synopsis of each of the BRICS states’ experiences with the right to adequate food and an analysis of their related periodic reporting to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as a specific assessment of their progress in regard to the first guideline. The discussion then focuses on the effectiveness of the Right to Food Guidelines as both a policy-making and monitoring tool, based on the analysis of the guidelines and the BRICS states.

Being the public voice of over 180 member organisations across nearly 90 countries, La Vía Campesina, the global peasant movement, has planted itself firmly on the international scene. This book explores the internationalisation of the movement, with a specific focus on the engagement of peasants in the processes of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). Since the reform of the CFS in 2009, civil society actors engage in the policy processes of this UN Committee from a self-designed and autonomous global Civil Society Mechanism. The author sheds light on the strategies, tensions, debates, and reconfigurations arising from rural actors moving between every day struggles in the fields and those of the UN arena.Whereas most theories in the dominant literature on social movements expect them to either disappear or institutionalise in a predetermined pattern, the book presents empirical evidence that La Vía Campesina is building a much more sophisticated model. The direct participation of representatives of peasant organisations in the CFS is highlighted as a pioneering example of building a more complex, inclusive and democratic foundation for global policy-making.Foreword by Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (2008-2014).

This book examines the bioeconomy concept, analysing the opportunities it can generate, the constraints and the potential benefits for society. The main objective of bioeconomy is to promote economic development, by creating jobs and enhancing the sustainable utilization of bio-resources. A primary driver of bioeconomy strategy, therefore, is the need to respond to the growing population's food and economic requirements. While today research and literature related to bioeconomy are limited, this book presents a unique collection of perspectives on the complex dimensions of the bioeconomy debate. Drawing on the experiences from Europe, Asia and Africa, it presents an international overview. The chapters address a wide range of issues, including coastal-land interactions, ecosystem services, food production, rural development, agriculture, forest management and bioenergy. As a whole, the volume outlines what role bioeconomy can play in contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) without compromising on the ecological sustainability and equitable distribution of benefits. The book concludes by providing recommendations for developing bioeconomy in respective sectors (agriculture, forestry, fisheries, renewable energy) and directions for planning future bioeconomy programmes and strategies. The Bioeconomy Approach will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecological economics, development economics and environmental economics, as well as policy-makers and practitioners involved in sustainable development.

Thousands of people in dozens of countries took to the streets when world food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011. What does the persistence of popular mobilization around food tell us about the politics of subsistence in an era of integrated food markets and universal human rights? This book interrogates this period of historical rupture in the global system of subsistence, getting behind the headlines and inside the politics of food for people on low incomes. The half decade of 2007–2012 was a period of intensely volatile food prices as well as unusual levels of popular mobilization, including protests and riots. Detailed case studies are included here from Bangladesh, Cameroon, India, Kenya and Mozambique. The case studies illustrate that political cultures and ways of organizing around food share much across geography and history, indicating common characteristics of the popular politics of provisions under capitalism. However, all politics are ultimately local, and it is demonstrated how the historic fallout of a subsistence crisis depends ultimately on how the actors and institutions articulate, negotiate and reassert their specific claims within the peculiarities of each policy. A key conclusion of the book is that the politics of provisions remain essential to the right to food and that they involve unruliness. In other words, food riots work. The book explains how and why they continue to do so even in the globalized food system of the 21st century. Food riots signal a state unable to meet a principal condition of its social contract, and create powerful pressure to address that most fundamental of failings..

Urban population growth is extremely rapid across Africa and this book places urban food and nutrition security firmly on the development and policy agenda. It shows that current efforts to address food poverty in Africa that focus entirely on small-scale farmers, to the exclusion of broader socio-economic and infrastructural approaches, are misplaced and will remain largely ineffective in ameliorating food and nutrition insecurity for the majority of Africans. Using original data from the African Food Security Urban Network’s (AFSUN) extensive database it is demonstrated that the primary food security challenge for urban households is access to food. Already linked into global food systems and value chains, Africa’s supply of food is not necessarily in jeopardy. Rather, the widespread poverty and informal urban fabric that characterizes Africa’s emerging cities impinge directly on households’ capacity to access food that is readily available. Through the analysis of empirical data collected from 6,500 households in eleven cities in nine countries in Southern Africa, the authors identify the complexity of factors and dynamics that create the circumstances of widespread food and nutrition insecurity under which urban citizens live. They also provide useful policy approaches to address these conditions that currently thwart the latent development potential of Africa’s expanding urban population.

This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization.The book uses a historical lens to analyze the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of the soybean commodity chain. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most cultivated biotech crop on Earth; used to make a huge variety of food and industrial products, including animal feed, tofu, cooking oil, soy sauce, biodiesel and soap. While there is a burgeoning amount of literature on how the contemporary global soy web affects large tracts of our planet’s social-ecological systems, little attention has been given to the questions of how we got here and what alternative roles the soybean has played in the past. This book fills this gap and demonstrates that it is impossible to properly comprehend the contemporary global soybean chain, or the wider agrofood system of which it is a part, without looking at both their long and short historical development. However, a history of the soybean and its changing roles within equally changing agrofood systems is inexorably a history about globalization. Not only does this book map out where soybeans are produced, but also who governs, wields power and accumulates capital in the entire commodity chain from inputs in production to consumption, as well as identifying the institutional context the global commodity chain operates within. The book concludes with a discussion of the main challenges and contradictions of the current soy regime that could trigger its rupture and end.This book is essential reading for students, practitioners and scholars interested in agriculture and food systems, global commodity chains, globalization, environmental history, economic history and social-ecological systems.

Human beings are getting fatter and sicker. As we question what we eat and why we eat it, this book argues that living well involves consuming a raw vegan diet.With eating healthfully and eating ethically being simpler said than done, this book argues that the best solution to health, environmental, and ethical problems concerning animals is raw veganism—the human diet. The human diet is what humans are naturally designed to eat, and that is, a raw vegan diet of fruit, tender leafy greens, and occasionally nuts and seeds. While veganism raises challenging questions over the ethics of consuming animal products, while also considering the environmental impact of the agriculture industry, raw veganism goes a step further and argues that consuming cooked food is also detrimental to our health and the environment. Cooking foods allows us to eat food that is not otherwise fit for human consumption and in an age that promotes eating foods in ‘moderation’ and having ‘balanced’ diets, this raises the question of why we are eating foods that should only be consumed in moderation at all, as moderation clearly implies they aren’t good for us. In addition, from an environmental perspective, the use of stoves, ovens and microwaves for cooking contributes significantly to energy consumption and cooking in general generates excessive waste of food and resources. Thus, this book maintains that living well and living a noble life, that is, good physical and moral health, requires consuming a raw vegan diet.Exploring the scientific and philosophical aspects of raw veganism, this novel book is essential reading for all interested in promoting ethical, healthful, and sustainable diets.

Human beings are getting fatter and sicker. As we question what we eat and why we eat it, this book argues that living well involves consuming a raw vegan diet.With eating healthfully and eating ethically being simpler said than done, this book argues that the best solution to health, environmental, and ethical problems concerning animals is raw veganism—the human diet. The human diet is what humans are naturally designed to eat, and that is, a raw vegan diet of fruit, tender leafy greens, and occasionally nuts and seeds. While veganism raises challenging questions over the ethics of consuming animal products, while also considering the environmental impact of the agriculture industry, raw veganism goes a step further and argues that consuming cooked food is also detrimental to our health and the environment. Cooking foods allows us to eat food that is not otherwise fit for human consumption and in an age that promotes eating foods in ‘moderation’ and having ‘balanced’ diets, this raises the question of why we are eating foods that should only be consumed in moderation at all, as moderation clearly implies they aren’t good for us. In addition, from an environmental perspective, the use of stoves, ovens and microwaves for cooking contributes significantly to energy consumption and cooking in general generates excessive waste of food and resources. Thus, this book maintains that living well and living a noble life, that is, good physical and moral health, requires consuming a raw vegan diet.Exploring the scientific and philosophical aspects of raw veganism, this novel book is essential reading for all interested in promoting ethical, healthful, and sustainable diets.

This work explores diverse cultural understandings of food practices in cities through the senses, drawing on case studies in the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.The volume includes the senses within the popular field of urban food studies to explore new understandings of how people live in cities and how we can understand cities through food. It reveals how the senses can provide unique insight into how the city and its dwellers are being reshaped and understood. Recognising cities as diverse and dynamic places, the book provides a wide range of case studies from food production to preparation and mediatisation through to consumption. These relationships are interrogated through themes of belonging and homemaking to discuss how food, memory, and materiality connect and disrupt past, present, and future imaginaries. As cities become larger, busier, and more crowded, this volume contributes to actual and potential ways that the senses can generate new understandings of how people live together in cities.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical food studies, urban studies, and socio-cultural anthropology.

This timely and much-needed book focuses on the phenomenon often referred to as "holiday hunger" in the United Kingdom. The book begins by outlining the history and scope of holiday hunger – the condition that occurs when a child’s household is, or will become, food insecure during the summer holidays. The decline of the UK welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism have created a situation where up to three million children in the UK face food insecurity during the summer months when there are extra financial pressures on the working poor and when free school meals are not available. This book details the level of childhood and household food insecurity in the UK and describes one of the main responses to holiday hunger – holiday clubs. These clubs are locally organised and funded and provide a place for children to go to eat nutritious meals for free during the school holidays. Highlighting the benefits of holiday clubs that often extend beyond food provision, this book also discusses the challenges that they face now and in the future. The book concludes with recommendations for food insecurity policy and the role of government in fighting holiday hunger. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and nutrition security, social policy and public health.

This book explains how True Cost Accounting is an effective tool we can use to address the pervasive imbalance in our food system. Calls are coming from all quarters that the food system is broken and needs a radical transformation. A system that feeds many yet continues to create both extreme hunger and diet-related diseases, and one which has significant environmental impacts, is not serving the world adequately. This volume argues that True Cost Accounting in our food system can create a framework for a systemic shift. What sounds on the surface like a practice relegated to accountants is ultimately a call for a new lens on the valuation of food and a new relationship with the food we eat, starting with the reform of a system out of balance. From the true cost of corn, rice and water, to incentives for soil health, the chapters economically compare conventional and regenerative, more equitable farming practices in and food system structures, including taking an unflinching look at the true cost of cheap labour. Overall, this volume points towards the potential for our food system to be more human-centred than profit-centred and one that has a more respectful relationship to the planet. It sets forth a path forward based on True Cost Accounting for food. This path seeks to fix our current food metrics, in policy and in practice, by applying a holistic lens that evaluates the actual costs and benefits of different food systems, and the impacts and dependencies between natural systems, human systems, agriculture and food systems. This volume is essential reading for professionals and policymakers involved in developing and reforming the food system, as well as students and scholars working on food policy, food systems and sustainability.

This book explains how True Cost Accounting is an effective tool we can use to address the pervasive imbalance in our food system. Calls are coming from all quarters that the food system is broken and needs a radical transformation. A system that feeds many yet continues to create both extreme hunger and diet-related diseases, and one which has significant environmental impacts, is not serving the world adequately. This volume argues that True Cost Accounting in our food system can create a framework for a systemic shift. What sounds on the surface like a practice relegated to accountants is ultimately a call for a new lens on the valuation of food and a new relationship with the food we eat, starting with the reform of a system out of balance. From the true cost of corn, rice and water, to incentives for soil health, the chapters economically compare conventional and regenerative, more equitable farming practices in and food system structures, including taking an unflinching look at the true cost of cheap labour. Overall, this volume points towards the potential for our food system to be more human-centred than profit-centred and one that has a more respectful relationship to the planet. It sets forth a path forward based on True Cost Accounting for food. This path seeks to fix our current food metrics, in policy and in practice, by applying a holistic lens that evaluates the actual costs and benefits of different food systems, and the impacts and dependencies between natural systems, human systems, agriculture and food systems. This volume is essential reading for professionals and policymakers involved in developing and reforming the food system, as well as students and scholars working on food policy, food systems and sustainability.

Short food supply chains (SFSCs) rely primarily on local production and processing practices for the provision of food and are, in principle, more sustainable in social, economic and environmental terms than supply chains where production and consumption are widely separated.This book reviews and assesses recent initiatives on this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective. In theoretical terms it draws on and advances two key concepts, namely, place (particularly embeddedness in local economic networks and communities) and governance (particularly in addressing sustainability concerns in an inclusive and socially just manner). Empirically, the book examines a diverse set of SFSCs such as small-scale entrepreneurship, farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture and grassroots and solidarity networks. The main examples discussed are from Europe and North America, but the issues are applicable in a global context.The book is of interest to advanced students, researchers and professionals in food studies, sociology, geography, planning, politics and environmental studies.

As Africa urbanises and the focus of poverty shifts to urban centres, there is an imperative to address poverty in African cities. This is particularly the case in smaller cities, which are often the most rapidly urbanising, but the least able to cope with this growth. This book argues that an examination of the food system and food security provides a valuable lens to interrogate urban poverty. Chapters examine the linkages between poverty, urban food systems and local governance with a focus on case studies from three smaller or secondary cities in Africa: Kisumu (Kenya), Kitwe (Zambia) and Epworth (Zimbabwe). The book makes a wider contribution to debates on urban studies and urban governance in Africa through analysis of the causes and consequences of the paucity of urban-scale data for decision makers, and by presenting potential methodological innovations to address this paucity. As the global development agenda is increasingly focusing on urban issues, most notably the urban goal of the new Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, the work is timely.The Open Access version of this book, available at: http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315191195, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Food and Cooking Skills Education (FCSE) is a complex mix of policy and practicality, educational theory and pedagogy, classroom and government policy. This book shows how FCSE has been at the centre of a tussle between education and policy for decades. It reviews how FCSE has grappled with various significant issues of concern that threaten to marginalise it and pose problems for educational practicalities, as expectations are increased, but resources are squeezed. It assesses the debate about the significance and importance of acquiring practical food and cooking skills in a society where the purchase of ready-made food has become commonplace, and public knowledge of where our food comes from is noticeably lacking. This has contributed to the escalating incidence of diet-related diseases and the attendant cost to society, and threatened environmental sustainability. In turn, governments have reacted by proposals to make practical cooking skills a statutory National Curriculum subject as part of the armoury for tackling such costs. Based on detailed research conducted across England and Wales, as well as comparisons with thirty-five other countries or states, the author makes recommendations for policy to manage this challenge facing contemporary society.

This book offers insights into the governance of contemporary food systems and their ongoing transformation by social movements.As global food systems face multiple threats and challenges there is an opportunity for social movements and civil society to play a more active role in building social justice and ecological sustainability. Drawing on case studies from Canada, the United States, Europe and New Zealand, this edited collection showcases promising ways forward for civil society actors to engage in governance. The authors address topics including: the variety of forms that governance engagement takes from multi-stakeholderism to co-governance to polycentrism/self-governance; the values and power dynamics that underpin these different types of governance processes; effective approaches for achieving desired values and goals; and, the broader relationships and networks that may be activated to support change. By examining and comparing a variety of governance innovations, at a range of scales, the book offers insights for those considering contemporary food systems and their ongoing transformation. It is suitable for food studies students and researchers within geography, environmental studies, anthropology, policy studies, planning, health sciences and sociology, and will also be of interest to policy makers and civil society organisations with a focus on food systems. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9780429503597, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book provides a historical and analytical account of changes in the seafood supply chain in Britain from the mid-twentieth century to the present, looking at the impact of various types of governance.The governance of marine fisheries has been a contested issue for decades with increasing anxieties about overfishing. In tandem, the rise of aquaculture, fish and shellfish farming, has driven another set of environmental concerns. In the food system, there have been scandals about safety failures and about fraud. At the same time, governments issue advice urging people to eat fish for its health benefits. In the context of these problems and contradictions, how have governments, the food industry and ordinary consumers responded? The author shows how different types of governance and regulation have been used to seek seafood sustainability and food safety and to communicate nutritional messages to the public and with what effects. The book also presents a new model for understanding food chains which combines governance and power approaches with an emphasis on understanding the interests served and the resulting balance of public and private benefits. This shows that the role of state regulation should have greater emphasis in governance and agri-food analysis and that theories about supply chain functioning, including the part played by major retailers and civil society, should be modified by a more nuanced understanding of the role of standards and certification systems.Although much of the focus is on the UK and Europe, this book provides key lessons internationally for the governance of seafood and other agri-food supply chains. The book will be of interest to students of food policy and those working in the seafood industry or studying for connected qualifications, and more widely to readers with an interest in seafood issues and problems.

Around the world, food has probably never been as safe as it is today. However, periodic crises have aroused consumer anxiety and contributed to a general lack of confidence in the agro-industrial system. The diverse nature of these crises increases governments’ and industry difficulties in predicting and tackling them. This book addresses the relations between risk and food theoretically and empirically through case studies from Japan and China.Part I of the book examines the interaction between theoretical aspects and decision-making. The book theorizes the links between food and risk and analyses the decision-making process in light of risks and governance. The relationship between food risks, governance systems and economic decisions is assessed to explore ideas such as the "pact of nutrition" and the theory of weak signals. Part II examines case studies from China and Japan in the aftermaths of recent crises such as the milk powder scandal in China and food safety following the Fukushima nuclear accident and tsunami in Japan. This book will be an important resource for scholars, academics and policy-makers in the fields of sociology, economics, food studies, Chinese studies and Japanese studies and theories of risks and safety.

This work explores diverse cultural understandings of food practices in cities through the senses, drawing on case studies in the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.The volume includes the senses within the popular field of urban food studies to explore new understandings of how people live in cities and how we can understand cities through food. It reveals how the senses can provide unique insight into how the city and its dwellers are being reshaped and understood. Recognising cities as diverse and dynamic places, the book provides a wide range of case studies from food production to preparation and mediatisation through to consumption. These relationships are interrogated through themes of belonging and homemaking to discuss how food, memory, and materiality connect and disrupt past, present, and future imaginaries. As cities become larger, busier, and more crowded, this volume contributes to actual and potential ways that the senses can generate new understandings of how people live together in cities.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical food studies, urban studies, and socio-cultural anthropology.

As awareness of the commodification of food for profit at the expense of our health and the planet grows, this book foregrounds the communicative dimensions of resistance by food movements. Voice and participation are argued by the author to be the means through which rural and urban communities can, and in many cases do, resist the capture of value by corporate actors and work to democratise their foodscapes. Her critical analysis of meaning-making under neo-liberalism suggests that agroecology, as a socially activating form of agriculture within a food sovereignty framework, provides an example of social learning relevant across rural/urban and North/South divides. Embracing indigenous knowledge, gender equity and postcolonial theory, this approach mobilises growers and eaters to contest the power structures that shape their food environments, and also to focus on social and economic justice within their communities, particularly in the context of climate change.Participatory ecologies that incorporate these forms of social learning encourage the co-creation of inclusive foodscapes and politicise food justice. Such a positive framing of resistance through horizontal pedagogy, participation, communication and social learning processes contrasts with the vertical dissemination structure of the corporatised food regime and takes vital steps towards a more democratic food system. Voice and Participation in Global Food Politics will be of interest to scholars of agri-food, transdisciplinary food studies and political economy of food systems. It will also be of relevance to NGOs and policymakers.

This collection takes an interdisciplinary look at how the transformation towards plant-based diets is becoming more culturally acceptable, economically accessible, technically available and politically viable. We offer strategies for achieving sustainable food systems without having to forgo succulence, sensuality and sacredness of food.Shifting food systems is one of humanity’s biggest challenges and greatest opportunities. This book explores adaptable and health-promoting plant-based diets, which by their nature can support nourishing environmental, social, ethical, political, and economic outcomes. In this book, detailed descriptions are provided of what constitutes a healthy plant-based diet and active lifestyle. Readers are invited to engage with a community of practitioners delving more deeply into strategies for transitioning societies to greater succulence and sustainability. Throughout the first section of the book, environmental challenges and opportunities for reversing climate change are highlighted as our most urgent action. The focus then turns to global food systems and the intersections that are undermining human and animal health. The final section offers preventative approaches and encourages reorienting systems of law, economics and education to exemplify integrity, coordination, coherence and compassion.This book will be of interest to students and academics, as well as policy professionals in all fields engaging with complex issues and systems analyses. It will be of value to those working in health services, policy development, agriculture, economic development, and social change as it provides steps to enhance well-being, pathways to increase jobs in the green economy, and practical ideas to reverse greenhouse gas emissions. It may also be a superb guide for individuals and families looking to become vibrant eaters and leaders.

This book fills a gap in the literature by setting food security in the context of evolving global food governance. Today’s food system generates hunger alongside of food waste, burgeoning health problems, massive greenhouse gas emissions. Applying food system analysis to review how the international community has addressed food issues since World War II, this book proceeds to explain how actors link up in corporate global food chains and in the local food systems that feed most of the world’s population. It unpacks relevant paradigms – from productivism to food sovereignty – and highlights the significance of adopting a rights-based approach to solving food problems. The author describes how communities around the world are protecting their access to resources and building better ways of producing and accessing food, and discusses the reformed Committee on World Food Security, a uniquely inclusive global policy forum, and how it could be supportive of efforts from the base. The book concludes by identifying terrains on which work is needed to adapt the practice of the democratic public sphere and accountable governance to a global dimension and extend its authority to the world of markets and corporations. This book will be of interest to students of food security, global governance, development studies and critical security studies in general.

This book fills a gap in the literature by setting food security in the context of evolving global food governance. Today’s food system generates hunger alongside of food waste, burgeoning health problems, massive greenhouse gas emissions. Applying food system analysis to review how the international community has addressed food issues since World War II, this book proceeds to explain how actors link up in corporate global food chains and in the local food systems that feed most of the world’s population. It unpacks relevant paradigms – from productivism to food sovereignty – and highlights the significance of adopting a rights-based approach to solving food problems. The author describes how communities around the world are protecting their access to resources and building better ways of producing and accessing food, and discusses the reformed Committee on World Food Security, a uniquely inclusive global policy forum, and how it could be supportive of efforts from the base. The book concludes by identifying terrains on which work is needed to adapt the practice of the democratic public sphere and accountable governance to a global dimension and extend its authority to the world of markets and corporations. This book will be of interest to students of food security, global governance, development studies and critical security studies in general.