Changing the food game: Market transformation strategies for sustainable agriculture by Lucas Simons

2025-03-19 22:03:48 | Review | Contributor(s): Adam Sneyd | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.139

Experts in the area of new agricultural standards, codes, and certifications tend to hold strong perspectives on the reforms that they believe will transform unsustainable conventional farming practices. However, these important practitioner points of view infrequently make a big splash in...

Fat activism: A radical social movement by Charlotte Cooper

2025-03-19 22:03:48 | Review | Contributor(s): Cassandra Kuyvenhoven | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.158

In Fat Activism, Cooper responds to mainstream and scholarly writings on fat activism that she claims create negative assumptions or “proxies” of fat people. These constructed proxies serve to efface, reduce, and oversimplify the voices and the lived experiences of fat activists and fat...

The art of natural cheesemaking by David Asher

2025-03-19 22:03:48 | Review | Contributor(s): Christopher Yap | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.157

Cheese wasn’t designed. Cheeses were, and are, products of specific geographical, economic, ecological, and cultural circumstances. And so in the history of cheesemaking we see the history of agriculture, of trade, of places, and people. The countless cheeses—each made with only milk, rennet,...

Is it hot in here, or is it just me? On being an emotional academic

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Article | Contributor(s): David Andrew Szanto | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.148

In writing this, I feel as if I am somehow coming out as an “emotional academic.” As if it were a thing I have been trying to keep hidden (not very successfully, probably) over the years. Yet I also suspect this label is one with which many of us might self-identify. Moreover, I believe that...

Food studies scholars can no longer ignore the rise of big data

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Article | Contributor(s): Kelly Bronson, Irena Knezevic | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.138

Our essay invites food scholars to consider how the recent technological developments are making ‘big data’ increasingly relevant to our field. We offer an overview of the how big data and related crowdsourcing of information are penetrating the production and marketing of food, and reflect on...

Food discourses in Cape Breton: Community, economy, and ecological food practices

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Article | Contributor(s): Erna MacLeod | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.119

This project investigates ecological food practices on Cape Breton Island as legacies of traditional lifestyles and responses to the acceleration of global capitalism. I examine the multifarious discourses that frame ecological food practices such as organic gardening and farmers’ markets in...

Constituting community through food charters: A rhetorical-genre analysis

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Article | Contributor(s): Philippa Spoel, Colleen Derkatch | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.144

Communities across Canada are increasingly developing food charters, with at least 22 regional charters published in Ontario alone. As a rhetorical genre, food charters are persuasive actions that articulate not only the kind of food system to which a community aspires, but also the kind of...

Planning for food sovereignty in Canada? A comparative case study of two rural communities

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Article | Contributor(s): Virginie Lavallée-Picard | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.73

In Canada, most local-governance level food system planning research has been conducted in larger, often urban communities. However, producers in small rural communities conduct the majority of Canada’s agricultural activities. Using case-study research, this paper documents how the rural...

Food and Femininity by Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston

2025-03-19 22:03:46 | Review | Contributor(s): Jennifer Braun | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i2.184

Driven by a central question—“why do so many women care so much about food?”—Cairns and Johnston investigate the contemporary contours and connections between food and femininity, detailing the diverse ways these two things intersect and emerge in women’s lives. Their research is done in a...

Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement: Reclaiming Control by Priscilla Claeys

2025-03-19 22:03:46 | Review | Contributor(s): Kaitlyn Duthie-Kannikkatt | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i2.181

Critical discussions of human rights have featured prominently in the development studies literature. While many social actors have utilized human rights to advance their goals, the framework has also been criticized for its tendency to individualize struggles and emphasize legal dimensions of...

Inspiring and informing through food studies

2025-03-19 22:03:46 | Essay | Contributor(s): Ellen Desjardins | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.156

Often, the ordinariness of familiar terms or concepts belies their complexity and hidden sides, necessitating closer scrutiny. “Big data” is one such phenomenon, upon which Bronson and Knezevic shine a critical spotlight. Showing how current data sources and data collection technologies differ...

Cultivating community through gardening in Kenora, Ontario

2025-03-19 22:03:45 | Article | Contributor(s): Rob Moquin, Alan P. Diduck, A. John Sinclair, Iain J. Davidson-Hunt | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i2.167

Community gardens are places where people connect, share, and engage their social and ecological communities. The purpose of this research was to document and communicate participants’ experiences of community-building through community gardening in Kenora, Ontario, Canada. The primary method...

Heroes for the helpless: A critical discourse analysis of Canadian national print media’s coverage of the food insecurity crisis in Nunavut

2025-03-19 22:03:45 | Article | Contributor(s): Bradley Hiebert, Elaine Power | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i2.149

In northern Canada, the Inuit’s transition from a culturally traditional to a Western diet has been accompanied by chronic poverty and provoked high levels of food insecurity, resulting in numerous negative health outcomes. This study examines national coverage of Nunavut food insecurity as...

Making better use of what we have: Strategies to minimize food waste and resource inefficiency in Canada

2025-03-19 22:03:45 | Review | Contributor(s): Rod MacRae, Anne Siu, Marlee Kohn, Moira Matsubuchi-Shaw, Doug McCallum, Tania Hernandez Cervantes, Danielle Perreault | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i2.143

We examined the problems of and solutions to food waste through the main three frames of social science research on food waste: political economy; the cultural turn (the cultures, ideologies and politics of food and consumption); and political ecology. In the course of our collective research...

New CSR in the food system: Industry and non-traditional corporate food interests

2025-03-19 22:03:45 | Review | Contributor(s): Margaret Bancerz | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i2.171

Throughout the twentieth century, the food system has not only undergone changes in structure and in process, but has shown a growing transformation in food system governance. Often this transformation involves private actors engaging in the policymaking and governance arena. This paper draws...

Cities and Agriculture: Developing Resilient Urban Food Systems by Henk de Zeeuw and Pay Drechsel (Eds.)

2025-03-19 22:03:45 | Review | Contributor(s): Zhenzhong Si, Jennifer Marshman, Simon Berge, Ning Dai, Tammara Soma, Bryan Dale, Karen Landman, John Bacher, Mashiur Rahman, Charles Z. Levkoe | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i2.177

In an age when we are inundated with information, efforts that streamline that information—by sifting kernels of wheat from the chaff—are precious. Our reviews are intended to assist CFS readers faced with a growing body of material relevant to food studies. However, the standard book review...

How Canadians Communicate VI: Food Promotion, Consumption, and Controversy by Charlene Elliott (Ed.)

2025-03-19 22:03:45 | Review | Contributor(s): Kathy Dobson, Fleur Esteron, Irena Knezevic, Agnes Malkinson, Scott Mitchell, Andrea Noriega, Chloe Poitevin DesRivieres, Julie Pasho, Antonella Pucci | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i2.182

Elliott’s collection brings communication studies to the core of food studies, and this makes it a long-overdue book. While not all authors are communication scholars, the range of topics covered in the book are representative of how enmeshed the study of food and the study of human...

Alternative Food Networks in Quebec

2025-03-19 22:03:44 | Review | Contributor(s): Manon Boulianne, Patrick Mundler | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v4i1.217

This commentary reflects on a two-day conference, Réseaux alimentaires alternatifs au Québec. Perspectives comparatives, held in Montreal on May 12 & 13, 2016, during the 84th Congress of ACFAS (Association canadienne-française pour l’avancement des sciences). The event was organized by...

Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey by Lenore Newman

2025-03-19 22:03:44 | Review | Contributor(s): Ellen Desjardins | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v4i1.223

Book review.

Nourrir la machine humaine. Nutrition et alimentation au Québec, 1860-1945 par Caroline Durand

2025-03-19 22:03:44 | Review | Contributor(s): Manon Boulianne | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v4i1.214

Il est toujours fascinant de prendre connaissance des contextes d’émergence des discours qui cherchent à transformer les normes et les pratiques sociales, ainsi que des véhicules utilisés pour en assurer la diffusion et tenter d’obtenir l’adhésion des publics concernés. Dans cet ouvrage,...