PRF - The right to food: Progress and pitfalls

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Article | Contributor(s): Smita Narula | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.130

Over the course of the past decade the human right to adequate food has definitively emerged as a normative response to widespread food insecurity, global food crises, and to the related phenomenon of agricultural “land grabbing.” This article considers both the progress and pitfalls in using...

PRF - The right to food and politics of knowledge

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Article | Contributor(s): Philip McMichael | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.101

This article concerns a particular struggle over the right to food, as played out recently in the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), within the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). As a relatively new participant in the CFS, the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM), representing...

PRF - The right to food: Many developments, more challenges

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Article | Contributor(s): Priscilla Claeys | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.100

The right to food (RTF)1has enjoyed growing recognition in the last decade. It has achieved legitimacy and visibility in international governance debates, where it is increasingly perceived as a useful “policy guide” (DeSchutter, 2009). The realization of the right to food is recognized as a...

PRF - SYNTHESIS - The right to food: Reflecting on the past and future possibilities

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Article | Contributor(s): Nadia Lambek | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.112

As scholars and activists met in Waterloo, Canada in September 2014 to discuss progress and obstacles in adopting the right to food, similar discussions were being held by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and among civil society organizations (CSOs),...

Mapping the state of play on the global food landscape

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Essay | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.103

The global food landscape is changing rapidly. In 2007–08 food prices soared and remained volatile in the following years, effectively leading to a world food crisis that drove tens of millions of people into poverty and hunger. A phenomenal increase in large-scale farmland acquisitions in...

SWFS - State of the world food system

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Article | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.88

The world food system has seen enormous change across a range of issue areas in recent years, as witnessed by the 2007–08 food crisis and subsequent period of volatility and uncertainty in a context of shifting ecological conditions. Closer examination of the specifics of those myriad changes...

SWFS - Two roads diverged in the food crisis: Global policy takes the one more travelled

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Article | Contributor(s): Timothy A Wise | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.98

The 2007-08 food price crisis provoked renewed policy debate on a wide range of important matters long sidelined from mainstream consideration—the role and value of smallholder agriculture, the need for public investment in the sector, the importance of public agricultural research, the value...

SWFS - Crisis of legitimacy and challenges for food policy

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Article | Contributor(s): Mustafa Koç | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.108

Looking into the food system through the lens of food security, the first decade of the 21st Century was a period of broken promises, distrust, as well as fear and anxiety due to multiple crises in the financial markets—in the agri-food sector and in global politics. I will argue that this...

SWFS - Governing land and landscapes: Political ecology of enclosures and commons

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Article | Contributor(s): Harriet Friedmann | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.95

Most of the world’s food is still produced by small farmers, many of whom remain organized though customary land tenure. Customary tenure is a general term for specific cultural ways in which farmers embedded in ecological contexts allocate rights and obligations to use land, including...

SWFS - SYNTHESIS - Paradigm change and power in the world food system

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Article | Contributor(s): Matthew Gaudreau | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.114

The articles by Friedmann, Koç, and Wise draw out overarching issues in the world food system, offering complementary views of the relationship between the dominant model of the world food system and its myriad issues. This contribution uses the concept of transnational policy paradigms to...

Challenges to acquiring and utilizing food literacy: Perceptions of young Canadian adults

2025-03-19 22:03:48 | Article | Contributor(s): Sarah Colatruglio, Joyce Slater | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.72

The purpose of this qualitative, grounded theory study was to explore the concept of food literacy from the perspective of young Canadian adults who recently transitioned to independent living. Seventeen individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with Canadian university students who...

Community Review: A little regulatory pluralism with your counter-hegemonic advocacy? Blending analytical frames to construct joined-up food policy in Canada

2025-03-19 22:03:48 | Review | Contributor(s): Rod MacRae, Mark Winfield | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.60

Canadian food policy is deficient in many ways. First, there is neither national joined-up food policy, nor much supporting food policy architecture at the provincial and municipal levels. Second, there is no roadmap for creating such policy changes. And third, we don’t have an analytical...

Event Review of BPLTC III: Food Control

2025-03-19 22:03:48 | Review | Contributor(s): Pamela Honor Tudge | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.154

In Eastern Bloc’s recent exhibition BPLTC 111: Food Control new media artists use digital technologies as both a form of aesthetic presentation and a kind of mimicry to critique the technologically driven industrial food system. This exhibition was the last of a three-part exhibition on...

The gluten lie: And other myths about what you eat by Alan Levinovitz

2025-03-19 22:03:48 | Review | Contributor(s): Jennifer Brady | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.96

What nutrition buzzword is on the tip of more tongues than gluten? Today’s popular obsession with gluten, or gluten avoidance more precisely, has spurred a bevy of gluten-free products and cookbooks with recipes for items such as cauliflower pizza crust. The Canadian market for gluten free...

Growing local: Case studies on local food supply chains by Robert P. King, Michael S. Hand, and Miguel I. Gomez (Eds.)

2025-03-19 22:03:48 | Review | Contributor(s): Ryan Phillips | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.136

The local food movement in North America has grown significantly during the last decade, yet there still remains relatively little empirical research on the subject. Fortunately, however, the recent work Growing Local: Case Studies on Local Food Supply Chains edited by Robert King, Michael...

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...