Food, Pandemics, and the Anthropocene – On the necessity of food and agriculture change

2025-03-19 22:13:14 | Article | Contributor(s): Marit Rosol, Christoph Rosol | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.532

The COVID-19 crisis demonstrates forcefully that human health, the well-being of animals, and planetary health must not be viewed in isolation—and that they all depend to a large extent on the ways in which we produce, process, trade, and consume food. In this perspective essay, we argue for...

Seizing this COVID moment: What can Food Justice learn from Disability Justice?

2025-03-19 22:13:14 | Article | Contributor(s): Martha Stiegman | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.525

It is now a shameful truism that COVID-19 functioned as a big reveal, exposing, and amplifying the structural inequalities Canadian society is built upon. We are now a year and a half into the global pandemic. I am writing from Toronto, where “hot spots” (neighbourhoods with high infection...

Critical food guidance for tackling food waste in Canada: A closed-loop food system alternative to the food recovery hierarchy approach

2025-03-19 22:13:13 | Essay | Contributor(s): Tammara Soma | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.490

Food waste is a complex problem with far reaching negative environmental, social, and economic impacts. To identify appropriate solutions to address food waste, the food recovery hierarchy developed by the Environmental Protection Agency is currently the most popular guiding framework in food...

“Good healthy food for all”: Examining FoodShare Toronto´'s approach to critical food guidance through a reflexivity lens

2025-03-19 22:13:13 | Essay | Contributor(s): Alessandra Manganelli, Fleur Esteron | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.503

By building community-based food systems informed by transformative ideologies and principles, Community-Based Food Organisation (CBFOs) can be understood as agents of critical food guidance from the bottom-up. This paper focuses on the notion of reflexivity as pivotal to the implementation of...

The de-meatification imperative: To what end?

2025-03-19 22:13:13 | Essay | Contributor(s): Tony Weis, Rebecca A Ellis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.511

Meatification describes a momentous dietary transformation: the average person on earth today consumes nearly twice as much animal flesh every year as did the average person just two generations ago, amidst a period of rapid human population growth and with marked disparities between rich and...

Critical reflections on "humane" meat and plant-based meat "alternatives"

2025-03-19 22:13:13 | Essay | Contributor(s): Wesley Tourangeau, Caitlin Michelle Scott | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.510

Canadians are among the top meat consumers in the world. Greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, animal stress and suffering, worker health and safety, and cardiovascular disease are among the multitude of issues tied to high rates of meat consumption. In response to rising concern and...

Reframing food as a commons in Canada: Learning from customary and contemporary Indigenous food initiatives that reflect a normative shift

2025-03-19 22:13:13 | Essay | Contributor(s): Jodi Koberinski, Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Joseph LeBlanc | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.504

This paper interrogates the role of the dominant narrative of “food-as-commodity” in framing food systems policy in Canada. Human values shape policies, usually privileging those policies that are aligned with dominant values and neglecting others that confront dominant values. In that sense,...

The evolution of Haudenosaunee food guidance: Building capacity toward the sustainability of local environments in the community of Six Nations of the Grand River

2025-03-19 22:13:12 | Essay | Contributor(s): Hannah Tait Neufeld, Adrianne Xavier | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.502

The emerging literature on the Indigenous food movement identifies community involvement, family-centred food education and re-establishing a relationship with the land as essential to restoring sustainable food systems, land and water access. These processes of reclamation have similarly...

How to enhance the good health and well-being of Canadians: Effective food and meal-based guidelines and policies that fit the facts and face the future

2025-03-19 22:13:12 | Essay | Contributor(s): Jean-Claude Moubarac, Jane Y. Polsky, Milena Nardocci, Geoffrey Cannon | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.500

Diet-related diseases and disorders in Canada are a national public health emergency, now and as projected. One main reason is that the national food supply has become increasingly dominated by ultra-processed food and drink products, mostly snacks, that displace dietary patterns based on...

Food policy councils and the food-city nexus: The History of the Toronto Food Policy Council

2025-03-19 22:13:12 | Essay | Contributor(s): Lori Stahlbrand, Wayne Roberts | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.505

This field report links food and city policies by tracing the history of the Toronto Food Policy Council and offers our experience-based suggestions regarding the concept of critical food guidance, which we associate with capacity-building and providing opportunities for civic engagement on a...

Critical food guidance from the slow food movement: The relationship barometer

2025-03-19 22:13:12 | Essay | Contributor(s): Brooke Fader, Michèle Mesmain, Ellen Desjardins | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.509

The Slow Food movement embeds food guidance that encourages interaction with local food production and appreciation of local cuisine. It advocates critical thinking and actions that support the preservation of traditional food practices, as well as environmental considerations around food...

Religious food guidance

2025-03-19 22:13:11 | Essay | Contributor(s): Michel Desjardins | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.514

This article reviews some of the ways in which food intersects with religion and argues that people’s religious food habits prepare them to critically engage the food they eat. Religious food guidance is presented through five categories: permanent food restrictions, temporary food...

A food charter as a critical food guidance tool in a rural area: The case of Bruce and Grey Counties in Southwestern Ontario

2025-03-19 22:13:10 | Essay | Contributor(s): Donald Cole, Laura Needham, Philly Markowitz | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.497

Food charters have been one means of mobilizing critical food guidance relevant discussions among stakeholders and policy makers in rural areas.  As actors in the rural food system of Grey and Bruce counties, we describe the counties' charter development led by the Food Security Action...

Critical food guidance

2025-03-19 22:13:10 | Essay | Contributor(s): Ellen Desjardins, Jennifer Sumner | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.588

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...

Critical perspectives on food guidance

2025-03-19 22:13:10 | Essay | Contributor(s): Jennifer Sumner, Ellen Desjardins | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.592

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...

Transformation or the next meal? : Global-local tensions in food justice work

2025-03-19 22:13:09 | Essay | Contributor(s): Elizabeth Vibert, Bikrum Singh Gill, Matt Murphy, Astrid Pérez Piñán, Claudia Puerta Silva | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.531

This article presents conversations across difference that took place among community partners and researchers at a week-long workshop in T’Sou-ke First Nation territory in 2019. The workshop launched the Four Stories About Food Sovereignty research network and project, which brings together...

Breadlines, victory gardens, or human rights?: Examining food insecurity discourses in Canada

2025-03-19 22:13:09 | Essay | Contributor(s): Audrey Tung, Reuben Rose-Redwood, Denise Cloutier | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.530

Long before the exacerbating effects of COVID-19, household food insecurity (HFI) has been a persistent yet hidden problem in wealthy nations such as Canada, where it has been perpetuated in part through dominant discourses and practices. In this critique of HFI-related frameworks, we suggest...

Review of Eat local, taste global: how ethnocultural food reaches our tables

2025-03-19 22:13:09 | Review | Contributor(s): Regan Zink | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.590

Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches our Tables, by Glen C. Filson and Bamidele Adekunle, addresses the demand, availability, and production of ethnocultural vegetables in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The book is centered around the three largest ethnic...

Unwrapping school lunch: Examining the social dynamics and caring relationships that play out during school lunch

2025-03-19 22:13:09 | Article | Contributor(s): Jennifer L Black, Rachel Mazac, Amber Heckelman, Sinikka Elliott | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.544

Students are important stakeholders in school food programs. Yet children’s daily experiences and voices are often overlooked in advocacy around school food. In Canada, where the federal government recently expressed interest in creating a National School Food Program, nearly no research has...

Striving toward a peasant identity: The influence of the global peasant movement on three women farmers in Canada

2025-03-19 22:13:08 | Essay | Contributor(s): Roseann Lydia Kerr, Erin Richan, Coral Sproule, Ayla Fenton | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.535

As diverse actors work through disparate food movements seeking to tackle the causes and effects of the global food crisis, Holt-Giménez and Shattuck (2011) call for strategic alliances between progressive and radical trends in the food movement to transform our current food system. This paper...